A Day in the Life of the Modern Day Cartoon: Anime Redux

Bubbleblabber sure has been buzzing recently. The first magazine is coming soon, and the site has come back from the holidays. Coming back, we had Space Dandy premiere, and it was great! With that, a question has been asked. Has there come a time when anime can infiltrate Bubbleblabber? No, I don’t mean Dragon Ball Z, because that has been done before when it first aired in America. Shows like Attack on Titan don’t really have a place either. Shows like that, as aired, are not funny. They are not meant to be funny. So, why would we put that on here?

Instead, there are shows coming out, that are blurring the lines between action and comedy. We already cover shows from America that straddle that line with Legend of Korra, Dragons: Defenders of Berk going to the front of the pack. Then this past weekend, we got what could be one of the best new shows for 2014. Of course, I am talking about Space Dandy.

For a show to simulcast here, as well as Japan, it has to mean something. Not only was it simulcasted here, but it was in most of the world. That’s taking online streaming into account. At Bubbleblabber, when a network or production studio decides to do something out of the box, we tend to listen. I personally did the network reviews for Korra, then it was announced on the Tumblr that they were doing the final episodes at midnight. We crushed the reviews, and people listened.  The fact that Toonami (something I swore I wouldn’t cover) was doing something very far out of the box, we had to listen.

But where do we go from here? Well, there are a couple different problems:
1. What other mediums do we have to cover shows? Anime in America presents a very clear problem, because every show up to last weekend was aired in Japan, and can take forever and a day to come stateside.

2. We have streaming sites like Viz, where they get the episodes sooner, but what are the turnaround times? They are almost all subs at that time. So, what do we do for subs vs. dubs?  The only thing I can say for right now is that I don’t know. It seems that the trend is just going with subs, but what about the dubs? Do we do a second review with an English dub?

Speaking of dubs, there’s another that has taken anime fandom by storm. That would be abridged series. Teams like Team Fourstar are taking shows like Dragon Ball Z, and trimming all of the garbage off, and redubbing the used clips to make it into a completely different script. This is something you can expect to see a lot more of. When episodes come out, they will get the same treatment as any network show. With that said, keep your peepers on Bubbleblabber, because we have a review of the latest episode of DBZ: Abridged.