Tag: cartoons

The Cartoon that Satirized Anime Before it was Cool

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One in a million

There have been numerous non-Japanese animations that have aped the art-style and, at times, tropes of the medium over the years. Sometimes a single episode is dedicated to taking the piss outta anime, other times it’s the framework of the entire show. You can pick some of your favorites, and while some of mine come from French-produced animations that Nicktoons Network was able to air in the US, one particular show jumped on the same bandwagon and in a more crude manner than its contemporaries in Europe. Enter Kappa Mikey:

Created by Larry Schwarz and his production company Animation Collective, it was given a home on Nicktoons Network, Nickelodeon’s redhaired step-child channel, from February 25, 2006 to September 20, 2008. The premise of the show is 19-year-old Ohioan fumbles an audition to become an actor in Cleveland and gets shunted by the auditioner for his inability to act. Elsewhere, the cast and crew of a Japanese tokusatsu children’s show called LilyMu are eyeing up the wall where the kanji for “financial ruin” (財政破綻) is being written. Their boss notices and demands the director come up with a solution to fix it or they’ll be jobless in no time. After a series of stellar auditions that go nowhere, the crew resorts to a contest on a series of scratch cards, some of which blow in the wind and find themselves in the failed actor’s hands in America.

As luck would have it, it’s the winning ticket, and since becoming even a B-list celebrity in the US is a bust, it’s time to see if the Japanese populace can be won over on this struggling TV series. Sure enough, the fish out of water wins over Japanese fans and breathes new air into the show.

The format of the show is like most comedy anime and even a few western cartoons. Rather than separate the A and B subplots of the episode, they tend to blend into each other, first being introduced as separated entities until they converge roughly 3/4 or 4/5 into the episode’s run time. As for the animation style, it’s a mix of eastern and western animation styles with the American having his distinct art style separate from his Japanese and other non-American counterparts.

The cast of the Kappa Mikey series consists of LilyMu actors Michael “Mikey” Simon, Gonard, Lily, Mitsuki, and the director-producer, Guano. Above them are the literal suits, their boss, Ozu and his Yes-Man named as such. Mikey is the orange-haired, blue-shirted American who does silly and ridiculous things when not acting as the new addition to the LilyMu team. On the set of the show, he’s the star and main hero, a position that would’ve gone to his co-worker, Lily, if it wasn’t for his introduction into the show and is the main reason for her off-screen aloofness towards him.

For Lily, her character design is across between Inuyasha’s Kagome Higurashi and Sailor Moon’s Usagi Tsukino, but personality-wise she exudes a type of tsundere exhibited by Tora Dora’s Taiga Aisaka and Lucky Star’s Kagami Hiiragi. Her language may not carry the same weight after 20 years, but at the time, she was so liberal with the use of the word “spaz” that a concerned British parent may as well investigate further before muting the telly because of how dangerously close that is to the word “spastic.” Sidenote: If you’re curious why that’s a taboo word in the UK, in the Americas it carries the same connotation as the word “retarded.”

Gonard is built like an off-brand Raditz sans scouter, armor, and death by Kakarot, but has the same role as Raditz and just because he isn’t plenty dead enough, lots more screentime. His role in the LilyMu TV show is that of the villain with all the gadgets and gizmos that either inspired Heinz Doofenshmirtz in Danville to build his own or inspired him to take on a lawsuit because that Japanese show took all of his ideas!

But the Tokyo Metropolis is well outside the tri-state area and Doof’s mission is to be a doofus.

When off the show, Gonard is simply the good-natured dimwit who eats everything that is known to edible while also experimenting like that one episode of Teen Titans when Cyborg’s module malfunctioned and he saw food everywhere. Gonard is essentially Patrick Star from the ridiculous ideas, to the green shorts, even to the body type, though instead of hefty, Gonard has noticeable muscle mass. As a result of being the villain on the show, one episode hints at him being feared by those with a surface level knowledge of the show he plays in. And this is a real phenomenon where kind actors are too heavily associated with a great villain they have or currently portray. See Sir Anthony Hopkins and Hannibal Lecter for more details.

Mitsuki is the polar opposite and foil of sorts to Lily. If Lily was like Kagami from Lucky Star, Mitsuki is a bit like her sister, Tsukasa. Furthermore, Mitsuki instantly took a liking to Mikey once he landed at Haneda Airport and has an immediate crush on him at first glance, despite his general idiocy and whatnot. Sadly, it’s not very reciprocal as Mikey himself has a one-way crush on Lily. The reason given in a Season 2 episode being that she has a competitive, risky edge to her, compared to Mitsuki who could best be described as what Jotaro Kujo considers a traditional Japanese woman, or “yamato nadeshiko”. Quiet, demure, considerate, but also smart and unflinching. I don’t know if the “blue haired loser girl” trope is this old, but if it’s not then that means Mitsuki is either the progenitor or an early source of the trope. On the show, she’s fiercer and tougher than she is off screen

Guano is the purple-dyed Pikachu reject and nervous trainwreck that manages to keep the show held together with homegrown gorilla glue and 20-year-old Flex Tape, and it’s fairly obvious why he’d be that. He’s the director and Ozu and Yes-Man breathing down his neck put him on edge, especially when things go diagonally. On the show, he lives up to the rip-off Pikachu by merely repeating his name with each action or attack he pulls, especially with the large gemstone in his chest. Although the gemstone functions and shoots lasers, its reserved for other emergencies both on the set and on the Kappa Mikey show as a whole, merely having the same function as the gem or laser eyes on Frylock’s back in Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

For Ozu and Yes-man, Ozu is the man who can feed or starve his actors, pay or withhold pay, pull the plug or keep life support on. Long before Benson the gumball machine on Regular Show would threaten to fire Mordecai and Rigby, Ozu did it several years prior and normally did it to Mikey, but sometimes he extended it to the rest of the cast if the screw up was that egregious. Opposite the iron footprint on the floor, he’s consistently shown to butter up Mikey and consider him the prized piece that makes the show whole. As an inseparable addition to the show, keeping Mikey in good graces is his main priority. He doesn’t always do this to him out of genuine kindness, but it hints at one aspect of Japanese and, by extension, East Asian face culture. Maintaining an image of grace and harmony keeps the tabloids and journos from slandering you every minute. As a contrast, the employees are societally obligated to also make the boss and the company look at its absolute best 100 percent of the time. And this is all a satire as the reality on the ground still exposes even East Asian companies to scandals and controversies of their own. Nintendo, Konami, most Korean chaebols (itself a different snake pit), Alibaba; being based in East Asia doesn’t save these kind of companies from human error, negligence, or even malice.

Finally, there’s Yes-man who’s more of a caricature than an actual character. He’s a parodical gag of an existing character in other media and at times in real life. A cheerleader in a suit for Ozu himself, he’s not exactly meant to have any development whatsoever, merely an exaggerated side-character to point and laugh at. A jester of sorts.

This video by Jordan Fringe explains the production side of things:

Channel: Jordan Fringe

For two seasons, Kappa Mikey ran largely unimpeded by any outside forces. It was pitched by Schwarz as an “American-style anime series” and considering what I’ve grown up on, it’s been preceded and surpassed many times depending on what you consider an American cartoon whose art-style is heavily influenced by Japanimation. The Boondocks and Avatar: The Last Airbender for instance but neither are very well-loved in Japan in particular or East Asia very widely. The former was made by Aaron McGruder as a reflection of black American culture which will get lost in translation, literally, when exported abroad and the latter does its best with its source material of wider Asian folklore and mythology, but without the core tenets of Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian beliefs, the face culture, or the courtship, it would at best be limited to a cult following outside of the west.

I haven’t even the slightest idea if this show has popularity in the country it takes the piss out of. On the one hand, it’s theme song is sung by a J-Rock band called Beat Crusaders, but on the other hand, Nickelodeon’s practice of hiding mid-tier TV series on Nicktoons Network and praying no one would notice when iCarly and Drake and Josh and SpongeBob were on the air left it to its fate of obscurity, at least for those who couldn’t afford cable.

Damn, I miss this logo…

Now that’s pretty much the show and its lifespan, how did it end? Or more to the point, why did it end? It had the energy to get at least another season or two. Perhaps even a made-for-TV movie. In that same video by Jordan Fringe, no clear reason was given except for speculation over budget constraints and a low viewership. Considering it was on an affiliate channel at the time and not likely not a major priority for the likes of Nick and Viacom, I can’t help but feel some sabotage was at play and as biased as it may sound to say about a studio over one show, there were a lot of shows that got shunted and only found wider success of sorts on the smaller channel. Some of the shows being legacy series that were given a modern reboot, though the results were far more mixed.

For a rather primitive though mid-2000s charmed show about an American becoming a Japanese audience darling, the entire series can be found on the Internet Archive for your viewing pleasure. Not to mention one I’m watching out of order since the callbacks to earlier episodes are few and far between.

Live Action Avatar: Honoring a Classic?

TiberiusLeave a comment

Bringing nostalgia back for new and old audiences

I had gotten news of the live-action Avatar remake on Netflix through the grapevine. Stirrings online in r/TheLastAirbender brought it up sometime last summer and I was holding my opinions until I saw the series for myself, which I did so this week. Even with all the news and assurances that it would do its best to honor the series while putting a new spin on it for a 2024 audience I still felt dubious for a number of reasons.

For one point, the original 2005 cartoon debuted on Nickelodeon, presenting itself as a goofy cartoon about practitioners of the four elements, one, the Avatar, being the master of them all in a bid to bring harmony to a world almost completely victimized and under threat from a militaristic, ultranationalist empire. Goofy moments when the time calls for it surely, but it’s a surprisingly mature cartoon that treats the subject of war, death, genocide, and loss with the maturity those all deserve.

It was a beloved show and those who were there when it aired (myself among them) remember very well many key events and moments from the show from Aang’s discovery by the Southern Water Tribe siblings, to the hunt for the nearly completely buried library managed by a spiritual being, to the planned for and failed invasion of the Fire Nation mainland by a coalition of Earth- and Waterbenders.

Forgive me if those were spoilers for those of you who couldn’t see it even until it recently came to Netflix, but I bring those plot points up to set up what it was like for me watching the show, eagerly awaiting for Book 3: Fire to finally launch in 2007.

I won’t pretend that it was the perfect series even at the time. Some episodes dragged on in places, character flaws that were acceptable back then show the age of the era select episodes were written in, and some plot points were either never addressed or outright dropped for mysterious reasons (the fate of Zuko’s mother was the biggest mystery back then), but I forgive a lot of these for the progress from beginning to end. The mark of good, if not, great writing is the kind where the character shows considerable growth from beginning to end, hence why you learn to hate Walter White towards the end of Breaking Bad.

Another point to bring up would be the early production issues experienced shortly after the announcement of the series. The series had been in the works for a few years prior to the filming of any trailers of announcements of which actors would be cast as which characters as told by original co-creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael D. DiMartino. Initially, they were all on board with the idea, but Netflix being Netflix seemed to have made a decision that drove them away from the project, and it would be up in the air as to what that would be until the series debuted in February of this year.

Either way, things weren’t looking very good for the live-action series, especially since this had the Netflix stamp of approval, a now-diminished status that at one point was worth a mouthful of gold crowns.

I personally had been critical of Netflix, at first for contrarian reasons. Since at least high school, even with the streaming service gaining ground as far back as the mid-2010s, I was the one going against the grain failing to see the point. Call it my upbringing; classic cable television hadn’t disappointed me yet. I was still a kid watching cartoons. It wasn’t until high school actually that I got a taste as to why some shows continued over others. Ratings were often the name of the game, which seems to be the core of the philosophy for Netflix now that they’re a streaming service.

It works for some, but the millions they spend even on single episodes, their original series being hit or miss at times, and their pioneering of the batch release takes some others getting used to if they ever do. But with a bunch of other apps and streaming services putting their own spin on the formula, some of them established brands and others newcomers, the crown jewels of the Netflix empire start to look and feel like old paperweights. Guess I still have those old opinions despite being on Netflix for the sake of a few shows that are on the service. Hahaha!

These days though, what makes me so cautious of Netflix is its reputation. I’m not gonna knock all of their originals — I’ve heard critics sing the praises of the likes of Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, and Bojack Horseman among others — but f[bricks falling]k me some of their other s[farting]t stinks to high heaven. I’m scared as hell to include the promotional poster for that one movie of theirs that caused such a stink online a few years ago for numerous reasons. IYKYK.

Narrowing it down further is the reputation of its live-action adaptations of popular anime. For years, live-action adaptations of anime, be it western or Japanese, has come under scrutiny for a lot of reasons, many of which are obvious. Impractical set pieces and designs, the absurdity of a lot of anime plots and character designs, and the awkwardness of introducing a lot of tropes known only to weebs apropos of nothing is a major killer of a lot of non-anime fans interest at the first hurdle. It’s a hard lesson that most western studios learn and forget rather quickly. I’ll never forget the ham-fisted attempts at hyping some of these movies up for release. Notably, this one:

For Netflix’s case, they thoroughly bungled the Death Note movie (forgive me for mentioning that… mess) and they screwed up the Cowboy Bebop movie with its god awful writing. Only recently did they nab themselves a mining pan of silver with the live-action One Piece, but flubbing it time after time, is that the only victory they have to flex? Probably.

Now they’ve come out with an eightfold batch of Avatar: the Last Airbender filmed and remade in the third dimension for our viewing pleasure.

I can’t make this a complete review as I’m only two episodes deep, but I already see the differences that Konietzko and DiMartino likely had an issue with. It’s not a shot-for-shot reshoot of the original series. Instead, it has the groundwork but interweaves easter eggs for the original audience watching with the new layer they built for themselves. Of the things I remember from Book 1, Zuko and Zhao were butting heads trying to capture Aang for Fire Lord Ozai until the end when Zhao was killed in the raid on the Northern Water Tribe, eliminating one of several of Zuko’s rivals.

Speaking of which, the circumstances behind Zuko’s scar are also rewritten. I didn’t get this far in the series yet, but in the clips I saw when the original and new shows were being compared, instead of cowering when he found out he had to face Ozai in an Agni Kai, he seemed to have put up a fight until the last minute. Something I’ve gotta praise personally because it hits a bit close to home. You or someone you know may have had that kind of parent, the type who wants to show their child the world is made up of enemies to fight with your fists by volunteering to be the first enemy they have to overcome.

And there’s more moments in the show that differ slightly or greatly from the original in a lot of ways. But are the humorous moments still there? Actually, yes. Select moments and characters do stand out quite a bit like Momo, Sokka, and my personal favorite so far, Uncle Iroh. But others did raise an eyebrow of curiosity, namely the early introduction of the Spirit World and the first Avatar Aang encounters when there.

If you remember, the first Avatar he encountered in the cartoon was Roku, first from his statue in the Southern Air Temple, then through his pet dragon Fang before finally meeting him on the eve of the solstice aided by an underrated character, Shyu the Fire Sage.

In the live-action series, Kyoshi’s the first Avatar he encounters and its at her temple where she’s pretty much having a DBZ: Abridged moment with Aang while he’s looking for easy answers to a complicated problem. Personally, I feel this would’ve worked well at the end when he’s nailed every element and the fight with Ozai is on the horizon, just like it is in the original. That works so well because Aang is at a crossroads and is looking for answers from as many of his past lives as he can contact.

In that moment, Roku didn’t much left to offer the teenage Aang; Kyoshi practically told the boy to make a decision or suffer the consequences; Kuruk used his life’s regrets as an example of what not to do in the face of danger; and Yangchen, the last Airbender Avatar, while understanding the disciplines instilled in all Air Nomads (Aang being the living legacy of such), she reiterated that Airbending Avatars like them are exempt from such expectations due to their duty, and in this moment, it was up to Aang to save the world from evil by lopping off the snake’s head. In the live-action though, it seems more than a little bit rushed. The original series gave Aang and co. roughly the length of a year to master the bending disciplines and concepts. The circumstances of the show may have forced him to rush it at at faster pace than his predecessors, but he’d matured well-enough to understand what was at stake.

The live-action series dumps all this on him at the first hurdle, before he has time to at least try to get a better understanding of this world he was awaken from. At this point in the series, all he knows is that thanks to Sozin’s Fire Nation, he’s the last of his kind. Again, everything was revealed both to him and the audience in snippets. The Netflix batch release hinders this, I feel, as it forces the series to do a lot more with a lot less, specifically condense 20 episodes into eight. It feels to me that it’s jumping the gun when it doesn’t really have to.

If Netflix were a different company, they could probably dedicate more time to retelling the story over the course of more episodes (probably 12-13 instead of eight), maybe giving the series more seasons than what it got back in the 2000s, but that’s just what I feel. Maybe a second season gets greenlit and we’re in business or maybe it follows a trend of million-dollar-an-episode shows getting canceled because someone hit the bulls[cattle bellowing]t button. Who knows what’s in store?

As I said, this is less of a full review (I hardly ever do those these days), and more of a first impression of sorts. It’s bound to change the more I watch.

For Saturday, May 11, 2024, I introduce you all to The Japan Reporter.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheJapanReporter/videos

Also known as Nobita from Japan until recently, The Japan Reporter is another Japanese YouTuber with a bridge to the western and Japanese worlds, reporting on a variety of different things that do or have the ability to impact Japanese every day life from societal norms, social issues, and environmental factors to political stirrings, culture, and a bunch of other stuff.

Far from being the only channel to openly discuss these topics for a broad audience, if you were looking for more windows into Japan perhaps for an upcoming visit or for your own personal curiosity, have a look at this channel.