I must confess I never got through Akira. It bored me so much I walked out of the last 30 minutes. Ghost in the Shell was okay, but the Stand Alone Complex series was better than the original (season 1 vastly better than season 2 if we need to be even more particular).
I’m sure most people who claim to like anime would be able to cite Akira (though whether they watched it is another matter). A safer “legendary” pick would be Neon Genesis Evangelion (you can argue it’s still timely since they can’t seem to stop re-working the thing over and over and over and over… it’s like George Lucas is overseeing it!). Or anything by Miyazaki.
I’m not a big anime fan. I’m naming things I know (and thus arbitrarily considering them “mainstream” and widely known). So if I’m sputtering out ideas then I’d also suggest Full Metal Alchemist.
Not sure what CS means, but today’s anime fans, and I mean the ones still currently into anime and watching the latest ones, have little interest in anything made before the animation went digital. The people still enjoying Akira today, for the most part, are either older anime fans, fans of film and/or animation in general, or people just up for anything. That is, they’d be the people you’d expect to be going out of their way to watch movies from the 1980s.
You can check the trends on sites like MyAnimeList or some pirate sites I’d rather not name as I don’t want to encourage traffic there, but these sites track viewer counts. Of the top 100 anime, most of them are anime either made in the past 10 years or had been on the air within the past 10 years. The few that manage to remain relevant after that long (like Death Note, Darker Than Black, or Neon Genesis Evangelion) are rare, but are also the ones most likely to have a number of wealthy fans. (NGE in particular–there were some cars that sold for literally US$1 million each, and they were sold out in a matter of hours.)
Heh, I can tell you’re not a big anime fan because you didn’t realize “Fullmetal” is one word in the title. (I kid. But fans of that series will get real mad if you don’t correct it in a hurry.)
Currently, the rights to Evangelion are in chaos, as Gainax (the studio that made it) has recently filed for bankruptcy. In the process, Gainax sold off the rights to its shows to various companies. The thing is, under Japanese law, creators always get the final say, and they’ve since scattered to different companies (or have passed away, which is another major obstacle to getting the licenses to Japanese franchises, especially old ones). If I recall correctly, Hideaki Anno, the producer and creator, currently works at Studio Khara, and most of the others still alive work at Studio Trigger. Khara and Trigger are on good terms, but the fact remains that with Gainax no longer in a position to make deals, these people have to be hunted down one by one (though Khara owns the rights overall, so I think you only have to go to two studios). I get the strong feeling that Anno will veto any pinball machine made of Evangelion though, considering there have been very few video games based on Evangelion relative to its popularity. (By contrast, My Hero Academia, in two years, has already had at least four games either set in its universe or containing characters from it. Black Clover just got a video game and it just debuted a few months ago.)
(For the record, there is an imitator on the airwaves right now: DARLING in the FRANXX, though it’s really more like Evangelion if it was produced by horny teenagers.)
Most people who claim to like anime would at least be passingly familiar with Akira, though only a minority would be interested enough to watch it. As I explained above, there is a sort of old vs. new rivalry, as was explained and mocked in Vice & Luna’s “Invasion of the Old-Timers, Part I” (currently ongoing).
Cool Shimmer, obviously you’re very into that world! Some of the newer stuff you’ve named I’ve heard of but don’t know anything about. Probably folks that are within 10-15 years of my age, 35, would have heard of ghost in the shell and Akira, even if they had no other anime touchstones.
Mmmm, even if we pretend it was an original theme, though, a pinball machine about a teenager with a cool bike and a friend that turns into a giant monster would be cool. Especially in light of TNA, which is original but doesn’t strike me as being particularly high concept.
Well, Ghost in the Shell is popular and mainstream enough to have had that live-action movie starling Scarlett Johannson last summer.
By the way, if you or anyone else wants to know, as of the time I’m typing this, these are the top 24 shows streamed on Crunchyroll, which is by far the most popular legal source to stream anime. (There is one exception though: RWBY is not an anime, but is an American-Canadian co-production. It is very popular in Japan though, and would also make for a good pinball machine albeit you’d have to market it strictly to on-location operators.)
Dragon Ball Super
Boruto: Naruto Next Generation (this is a spinoff of Naruto)
One Piece
Black Clover
Overlord
Naruto Shippuden
The Ancient Magus’ Bride
Hitori no ____a - The Outcast (I think this place has a swear filter…)
To be fair, NONE of the series on that list really shares much overlap in demographic with AC/DC (with the possible exception of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which has a lot of references to the band with characters and powers named after them directly as well as their songs and albums…though there are plenty of viewers not familiar with AC/DC and thinks the series invented phrases like “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”).
EXCLUSIVE EXPO 2018 Cancelled, Replaced by Pinball Palooza? Interview with Rob Berk.
The Chicago Pinball Expo has been run by Rob Berk and Mike Pacak for 33 years. They have now split. Rob will be starting a new show called Pinball Palooza. It is not known what will become of Pinball Expo.
To clarify the headline, “EXPO 2018 Cancelled, Replaced by Pinball Palooza?” is supposed to read as one big question.
From some Facebook posts made by Mike this morning, it sounds like he is planning to still hold Expo October 17-21. So two pinball shows in Chicago in the fall.