Chris Campbell wrote:
I think Star Trek would be a more apt comparison. Both were huge for
awhile, both generated a plethora of TV series and movies/OVAs, and
both are so thoroughly played out that the public is sick of them.
There will always be die hard fans, of course, but how big can a
property get before it implodes under its own weight?
That's an interesting argument. I might say, in JP/KR/HK/TW, Seed is
doing better than Enterprise is (was?) doing in the US. The question
is what comes after Stargazer. If Destiny is the Zeta clone of CE,
then are we getting the ZZ clone of CE after this? Or Bandai wants to
skip that loser and hop (skip a few years) on to a CCA clone.
I think Bandai wants to convert Gundam from the old UC (also
comparable to Trek) ways to the more commercially successful Power
Ranger/Final Fantasy way.
Gundam and Trek both have had their time in the sun, and people
enjoyed them immensely. But now it's time to move on to other things,
leaving the die hards to wallow in their nostalgia and the rest of
the world to anticipate the next big thing.
I think Lucas is doing a much better job with SW than the respective
owners are doing with Gundam and Trek. There are less than 15 hrs of
movies (including the Clone Wars cartoons) and I'd say all of them
were hits at at least some level (even Ep. 1 was a commercial
success). Lucas lets the comics, games (both video and RPG), and
books go off and do their wild things, but there's a sense that the
movies are the canonical anchor. For sanity check, review the movies.
But there's no sanity check with Gundam. There were at least 200 hrs
of Gundam animation and the hit/miss ratio is pretty poor. Trek may
be a little better in hit/miss, but there's also a sense that, for
rating's sake, anything goes.
I am a big fan of the "next big thing", but it despairs me to see that
the big commercial hits both in US and JP is One Piece and Naruto.
FMA was the next big thing for a while, but did it inspire something
better after that (no I don't mean a sequel)? Wolf Rain and Samurai
Champloo were pale compared to Cowboy Bebop, IMHO. Is there a
successor to quaint old Miyazaki? Is GITS starting to show its age*?
* - I just saw Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State
Society over the weekend, I enjoyed it personally, but ultimately it's
a title with two colons. Any title with ten words and two colons is
pushing its limits.
--
Dr. Core
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