The Taco Bell Effect

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The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby El Squibbonator » Sat Aug 14, 2021 3:03 pm

I’m not sure whether this subject is better suited to this subforum or the manga/anime one, because it sort of discusses both topics. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and want to hear you guys’s opinions on.

I call it the Taco Bell Effect.

Imagine you grew up in Mexico, and you've known authentic Mexican cuisine all your life. Then you move to America, where they have this thing called "Taco Bell" that says it's meant to evoke Mexican food, but it really just tastes like cardboard and gives you diarrhea. That's the gist of the Taco Bell Effect: any attempt at selling a domestic imitation of a foreign commodity will be rejected by the established consumers of said commodity.

It’s the same way with anime. Basically, the idea is that many anime fans outside of Japan watch these shows and movies not simply for their content but because of an inherent exotic quality they have. There's some merit to this, since by and large, a great deal of anime covers genres that simply don't exist in western animation. But every so often, you'll get western animated works that are deliberately inspired by anime, either in terms of art style, in terms of the tropes they use, or both. Yet anime fans typically reject these shows, often dismissing them as "not real anime.”

So why is this a bad thing? It means western animated works that are clearly inspired by anime have to face an uphill struggle for success, since they're competing for attention not only with other local animation, but with genuine anime. This, in turn, discourages major western animation studios from experimenting with such works and hence having the same variety of genres as anime does.

Imagine, for example, that some American animation studio produced a domestic equivalent of Neon Genesis Evangelion— a show that presses the same buttons in terms of tone, themes, and genre, while still being a unique and original story. It’s all but certain that it would still be rejected by most Evangelion fans as an inferior copy not worth their time.

Many anime fans, it seems, draw an invisible line between "anime" and "cartoons", with the implication that the latter should never try to be the former. And distributors seem to have picked up on this. Netflix labels a number of domestically-produced adult animated series (Castlevania, for example) as anime to attract anime fans, even though they are not Japanese.

With all of that in mind, is there anything that can be done about the Taco Bell Effect? Is there a way to make western animated movies and TV shows that effectively fill the same niche in terms of genre and style as popular anime, without alienating anime fans?
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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby Natalie the Cat » Sat Aug 14, 2021 10:47 pm

I don't think that an American effort could produce any form of equivalent to Eva. It has universal themes but it's still rooted in Japanese culture and all the ways it appeals to Americans are outside the scope of the authors' intent with it.

There's going to be fundamental differences, no matter what. If you "translate" anime you get the relationship between Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix.

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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby Bagheera » Sun Aug 15, 2021 6:31 pm

I think you're way off base, personally. There is no "Taco Bell effect" with these projects because they aren't marketed to anime fans -- they're actually marketed to fans of Avatar, since that show was wildly successful and proved that serious, story-based cartoons could be made in the west. It doesn't particularly matter whether or not anime fans embrace such works because they're not the target audience (which is also why Taco Bell continues to thrive even when authentic Mexican food is right around the corner, but whatever).

It helps to have a coherent definition of what anime is: from the Western perspective it is the body of animated works produced for a Japanese market. It doesn't matter if they're made in Japan (some are made in China or Japan or the U.S., and Japan produces plenty of exports that never see the Japanese market). What's important is that they're made for Japanese viewers, and thus cater to Japanese sensibilities. That's what the Japanese and the weebs who love them like. So, for a comparable American project, you need to take the same idea and make it for American viewers -- hence Voltron: Legendary Defender, which is a very different show from GoLion, along with Avatar and Castlevania and She-Ra and the rest. All of these are built with American sensibilities in mind, and are thus marketed toward Western audiences. Anime fandom isn't really on the radar here as it's a tiny part of the Western animation market generally (which also includes things like Steven Universe and MLP and Gravity Falls and so on and so forth).

Simply put, anime fans are not enough of a factor here for the "Taco Bell effect" to be relevant. They just think they are because they typically don't understand what makes their beloved anime, well, anime.
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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby El Squibbonator » Mon Aug 16, 2021 9:47 pm

View Original PostBagheera wrote:It helps to have a coherent definition of what anime is: from the Western perspective it is the body of animated works produced for a Japanese market. It doesn't matter if they're made in Japan (some are made in China or Japan or the U.S., and Japan produces plenty of exports that never see the Japanese market). What's important is that they're made for Japanese viewers, and thus cater to Japanese sensibilities. That's what the Japanese and the weebs who love them like. So, for a comparable American project, you need to take the same idea and make it for American viewers -- hence Voltron: Legendary Defender, which is a very different show from GoLion, along with Avatar and Castlevania and She-Ra and the rest. All of these are built with American sensibilities in mind, and are thus marketed toward Western audiences. Anime fandom isn't really on the radar here as it's a tiny part of the Western animation market generally (which also includes things like Steven Universe and MLP and Gravity Falls and so on and so forth).


That may be true, but it still feels like there’s some degree of cultural snobbery in play. For example, one thing I've noticed is that Western animation doesn't have a unified "fandom" in the same way anime does, and that kind of has repercussions for its wider acceptance. What I mean by this is that anime is seen as a unified category unto itself, with the various works in it being more similar than different, even though that's not actually true at all. But— outside of Japan— anime is marketed as something distinct and separate, and that means we get fans of series as different as Attack on Titan and Azumanga Daioh joining the same clubs and going to the same conventions.

Fans of western animated works tend to be more disorganized. They'll identify themselves as fans of just one series, or a few, and they get very defensive about them. You won't find someone who's a fan of Rick and Morty sharing the same group as someone who likes DuckTales. On sites like 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica, the so-called "cartoon community"— people who prefer Western animation to anime— are considered to be even less respectable than anime fans, which is saying a lot.
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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby Natalie the Cat » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:06 pm

View Original PostBagheera wrote:I think you're way off base, personally. There is no "Taco Bell effect" with these projects because they aren't marketed to anime fans -- they're actually marketed to fans of Avatar, since that show was wildly successful and proved that serious, story-based cartoons could be made in the west. It doesn't particularly matter whether or not anime fans embrace such works because they're not the target audience (which is also why Taco Bell continues to thrive even when authentic Mexican food is right around the corner, but whatever).

It helps to have a coherent definition of what anime is: from the Western perspective it is the body of animated works produced for a Japanese market. It doesn't matter if they're made in Japan (some are made in China or Japan or the U.S., and Japan produces plenty of exports that never see the Japanese market). What's important is that they're made for Japanese viewers, and thus cater to Japanese sensibilities. That's what the Japanese and the weebs who love them like. So, for a comparable American project, you need to take the same idea and make it for American viewers -- hence Voltron: Legendary Defender, which is a very different show from GoLion, along with Avatar and Castlevania and She-Ra and the rest. All of these are built with American sensibilities in mind, and are thus marketed toward Western audiences. Anime fandom isn't really on the radar here as it's a tiny part of the Western animation market generally (which also includes things like Steven Universe and MLP and Gravity Falls and so on and so forth).

Simply put, anime fans are not enough of a factor here for the "Taco Bell effect" to be relevant. They just think they are because they typically don't understand what makes their beloved anime, well, anime.


You’re making me wish Gargoyles could get a revival. It was ahead of its time.
Last edited by Natalie the Cat on Fri Aug 20, 2021 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Postby El Squibbonator » Wed Aug 18, 2021 12:40 am

Gargoyles wasn't really "ahead of its time", not in the way a lot of people seem to be under the impression it was. It was a part of wave of "serious" action/adventure shows that were popular in the 1990s, with examples including Batman: The Animated Series, Exo-Squad, Superman: The Animated Series, X-Men and Spider-Man.

This trend had largely subsided by the year 2000. You still had action cartoons made in the 2000s, but most of them had much more pronounced comedy elements than their 90s forebears. You know, stuff like Kim Possible, Danny Phantom, and American Dragon Jake Long. Even superhero cartoons were becoming more humorous, with shows like Teen Titans and Batman: The Brave And The Bold.

So what changed? Ironically, the answer seems to be anime. The 2000s were the period when anime truly came into its own. The 90s had the first sign of that with Dragon Ball and Pokemon, but the floodgates truly burst open in the 2000s. And since action cartoons--especially serious ones like Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series--were notoriously expensive, it was much cheaper to import them from Japan than to make them in-house. So the only ones that survived were the ones with comedy elements. Again, all this was happening by the early 2000s. The biggest sign that the age of the serious action cartoon was over came in 2002, when the channel space of Fox Kids-- the home of X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and other beloved superhero shows-- was bought out by 4Kids, who proceeded to fill it with cheap dubbed anime.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was a bit of an outlier, being a serious American action cartoon produced during the mid-to-late 2000s, but it makes a lot more sense in context. It was greenlit during the 2000s anime fad, and, good as it was, it's easy to see it as being Nickelodeon's attempt to cash in on said fad.
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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby Natalie the Cat » Fri Aug 20, 2021 6:15 pm

View Original PostEl Squibbonator wrote:Gargoyles wasn't really "ahead of its time", not in the way a lot of people seem to be under the impression it was. It was a part of wave of "serious" action/adventure shows that were popular in the 1990s, with examples including Batman: The Animated Series, Exo-Squad, Superman: The Animated Series, X-Men and Spider-Man.

This trend had largely subsided by the year 2000. You still had action cartoons made in the 2000s, but most of them had much more pronounced comedy elements than their 90s forebears. You know, stuff like Kim Possible, Danny Phantom, and American Dragon Jake Long. Even superhero cartoons were becoming more humorous, with shows like Teen Titans and Batman: The Brave And The Bold.

So what changed? Ironically, the answer seems to be anime. The 2000s were the period when anime truly came into its own. The 90s had the first sign of that with Dragon Ball and Pokemon, but the floodgates truly burst open in the 2000s. And since action cartoons--especially serious ones like Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series--were notoriously expensive, it was much cheaper to import them from Japan than to make them in-house. So the only ones that survived were the ones with comedy elements. Again, all this was happening by the early 2000s. The biggest sign that the age of the serious action cartoon was over came in 2002, when the channel space of Fox Kids-- the home of X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and other beloved superhero shows-- was bought out by 4Kids, who proceeded to fill it with cheap dubbed anime.

Avatar: The Last Airbender was a bit of an outlier, being a serious American action cartoon produced during the mid-to-late 2000s, but it makes a lot more sense in context. It was greenlit during the 2000s anime fad, and, good as it was, it's easy to see it as being Nickelodeon's attempt to cash in on said fad.


With respect, the X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons were not on the same plane as ExoSquad, B:TAS, or Gargoyles. They weren't *bad* -they were definitely a leg up over their 80's predecessors- but they still had fairly poor animation and were hampered by censorship to the point of ridiculousness. (PLASMA!)

Those three were fundamentally different, in my view, and only Batman got its due. It would be hard not to; Batman is Batman. Anything with Batman in it will sell.

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Re: The Taco Bell Effect

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Postby El Squibbonator » Fri Aug 20, 2021 11:45 pm

My point still stands, which is that you mostly didn't see shows like that after the 1990s. Avatar was the only real exception, and even that was born mostly out of a desire to cash in on the mid-2000s anime craze. Avatar used a lot of the tropes and visual motifs common to contemporary anime, but no one would ever literally mistake it for one. Jason Demarco, the producer of Blade Runner: Black Lotus and the upcoming Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim, says that Avatar was "Nick's attempt at a home grown Naruto". At the time, the dubbed version of Naruto was one of Cartoon Network's highest-rated shows, even outdoing its in-house programming, and Nickelodeon had no equivalent.

There are many genres that are common in anime, but that are rarely, if ever, represented in Western animation. Mecha series, Dragon Ball/Naruto-style "battle shounen" series, and "magical girl" series are three of the most obvious ones, if only due to the fact that these three genres seem to be inherently linked to anime in the Western mind. The few Western examples of them that exist are, for the most part, directly inspired by anime, which is where the Taco Bell Effect comes in-- fans of actual Japanese anime aren't drawn to them.

What would it take to create a show in a genre normally associated with anime, but not directly influenced by it-- in other words, a genuinely Western work in said genre? What would such a show look like?
Life can seem a challenge. Life can seem impossible. It's never easy when so much is on the line.


Do you like Eva? Do you like Pokemon? Then check out Neon Genesis Evangelemon-- You Can (Not) Catch 'Em All thread/16052/Neon-Genesis-Evangelemon/


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