Why Tokusatsu is underestimated in Japan?
- Thread starter cobabooy
- Start date
DBZ and One Piece both air on Sunday mornings and have toys market to the same age audience as Kamen Rider. Bandai in Japan has been making a lot of money with Dragon Ball Heroes which is a card game for the arcades. I don't know about Naruto and Fairy Tale, but I believe they still are market to kids in Japan and still have a decent toy line market to kids. I remember Japan did McDonald toys for Naruto a while back.
Not even anime like Pokemon, Doraemon, Yu-Gi-Oh or Yokai Watch?
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cobabooy
Lurker
Being made for kids is not a problem. The problem is Toku shows and movies will always be an after thought. Having a more mature plot didn't help Kikaider Reboot or Gavan The Movie
cobabooy
Lurker
Which makes me wonder why can't Rider and Sentai get Hollywood movies like Godzilla? I hope the new Power Rangers movie will be a success so Toei will have a serious thought about having a partner in Hollywood to produce movies using their properties
Shynilyte
Shyni
Because there arenn't as many Rider or Sentai fans as there are Godzilla fans in Hollywood.
Toku Prime
Well-Known Member
When it comes to adaptations of manga creator's work into another medium, the expectation in the Japanese industry is that the original creator retains a lot of creative control. Studios making anime adaptations have to OK everything from plot changes (or endings if the original work is still ongoing and the anime doesn't want to end on a cliffhanger) down to whether the character models meet their approval. Interviews concerning the recent American Godzilla film indicated that Toho similarly had a lot of input into how things went.
Hollywood is generally the opposite. When they buy the rights to adapt something, that's often the end of their involvement with the original creator. If it's something with a massive following then they might stay fairly close to the original, but in most cases what they are really looking for is a seed idea they can use to make whatever they think will sell to a general audience.
Before he died, Shotaro Ishinomori saw an episode of Saban's Masked Rider and was so appalled that he decided he would never approve another Western adaptation of the franchise. After he died his rights passed to his family, which runs a business dedicated to managing the rights to his works. As far as Toei making their Sunday morning Rider shows goes, the family just collects their annual royalty checks and otherwise doesn't get involved, but according to the creators of the Dragon Knight show the family had maintained that no foreign adaptations could be made. The only reason a license for Dragon Knight was OKed was because they went out to Japan and gave the family a big presentation about what they were doing and how they wanted to respect the legacy of the franchise.
Dragon Knight wasn't a success, either in sales or ratings, and the Kamen Rider franchise in general isn't well known in the West. Certainly not in the same way as Godzilla. So there's no big draw for a Hollywood agent to stay loyal to what came before or to follow the typical Japanese adaptation process. Yet it seems that the family in some ways still insist upon some degree of faithfullness from the West after Saban burned them. Plus there's no way of knowing if Toei would want to have it's own say in things too (which they're completely intitled to as co-creators). I suspect that's going to be a big stalling point for any deal being proposed.
Lionsgate's Power Ranger movie is a Hollywood movie of Sentai
. If you mean a big budget pre-Zyuranger movie in Hollywood then that would never happen. People will still look at it as Power Rangers. Power Rangers is an American version of Super Sentai. Different story and characters, but they still have the same concept.
