His American design is more in-line with American cartoon canon than with anime. Obviously they wanted to market it towards Americans and in the 80s/early 90s it wasn't that cool to be into anime, it was still very much fringe, if you even knew about it.
Anime was not "verboten," it was just niche and not well known, at least in America, euros may have had more exposure idk. They just weren't making a lot of home media (tapes) or dubbing any anime, the market wasn't there yet. For example we didn't even get the first airing of Dragonball and Dragonball Z in the states until 1996. I don't think people were attaching the word "anime" to astro-boy, it was just a cartoon. Some may have known the difference, but these were the minority.
Same guy, just to add:
The only exception to this was probably Hawaii, as they had (and still do have) a large Japanese population, anime usually would air there first.
>Hawaii and anime
I remember when the hot way to watch DragonBall in the 2000s was downloading or buying VHS copies of Nippon Golden Network's subtitled versions of the series.
Exactly, I think people underestimate how new the cultural phenomena of anime is in America. Yes, a lot of iconic anime is from the 80s, but that doesn't mean they were simulcasting it in America or even dubbing it at all. Most of the anime hype in our culture originated in the mid to late 90s.
Easy to spot ESL, murricans got dbz in toonami by the 2000s,along digimon by same date.
For example anime was known in USA but due to being a butchered product made almost no sense (remember captain tsubasa and how it was,i remember how in US several VS got stretched the more they could sometimes stretching one episode over 6 or 7 episodes i was surprised to find out it barely had 100 episodes for the whole series when on tv was around 2 years to end it) other anime is macross which got butchered as well,tetsuwan atom equally butchered and so on.
I don't think they really knew Mega Man was inspired by Astro Boy at the time, so they based his appearance more off of superheroes like Batman and Superman. Maybe Robocop too since the film for it was also 1987
It looked girly as shit, and it was just barely trickled into America, not to mention you still had people salty about Pearl Harbor and "muh auto industry" >didn't astro boy do pretty well?
It existed, but there were multiple other cartoons that were more popular.
>anime
it was called japanimation back then and it just was not part of pop culture in the US at all until maybe the late 90s when things like akira, dragonballz, pokemon started becoming mainstream. im not surprised they changed the art style on these covers but it looks super weird
You can see where they had redraw the trace on his Buster arm on the EU cover to 4 but it's so weird how they re-drew his other hand to have 5 fingers.
His American design is more in-line with American cartoon canon than with anime. Obviously they wanted to market it towards Americans and in the 80s/early 90s it wasn't that cool to be into anime, it was still very much fringe, if you even knew about it.
Can anyone explain why anime was verboten? Didn't Astro Boy do pretty well in the US?
Anime was not "verboten," it was just niche and not well known, at least in America, euros may have had more exposure idk. They just weren't making a lot of home media (tapes) or dubbing any anime, the market wasn't there yet. For example we didn't even get the first airing of Dragonball and Dragonball Z in the states until 1996. I don't think people were attaching the word "anime" to astro-boy, it was just a cartoon. Some may have known the difference, but these were the minority.
Same guy, just to add:
The only exception to this was probably Hawaii, as they had (and still do have) a large Japanese population, anime usually would air there first.
>Hawaii and anime
I remember when the hot way to watch DragonBall in the 2000s was downloading or buying VHS copies of Nippon Golden Network's subtitled versions of the series.
Exactly, I think people underestimate how new the cultural phenomena of anime is in America. Yes, a lot of iconic anime is from the 80s, but that doesn't mean they were simulcasting it in America or even dubbing it at all. Most of the anime hype in our culture originated in the mid to late 90s.
80s kids grew up on anime. TMNT, Ghostbusters, Transformers all that shit was animated by japs
Easy to spot ESL, murricans got dbz in toonami by the 2000s,along digimon by same date.
For example anime was known in USA but due to being a butchered product made almost no sense (remember captain tsubasa and how it was,i remember how in US several VS got stretched the more they could sometimes stretching one episode over 6 or 7 episodes i was surprised to find out it barely had 100 episodes for the whole series when on tv was around 2 years to end it) other anime is macross which got butchered as well,tetsuwan atom equally butchered and so on.
Those aren't even the bad ones
I don't think they really knew Mega Man was inspired by Astro Boy at the time, so they based his appearance more off of superheroes like Batman and Superman. Maybe Robocop too since the film for it was also 1987
America was, and is, scared of Asian cultural soft-power
The israelite fears the Samurai.
It looked girly as shit, and it was just barely trickled into America, not to mention you still had people salty about Pearl Harbor and "muh auto industry"
>didn't astro boy do pretty well?
It existed, but there were multiple other cartoons that were more popular.
>anime
it was called japanimation back then and it just was not part of pop culture in the US at all until maybe the late 90s when things like akira, dragonballz, pokemon started becoming mainstream. im not surprised they changed the art style on these covers but it looks super weird
why didn't the european releases get new box art after 3? was it because 3's was such a disaster that they forgot how dope the first two were?
Too much effort for less sales. Didn't the last one come out in 94 which is just 1 year before the Playstation.
colors are way better on the american version even if they made his face derpy
I like how they even fixed his hand in both of them.
looks like a massive rapist in american one. Were rapists popular in the early 90s?
>Were rapists popular in the early 90s?
These are good covers.
You can see where they had redraw the trace on his Buster arm on the EU cover to 4 but it's so weird how they re-drew his other hand to have 5 fingers.
I'm surprised he was allowed a gun on the cover in the EU.
Why?
He looks like a stoned moron in the euro releases. It's better for marketing to have him look determined.