Anime fans would likely agree the genesis of the modern anime industry in the 1990s and early 2000s began with Osamu Tezuka's Astro-Boy in 1951. What those fans might be tempted to overlook are the other major influences on both Japanese and American culture during the same time period.
What makes Tezuka-sensei's work remarkable, among many other things, is that it was launched scarcely six years after the end of World War II. Like much of Japanese entertainment from the 1950s and 1960s, Astro-Boy concerned itself with man's relationship to technology. The art style was an homage to the Disney, Max Fleischer and Merrie Melodies era of animated entertainment in the United States, which consisted of heavy lines, circular designs and black-and-white color schemes. The Astro-Boy art style is reminiscent of Betty Boop. Its influences and origins can be seen throughout the American cartoons of the 1950s.
It took twelve years for Tezuka-sensei's work to find its way to television, where it ran for four seasons and 193 episodes. The show reportedly earned as high as a 40 rating on Japanese television, which would put it ahead of both Johnny Carson's Tonight Show Finale and the Friends finale on the list of most watched American television broadcasts measured by rating. Astro-Boy was the show that gave birth to Japanese animation.
Astro-Boy was about fighting robots. This particular subject matter will come as no surprise to any modern anime fan, as mechs, robots, cyborgs, androids and every other kind of technological character has been featured in anime series from Gundam Wing to Magic Knight Rayearth.
More generally, Astro-Boy is speculative fiction. It is a story of the fantastic and the other-worldly, and it happened in Japan at a time when technology was a prominent cultural concern. The Japanese people took inspiration from Tezuka-sensei's vision and the technology it featured and apply it to industry and entertainment in ways that nobody else could have imagined.
A contemporary of the Astro-Boy manga was Ishiro Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Where Tezuka-sensei's work was an inspiring tale of mankind co-existing with technology, Honda-sensei's work can be seen as a warning against mankind's frivolous misuse of technology. Both works were landmark artistic expressions of Japan's emerging national character, and the speed with which the nation apparently intended to establish itself creatively.
By the mid-1960s, Astro-Boy's influence started to find its way into other television series like Giant Robo, Speed Racer and Ultraman. It was clear by the enormous popularity of anime that fantasy, science-fiction and other speculative subjects were safe bets for new stories to broadcast on Japanese television. The live-action side of the business came to be known as tokusatsu, or "special filming." It is a term that generally refers to any film or television that relies primarily on special effects.
The common thread through many tokusatsu works is their appeal to children. Godzilla evolved from a terrifying destructive force into a heroic defender of Japan and Earth over the years. Many other daikaiju (strange creatures) followed. Gamera, a gigantic jet-powered turtle, eventually came to be known as a "friend to children" while Mothra, alternatively a silk-spitting larva or a huge, brightly colored and strangely cuddly butterfly, became quite popular with Japanese women and other kaiju fans. The growing appeal of these kinds of fantastic stories gradually built a foundation from which a worldwide entertainment franchise could be launched. They also made it clear that such a franchise could be successfully and profitably geared towards a children's audience.
Meanwhile, in the United States, a similar focus on technology was steadily becoming more and more prominent. The 1960s saw the tremendous build-up of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and cultural touchstones like the original Star Trek television series in 1966 and a series of highly visible reprints of the Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars novels beginning in 1963.
But the cultural force that would influence an entire generation of American children and completely reshape the entertainment industry was just beginning to form in the offices of a company called Avalon Hill.
Avalon Hill was a gaming company that published a magazine called the Avalon Hill General. This publication made it possible for the company to organize a nationwide fan community of wargaming aficionados. This community became the foundation upon which future tabletop game development would be based. One of those games would come to be known as Dungeons and Dragons.
Wargaming is a hobby that can trace its roots deep into history. In fact, the first game that modern fans might recognize as a "war" game was invented by a man named Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig in northern Germany over 200 years before the first Sailor Moon episode premiered. War games were remarkable primarily because of their dissimilarity to chess. Although chess is also technically a war game, it trades detail and scope for more standardized and approachable rules. Hellwig and his future colleagues were more interested in granular simulation.
What wargames brought to the hobbyist's repertoire was the ability to simulate imaginative situations either through representation in model form or through meticulous record-keeping and exacting rules (or both). This activity literally opened up new worlds ripe for exploration by highly intelligent people. Some were concerned with history. Others were concerned with storytelling and imagination. Now both had a medium through which they could express their interest. They were the proto-geeks, and their hobby would go on to spawn a multi-billion dollar industry.
One might wonder how Sailor Moon could possibly be influenced by something as obscure as a series of customized rules for tabletop wargaming. The truth is that role-playing games and the communities that formed around them were the training grounds for nearly every future entertainment executive in America and the audiences they aspired to build.
Generation X, which consists of everyone born between 1961 and 1981, came of age at a crucial inflection point in entertainment history. They were children and teenagers at a time when three major cultural events took place in the United States. One was the release of Star Wars in 1977. The second was the invention of Saturday morning cartoons and the third was Dungeons and Dragons.
These three influences combined to produce a generation highly sensitive to the importance of culture and entertainment. Their instincts were as finely tuned as the mechanical instincts of their parents and grandparents. The World War II generation was raised on radio. Baby Boomers were raised on television. Generation X would come to be raised on role-playing games and computers, and they would go on to use those games and computers to reshape the culture with which they were entrusted. They started by building something called the "world wide web" in the early 1990s at about the same time Sailor Moon premiered on television.
The key element in all that was set to influence some 84 million Americans was the common thread of speculative storytelling. The fantastic, from horror to science fiction to fantasy, was not only prominent, but expected. Imaginative stories were in abundance for this generation from their earliest television experiences all the way through to the first home video game consoles and far beyond. Imagination shaped their lives from the very moment they were able to exercise it.
David Brin, the editor of Star Wars on Trial, noted that ours is the first civilization to "make fun important." If that is true, then Generation X was not only the first to experience that culture, but the first to help create it.
A Dungeons and Dragons fan did not simply concern him or herself with the outcome of a battle between a giant snake and a magical golem. They could tell you exactly how and why one or the other would win and further, be able to produce statistical analysis to back up their conclusion. Among such people, how powerful Giant Robot's finger missiles were was as frequent a topic of discussion as the meaning of Bugs Bunny's insults in last weekend's early morning Looney Tunes selections.
As they grew up, the Generation X-ers honed their humorous sensibilities. They absorbed the knowledge of how to tell a good story the way 19th century teenagers absorbed farming techniques and woodworking. The Generation X kids could explain almost without thinking the difference between a paladin and an anti-paladin. They knew why arcane magic was different from healing magic. The idea of a sword that glowed blue when danger was nearby was natural to them. They didn't need to have read Tolkien.
This is something that shouldn't be too quickly overlooked. The deep cultural knowledge that served as the undercurrent for every myth of the 20th century courses through the very veins and arteries of Generation X. They responded to these influences in a manner no other generation has, and they have made the world a much more colorful place as a result. They not only participated in collaborative storytelling, they made it part of our culture. They helped shape the creative vision behind the $100 billion video game industry while they cleared their dining room tables to simulate adventures in dark and forbidding caverns every weekend. They were the first generation to get up from in front of the television and start creating new and exciting stories instead of simply consuming them at regular weekly intervals. What followed is unprecedented and will likely remain so for many decades.
Anything with a speculative angle was instantly interesting to the kids of the 70s and 80s. Imaginative inventions were dissected with the precision of a futuristic research lab. What is it? How does it work? Is it technology or magic? If it's a monster, is it good or evil? What kind of armor does it wear? How powerful is it? Can it talk?
This was not simply an American phenomenon. Conversations like these were taking place on a daily basis on opposite sides of the Pacific. Japanese children were no different than American children when it came to measuring the precise power level of Godzilla's tail swipes, or how many evil henchmen were in the Gargoyle Gang. In fact, both groups of children were watching the same movies and TV shows. KHJ-TV Channel 9 in Los Angeles was frequently the home of the kaiju films of the 1960s and 1970s, just like Japanese channels. These two communities of children were connected even if there was no chance they would ever meet.
American children were just as thrilled by outer-space subject matter as Japanese children. Star Wars premiered in Japan in 1978. Alan Ladd Jr. attended the premiere and was quite nervous when the audience sat in silence after the film ended. He was later relieved to learn that silence is the highest compliment a Japanese audience can give a film.
What happened during the decade of the 1970s was both unprecedented and remarkable. Generation X in both nations was trained by their day-to-day experience to view the world in speculative terms. They did not see what was. They saw what could be. The idea of a gigantic atomic-breath-blasting cross between a tyrannosaurus and a 40-story building was as natural for them as horsemanship was to a teenager 100 years earlier. Nothing was out of reach. They were the people destined to make the world a much more colorful and imaginative place. They learned to express themselves the way previous generations learned to play tag.
The Imagination Generation was not limited to boys either. Girls took to Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and cartoons just as eagerly as their brothers and friends. They asked the same questions and wondered the same things, and began to create their own characters and worlds right alongside the guys.
Key to the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon was the ability to create your own character. This gave boys and girls both an activity they shared a highly focused enthusiasm for. It also trained them to recognize an opportunity to vicariously experience different worlds and ideas. Once you have learned to express yourself in imaginative terms, recognizing the opportunity to do so again becomes easier and easier over time. This is exactly what happened to Generation X in both Japan and America. They learned to see the world through a lens of imagination.
Even a quarter-century earlier, the academic principles of creating a literary character were taught in classrooms and textbooks. They were a school subject and were about as interesting to kids as algebra and European history. But starting in the 1970s, the process of creating a character emerged from the obscure lectures of teachers and professors and became entertainment. The explosion of ideas and imagination that followed is one of the true wonders of human endeavor.
This was a generation conditioned to accept notions of the fantastic and then to take those ideas and continue developing them into newer and more refined concepts. This was the key impact of the invention of the role-playing game. Taking the raw materials of imagination and combining them into something completely new, and then doing that over and over again is something that previous generations had never experienced. When those skills were combined with the growing surge of stories, comics, characters, games and ideas coming from multiple international sources, what followed was both inevitable and tremendously powerful.
By 1980, the Generation X kids were either in high school already or almost ready to start. A large number of them were already Star Wars, Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons fans. Many were taking up alternative tabletop and role-playing games. In Japan, they were tokusatsu and manga fans. They were also excitedly coming up with ideas of their own. And then they met each other and formed the first communities of geeks.
These were kids who dove into worlds of imagination the way readers would approach a library. They created characters and monsters in games and other creative works. Then they expanded their ideas until entire worlds were mapped out on graph paper. Books and stories were written. You've probably read or heard a few of them by now.
By the early 1990s, anyone, Japanese, American or otherwise, who had participated in the proto-fan-culture in the 1970s and 1980s had been through a years-long course of advanced speculative fictional study that taught them to recognize creative genius. A magical girl who transforms into a powerful hero with an ancient artifact as a weapon and who once lived in the Kingdom of the Moon would be as easily understood by them as Jackie Gleason's comedy was by their parents and grandparents.
These were the kids that discussed creativity at exhausting length. Would Godzilla defeat Mothra? What if we could construct a robot? What would it be like to fly through space? What would it be like to have magical powers? What's on the moon?
As it turned out, one of the kids pondering such questions was named Naoko Takeuchi.