Aaargh… Must… Not… Open… Spoilers…
I really don’t know what to make of the Japanese media Whedon link that’s been drawn here. It just seems so wildly off base. The large majority of anime and manga is just so hugely different in both structure and tone that any connection seems tenuous and fleeting at best. If someone wants to actually make a substantive case on that point I’d be interested to hear it, but I don’t buy it at all at face value.
I would agree that Firefly owes quite a bit to Cowboy Bebop, but the latter is such an outlier when it comes to anime that it’s not really useful for establishing a more general trend.
The glib tone is in some small way reminiscent of anime for teenage audiences, especially the big ones such as Naruto, which can have the same sort of emotional flipping where it makes some really dumb jokes followed by ~serious plot~. It’s also more serialized than many of the shows airing at the time, and anime is known for largely being heavily serialized. But that’s partially just Whedon going against the zeitgeist, it’s not like popular serialized shows were never on TV before.
The only other big one is the “surrogate family” angle. That in particular is huge in shounen anime. Often referred to “nakama plots”, they run through a ton of anime where the main character comes to have a deep, loving relationship with their friends, to the level of essentially being family. That’s probably the closest Buffy gets to looking like an anime, but it’s a spurious relationship at best. Anime wasn’t even all that popular in 1997. Hell, two of the biggest “nakama”-focused shounen stories – Naruto and Bleach – came out as manga in 1997 in Japan. It’s highly unlikely Whedon was even aware of those anime tropes, since those types of plots were, to my recollection, not as omnipresent as they were after those two shows became popular.
Comparing Buffy/Angel to anime is a huge stretch, almost all similarities are barely there or coincidences. If there’s any medium they owe anything to, it’s daytime soap operas. That’s not even a secret, Whedon openly and explicitly took a lot of beats from soap operas when making the show. Maybe also a dash of Twin Peaks, but Twin Peaks left so much of a mark on television that’s hardly a surprise.
Tokusatsu superhero shows are live action TV, featuring heroes beating up monsters of the week while dealing with their personal issue of the week. Generally, they have an alter alias, so that they can live normal at school, work, or wherever, while saving the world in their free time.
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is an example that targets a slightly younger audience; Kamen Rider Ryuki would be one that targets a slightly older audience than Buffy.
I’m sure there’s some anime equivalents, but I believe that live action is where nearly all of it is. If you haven’t seen any, then you wouldn’t know it’s a Japanese thing since, as said, it’s not a genre that’s generally featured in anime (I don’t know of any).
Oh, I didn’t see that the original conversation was about Tokusatsu shows. I think that’s more on base than anime, but I still think the connections are incidental. The similarities come by more because both are to some degree a marriage of the super hero and soap opera format to one degree or another, though less intentionally in the Tokusatsu case.
I admit I am not terribly familiar with the live action Japanese superhero genre, but I have seen bits and pieces and I’ve seen it parodied a lot in other Japanese media. I have some memories of Power Rangers and the like on TV when I was a child.
I can see where you’re coming from, but it’s quite a stretch. Those shows, from what I’ve seen, are very formulaic and targeted at a significantly younger audience. They’re a lot closer to Saturday morning cartoon fare. They deal with the kinds of problems that younger children would identify with and the threats they face have largely impersonal stakes. Even just looking at the excessive and elaborate poses you can tell that it’s mostly just action set pieces for the characters to look cool beating people up. School and monsters seem to be pretty superficial similarities to me.
Could you please elaborate on where you see the structural similarities? It seemed to me that Buffy shares much, much more DNA with X-Files, Western comics, and soap operas.
On the subject of glibness, I would actually say that anime very rarely has that tone. Japanese in general is extremely light on sarcasm. It’s often wacky and the younger characters may frustrate their elders by acting silly, but the kind of snarky, sarcastic dialogue that many of us would describe as “Whedon-esque” would not resonate at all with a typical Japanese audience.
Now we’re talking about type of humor rather than show structure, though. I’d argue that Naruto fucking up a jutsu in the middle of a big battle is extremely similar, in a fuzzy sense, to Buffy’s sardonic quips during apocalypse #714. The type of humor is different, but the deliberate tonal dissonance is very similar.
It’s an interesting comparison, but I think it’s a bit more different than just the tone of humor. When I watch Buffy, I get the strong feeling that the characters are using humor as a coping mechanism to deal with their often horrifying experiences. Yes, sardonic quips can be tonally different than the brutal bloodshed, but it’s the only way they can keep themselves from being dragged into the darkness. It’s a big part of why, in my personal opinion, the show’s melodrama lands so much more successfully than soap opera fare.
When a fight scene in Naruto gets disrupted by wackiness, it feels more like a humorous interlude rather than an integral element of the scene. I’ve never been a huge fan of Japanese style “sudden shock followed by exaggerated reaction shot” humor, though, so I may be unfairly biased here, though. Interesting comparison, though. I haven’t thought about Naruto in quite awhile.
I am also streaming Buffy for the time round and am just up to Spike coming on board.
To me it does not feel so old hat and I was actually impressed by how cutting edge some of the throw-away jokes were for their time … such as when Giles is stammering over asking Jenny Calender out … “Ms. Calender … I … I …” “Please Giles, it’s Jenny. Ms. Calender is my father.” (Not exact quotes I am sure but that was the gist.)
It’s been good enough to stick with slowly getting through (not binge worthy yet) and I look forward to it picking up quality as promised!
Also? It ends with Season 5. Seriously. Just stop at the end of season 5, wait a month or so and then watch the season 6 musical episode.
Don’t mind Fenris - he just doesn’t like yellow crayons and Camelot.
Buffy is my favourite show, and I absolutely despise that episode. Might not be the worst episode of the series, but it’s close.
As a concept and one-off, it was very interesting. As a piece of a series, it sucked donkey balls.
Yeah, that one is polarizing. I know many series fans that were annoyed or even offended by it. Me, I liked the idea and thought it would have been a dandy final episode and to have had the whole thing end with the idea that was presented in it ( to keep things vague and non-spoilery ).
But I agree it isn’t a great bellweather episode for the series. Hush might be a good choice for that, as it is an episode where everything is hitting on all cylinders and just about all fans like that one.
Season 7 had its moments.
I loved Season 7. Season 6 was bad, but for me it’s hard to pinpoint why it’s bad. It’s this weird thing where it’s less than the sum of it’s parts because it has a lot of very, very good pieces (even some of the best moments and episodes of the entire show), but they fail to come together and it’s just a slog. But that’s a discussion for when the OP gets there.
I agree it’s a very interesting concept that didn’t really work in the show. Might have worked with Angel, due to the different tone of that show, but it seemed very out of place in Buffy.
And I’d have probably hated it even more as series finale.
I used to say season 6 was the worst season, but I now give that title to season 7. Seven is never as bad as six, but it’s also never as great. Seven’s consistently average. Six fluctuates between brilliance and sheer awfulness.
I think you’re giving Season 6 way too much credit. Aside from a few episodes…
The Musical, Tabula Rasa
…actually, that’s pretty much it. I suppose a case could be made to watch the first eight episodes of Season 6 and then skip right into Season 7. You’d get the gist of the story without all the unpleasantness that came after.
That won’t work at all. Without all the unpleasantness, as you so rightly put it, all of Spike’s reensoulment and torment makes no sense whatsoever. Ditto the monster that gets to Willow at the start of the season, not to mention her reluctance to use magic Season 7. On top of all that, it would rob you of one of the highlight scenes of the entire series, when Giles returns: “No-one can stop me now.” “I’d like to test that theory.”
Or as we in the comic world call them, early-1960s Stan Lee Marvel comics.
Seriously, the argument of ‘who did it first’ is semi-pointless. It’s easy to trace plots/arcs/etc back hundreds - if not thousands - of years. They’re all part of storytelling and narrative traditions that might well date back to our caveman forebears sitting around the campfire shooting the breeze.