Shoujou Knife Jump

See, I'd actually connected to AIM and everything, using Gaim, right, but then I foolishly decided I wanted to use a buddy icon. C'mon, who can resist Skank Zero Hopeless Savage?

Anyway, the instructions call for changing the protocol from TOC to Oscar. Don't worry about it. Just don't do it. Took me right back to thinking I was on, when this was not the case.

Bastards. Just when I found some cool Sakura and Escaflowne icons, too.

No one has said, "Shut the hell up about your anime, nobody wants to hear about your anime," but this should be the last of it. Really.

Another part of the source of that last set of icons, strictlyshoujo.com | anime and manga for girls, focuses on Card Captor Sakura. The Japanese version, obviously, rather than The Crime of Cardcaptors:

A few weeks ago, KidsWB began airing a show entitled "Cardcaptors." Fans of Card Captor Sakura may have noticed that this show bears some eerie semblance to our beloved CLAMP creation.

Alas, it is, in fact, only a semblance.

Nelvana seems to have mutilated the show beyond all possible recognition.

If you visit their FAQ, you will notice that Nelvana attributes this to market research which indicates that "kids" wished to see the show center more on Li Syaoran (Li Showron, to uneducated Americans -- and never you mind that Li is supposed to be his last name). While we don't have access to their hard data, I rather suspect they polled a heavily male audience. You know, the ones who watch Pokemon. Because it is this same audience they wish to attract. (A later interview with Nelvana confirmed this fact -- it was requested by Kids WB. See http://www.fantasticon.com/anime/features/cardcaptors.html for more information.)

Since the existing animation market in American is something like 70 percent male, young males after all are the only people worth polling.

Girls just don't matter.

For once, the long-suffering-fan routine (which is what keeps me from most anime and manga newsgroups and web sites) is actually appropriate. KidsWB took a show with a female protagonist and tried to edit it into one with a boy in the starring role. This meant actually skipping the first seven episodes of the series, so they could begin with the one introducing Li, but the others just set up the situation and the minor characters. You know, the girls.

Fox did something similar with Escaflowne, starting their version of the series with the second episode. They also, paradoxically, played up the fighting while removing the bloodshed. The Escaflowne Report, linked in an earlier entry, goes into actually troublingly obsessive detail about what was removed from the US broadcast version. A brief sample:

As the reports said, the first episode was skipped almost entirely. Or rather, as I predicted it was folded down into about 5 minutes total, then interspersed into the second episode at reasonably appropriate times to create a backstory; a sparse one, but at least it's there, which is more than you can say for Cardcaptors. Generally, whenever Hitomi cuts to one of her visions or daydreams in the second episode, we are instead shown key visions or events from the first episode.

[. . .] But by far the most meaningful change is how the American edit handles violence. As I mentioned in my introduction, there is a lot of violence, blood, death, and destruction in Escaflowne, much more so than anything else you're likely to see on Saturday morning. This is because Escaflowne was targeted towards a high school teen audience and showed at a less juvenile pre-prime-time slot. The American edit does not - because it is targeting [younger] kids. I was curious as to how they could deal with this discrepancy. As expected, they did find a way, although I can't say I'm all that pleased with it.

First of all, it would be impossible to omit the death and destruction without completely screwing up the show, so they didn't try to do that. Insteady they chose to tone down how it is done. Virtually all signs of blood have been eliminated. Anytime someone is attacked, they never actually show them being hit. Instead they show them aiming, firing, and then cut to the victim falling to the ground. We never see the weapon actually hitting them, piercing their body, or making them bleed. Nor do their bodies afterwards show much visible signs of damage. But the unfortunate consequence of this method of reducing the intensity of the battle is the disruption of the flow.

For those of you who saw the original version, yes, that was my reaction, too. . .

If you're really bored, you can debate whether or not Escaflowne was shoujou to begin with; Anime News Network's editorial on the Fox edit says it wasn't, and there were two different comics/manga adaptations of the series, girly character-development heavy shoujou and fightin' robots action shonen. If I wanted to lose serious money in the dying comics market, I'd buy the rights to both and publish 'em together in a flip book, half of each issue dedicated to each version. Then retailers could write saying it sold better when they racked it the boys' version cover facing out, and wouldn't it be more sensible to use the back cover for ads instead? And maybe take the girls' version out completely, since people were complaining about paying for half a book they had no intention of reading?

Funny. I was writing about pop culture so I wouldn't get annoyed.

Want to know more? There's more info on the Escalowne Manga if you want. Warning: Hitomi seems to have gone all upfront in the shonen version. Another reason it would sell better in comics shops. Perverts.