I’m surprised I didn’t spot this earlier, but there is a brief shot of an Evangelion poster in the 2nd episode of I Survived A Japanese Game Show:
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And if you’re blind as a bat and can’t see it:
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As I said, I’m surprised I didn’t spot it before since I’ve been trying to keep an eye out for anything like that. I wouldn’t be shocked if I missed something else too.
Wow, I totally didn’t even know that this show existed until I was surfing channels tonight.
In fact, I was thisclose to not even seeing it. I was about to stick another anime DVD into the VCR um, duh, the DVD player when I saw that Family Feud was on NBC, and I always loved that show, so I had to watch. But when I was flipping during ads, I saw that ABC was advertising a show call “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” which was to air next so, of course, I had to check it out.
Now, my impression is that they’re taking part in a made-up Japanese game show called Majide (and someone can correct me if I’m wrong on this part) where contestants basically compete in the most famous (or infamous) competitions seen on Japanese game and variety shows.
I’m not really an expert on said shows, so I’m not sure if the competitions they partake in actually occur or are common on Japanese TV, but this should be interesting nevertheless, though I almost watched as much to see things in Japan (oh! There’s the Rainbow Bridge! I know that! Oh! And that’s the Tokyo Tower! Oh, and I’ve seen that building in an anime before too!) than to actually watch the reality show.
In any case, they can’t have a show set in Japan without hitting anime eventually, I would think. They at the very least have to go to Akihabara and run into a horde of otaku or something.
When I saw the trailers for Speed Racer first come out, I had mixed feelings about the movie. I thought the movie had promise, but I was unsure as to whether other people would think the same.
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Perhaps being a fan of anime, I’m not automatically turned off by cartoonyish (is that a word?) movies (though I guess I wasn’t before I started watching anime, which is perhaps why it eventually appealed to me). However, movies which are shot in unusual or cartoon-like styles tend to not do well at the box office.
The three examples that come to my mind first are Starship Troopers, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Starship Troopers was released in November 1997. Similarly to Speed Racer, Starship Troopers opened with only $22.1 million (about $28.9 million when adjusted for inflation). It started #1, but mostly because November isn’t exactly the biggest month for movies. In any case, it ended with $54.8 million ($71.8 million) domestically at the end of it’s run, finishing 35th for the year. Not terrible, but not necessarily near the $105 million ($137.5 million) it cost to make it.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen opened July 2003, so it’s situation is quite similar to Speed Racer’s. It opened at #2 with only $23.1 million ($26.5 million today) and went on to make $66.5 million domestically ($76.2 million), putting it 44th for the year, again short of the $78 million ($89.5 million) that it cost to make it.
Sky Captain opened September 2004 at #1, but grossed only $15.6 million ($17.5 million today). It went on to make only $37.8 million domestically ($42.5 million), finishing 77th for the year and again, no where near the $70 million ($79 million) it cost to make.
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There are some exceptions, of course. 300 would probably be the most recent, but the Tim Burton Batman movies are also included - though even those started going out of favor when they got too weird for people.
One of the lessons one might be able to bring from this is that audiences typically don’t like live-action movies that are cartoon-like, unless they shamelessly pander to their targeted audience (300) or are very well known before hand (Batman). Unfortunately for shows based on anime, none of them are going to draw in audiences by the popularity of it’s source material alone, and I’m not sure exactly how well you can pander to an audience while at the same time sticking to the source material very well (unless the source material itself does nothing but pander).
This seemingly gets us to the conclusion that if you want a movie that 1) actually has a story, and 2) whose source material isn’t already widely followed, then doing a movie in a cartoon-like style isn’t a good idea.
Perhaps related to their poor box-office performance, many of these movies seem to sacrifice story for the gimmick of looking the way they do, but I’m not sure that fully explains why they would get an atrocious opening weekend.
This (finally) leads me to what I’m trying to get at here: when adapting graphic novels, comic books, or anime into live-action, there seems to be a strong urge to adapt the cartoon into a movie instead of adapting the story into a movie.
One reason why I think the new Batman movies, Spiderman, Superman, and X-Men have largely been successful is that they adapted the story and not the comic. Yes, they all have cool special effects, but do you think X-Men would have been as well received as it was if Wolverine actually showed up on screen in his yellow and blue spandex? Probably not. Hardcore X-men fans may cry heresy for that not happening, but the people who made that movie knew that it was more important to turn it into a movie instead of into a live-action comic strip.
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The same thing applies to adapting anime. When doing so, one needs to adapt the story into a movie, not adapt the cartoon into a live-action cartoon. That is the mistake the Wachowski brothers made with Speed Racer and what I fear Dragonball will make the same mistake doing (and indeed, what most people who make cartoon-to-movie adaptations have done).
I have more faith in James Cameron’s Battle Angel (whenever he starts it) and Dreamworks’ plans to do Ghost in the Shell, since I think the people behind those movies generally know what works and what doesn’t, but that’s assuming studios don’t axe the trend to adapt anime or manga into movies by then based on directors seemingly not learning from mistakes of the past.
Part of the trick is choosing an anime or manga which can be successfully translated into a movie. Right now, the trend seems to be picking the most well known series without really thinking “is this actually going to translate well?”
It would have been nice had Speed Racer started this trend off well, but it didn’t and people are already asking if movies based off anime are dead before the trend even gets off the ground.
Of course, some in the anime community wouldn’t necessarily mind that, but I’m not really in that group. I generally like watching anime for the stories, in which case it doesn’t really matter what medium it is done in, as well as it is done well.
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Anime does allow for some things to go on which wouldn’t work or would look silly in live-action to be sure (which is one of the things that makes adapting it into live-action problematic), but overall I don’t think I watch anime because it’s anime necessarily.
In any case, the first wave of anime adaptations seem to be done by people who are like “this is well known! Let’s turn it into a movie!” and then appear to either be making a live-action anime movie for themselves or “for the fans” without really thinking about whether such a movie will actually have broad appeal if made that way. As I said earlier - they’re adapting the cartoon, not the story. Until people learn the lesson that you have to make a movie instead of a live-action cartoon, I think any adaptations based on anime are going to continue to fail.
You know that $20.2 million figure from Monday for Speed Racer? Apparently that was an over-optimistic estimate by Warner Brothers for the weekend.
Actual numbers are out now, and they say that Speed Racer actually made a paltry $18.6 million over the weekend, placing it at 3rd place behind the 2nd weekend of Iron Man and What Happened in Vegas, earning it a lousy $5,147 per screen. That’s $1,716 per screen per day. At the national average ticket price of $6.88, that’s 249 people per screen per day, or probably something around 50 to 60 people per screening. Ouch.
Well, Speed Racer ended up doing what I feared it would: it bombed.
OK, yeah, it finished in 2nd, but it only took in 40% of Iron Man which is in it’s second weekend, and even though it (barely) brought in more money than What Happens in Vegas, at least based on the estimates, it took in less money per theater.
And next weekend we get Narnia (followed by Indiana Jones the following weekend), so don’t expect any sort of rebound either. That’s a pretty bad opening for a movie that cost $120 million or whatever to make.
Looking at movies with similar openings last year, Speed Racer will probably hit $50 million (for example, 1408 opened at $20.6 million and finished with $72 - though it only cost $25 million to make, while Halloween 2007 brought in $26.4 million on it’s opening but totaled only $58 million), but I’m sure they would have liked that as an opening weekend, not as a total domestic haul.
So while I was in Roanoke doing some other stuff, I decided to swing by and see Speed Racer tonight to check it out (OK, I would have gone to see it even if I didn’t go to Roanoke). As I tried to think of a good title for this post it hit me: I’ll talk about the good things about the movie, the bad things about the movie, and the ugly things.
And just a note: I haven’t seen the TV series so I can’t say whether the movie does it justice or how well it feels like it. I am sort-of familiar with some of the characters, so I wasn’t going in completely blind.
First, lets start off with the good part. I think contrary to most reviews of this movie, there was indeed a plot, and it was clearly apparent to me what it was. Was it necessarily a deep plot? No. But then again, how many big summer movies actually do have deep plots? And it’s about auto racing. How many deep plots about automobile racing can one come up with? It’s like going into a McDonalds, and then faulting it for not being a 5-star restaurant.
Second, yes it was quite flashy, but I think once I settled into the universe that the movie existed in, all the colors and flashyness didn’t really bother me. Sure, it’s not something you see every day, but it’s kind of like a Pixar movie except with live people playing the characters. Critics seemed to pan this idea as automatically bad, I’m not sure why.
Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, I found it entertaining. I wasn’t crying out of boredom like most of the reviewers seemed to be. I thought the races were exciting, even if they did blatantly violate the law of physics (again, people don’t seem to care about such things in other movies too much). Also, it got in some good lines which got quite a bit of laughs as well.
Finally, the kids in the theater seemed to love it.
This isn’t so much “the bad” as it is the “this may not play well for some audiences.” Perhaps my main concern was that the specifics of the plot may be hard to follow, especially for those who are younger, which may be a problem since the movie is largely aimed towards a younger audience. There were many instances were something happened, and after it did, I kind of considered myself lucky to catch it. I’m sure other people didn’t as some things were easy to miss, but which might cause some confusion if you did miss them.
Second, the movie is, admittedly, kind of hokie. I kind of new that going in, so I sort of new what to expect, but it may turn off some audiences. It’s not that the acting is bad, but I think sometimes they had a tendency to over act (which I’m sure is on purpose), which if you think about it, kind of goes along with the rest of the movie anyway.
Third, while the racing scenes were pretty cool, one may almost get dizzy switching from this view or another. It was pretty cool effects, but sometimes before you knew what you were looking at, you were already looking at the next shot. I don’t think it was too bad, but it might be distracting for some.
The Ugly
The only really ugly part wasn’t part of the movie at all - it was the crowd at the movie. As in the number of people who went to see it. Admittedly, one screening of it started a half hour before the one I saw, but the theater was pretty empty - I’m not even sure a quarter of the seats were filled. The people who were there seemed to pretty universally like the movie based on their reactions, it’s just there weren’t that many people there. If this theater is like most of the other theaters, we’re not going to be seeing very high numbers for this movie come Monday, unfortunately
One final note, I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but you can definitely tell the Wachowski made this movie, so if you don’t like the styling of the Matrix, you may not like the styling of this either. I personally liked it, but that’s just me.
OK, I know that you can download it as an excel file, but if you don’t have excel, or are too lazy, or are somewhere where you can’t/shouldn’t down load things, the full list is below the fold.
There is a total of 304 theaters in (if my count is right) 41 states. Hopefully there will be one near you! Read More
As you may or may not know, Warner Brothers is releasing a live-action Speed Racer movie in the US on May 9, 2008. It is, of course, based on the anime series Mach Go Go Go, known as Speed Racer in the US, which originally aired in Japan in 1967 and 1968.
After being in development hell for 14 years, the Wachowski brothers (Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta) finally decided to do something with it, and a few days ago they put out the first trailer of the movie.
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