Originally Posted by
SuperMillionaire
When I said underground, I meant "not popular in mainstream American pop culture." You don't see much talk about video games and animes in entertainment guides alongside American or British-made movies, music, TV shows, etc. If you read Entertainment Magazine orr watch any entertainment showcase shows such as TV Guide, Access Hollywood, Extra, Showbiz Tonight, etc, you won't see ANYTHING related to video games. For some strange reason, video games and not frequently mentioned in Hollywood here in the United States, while all the Hollywood stuff we make here is frequently mentioned in Japan; the entertainment popularity exchange ratio is not equal! If everything we have here is wildly popular in Japanese pop culture, why not the other way around as well?!
You're either still living in that crazy bizarro world or you're just ignorant to everything going on around you. Hollywood doesn't talk about anime or video games? Have you completely missed the growing trend of adapting anime and video games into Blockbuster movies? What about Dragon Ball: Evolution? How about Astroboy? Video game adaptations have been going on even longer: Resident Evil? Tomb Raider? Hell, go back to Super Mario in the early 90s.
Anime isn't underground anymore, and it hasn't been since the mid-90s. On top of that, video games are about as close to the new shared culture that our generation is ever going to get. Video game movies, even
ty ones, and anime movies (especially
ty ones) make huge blockbuster hits. If that's not indicative of their popularity, I don't know what is.
Also, of course the popularity exchange isn't equal. America arguably exerts a greater pop culture influence over any other country in the world. I don't know
why you would ever expect it to be absolutely equal, but it's not quite as dismal as you seem to think. That said, Japanese media hasn't become mainstream in other nations until
maybe two decades ago if you want to be generous. Disney has been exerting an effect world wide for much, much longer. It's an issue of catch-up, and Japan, as far as I can tell, has done a very good job of pushing it's culture worldwide in the past two decades.
I think your problem is that you're actually using things like Entertainment Magazine, Access Hollywood, etc. as indicative of what's currently "in" in American pop culture. They don't have a freaking clue what's going on.