Originally posted by Viz Hater@Apr 17 2005, 02:43 PM
It doesn't matter what the miners ( ignorant children who's parents let the watch anime) think about a show that is (In America) intended for Teens and older.
When I read this, I got a mental image of a bunch of grizzled old prospectors sitting around discussing One Piece.
And… uh... teens under 18 are minors. You mean pre-adolescents, who are a prime advertising demographic, so yes, it does indeed matter what they think about a show.
On another note, I'm not sure why so many people think Funimation or anybody else will get One Piece if it fails for 4Kids.
The corporate mentality in this country usually isn't that "somebody did a bad job with this property, which is why it isn't popular", more often it's "this product isn't popular and won't be." That mentality is a cousin to the "wow, this work was successful so something else in the same genre must be successful regardless of quality!" mentality that dominates Hollywood and the publishing industry.
If 4Kids drops One Piece, Funimation or any other animation company likely won't get it without paying a hefty sum for it unless it's such a spectacular failure that it drags 4Kids down with it and they need an immediate cash infusion to stay in business. Of course, if One Piece is a big enough failure to kill 4Kids, I doubt anybody else would want to be associated with it; the stench of failure would be enough to put off previously interested parties.
I seriously doubt 4Kids is spending enough money and effort on One Piece for it's failure to cripple their business, so the more likely result of 4Kids abandoning One Piece would be Oda's creation languishing in Hiatal Limbo for years. It wouldn't be doing them any good, but selling it cheaply to anybody else would be an admission of their own failure. If One Piece fails to generate revenue, it's hard to see why anybody would want to pay for those rights, especially considering that they would likely not only to pay for distributions rights, but whatever 4Kids wants on top of that to recoup money they lost on One Piece.
Anybody who takes One Piece away from 4Kids would have to pay more money than 4Kids originally offered for the series (presumably they were the highest bidder for the rights), which is unlikely as they weren't willing to do so in the first place and would almost certainly not want to now, especially now that One Piece has a track record of failure in the United States.
It sickens me to see 7 year olds mess with things that they don't belong near like anime. I saw some ignorant kid trying to get a FMA figure at Boarders and I was so outraged that my brother and I loudly started talking about Winry and Ed doing "bad things" which of course I made up to get the Ignorant father to make the miner put the figure down …............................and it worked!
Why, oh why, do I get the feeling that the part of this story represented by those ellipses was something like "the miner put the figure down, and I grabbed it because I totally needed it for my badass collection"?
Hey, maybe a better idea would have been to let the kid buy the figure, so Borders would make money and be inclined to sell more merchandise of that sort. The kid gets a cool action figure, Borders makes money, and the kid's dad doesn't think people who watch anime are perverted deviants.
Instead, you chose to deny a little kid from getting a toy he wanted and contributed to a negative social stereotype.
Bravo, you're as much of a credit to Anime Fandom as Star Wars Kid is to Star Wars Fandom.