Media Research Failure/Anime and Manga



When journalists fail to do the research on the anime and manga they're reviewing, Cowboy Bebop at His Computer (Media Research Failure) is the result.

""[Ranma] fell into a well where a great female warrior had drowned. Now, when he gets wet, he gets wild! Bad guys learn not to spit when Ranma's around.""
 * The former Trope Namer is from Cowboy Bebop and a rather incorrect newspaper picture caption (see the page pic). The character pictured is not named "Cowboy Bebop" and is actually female. She goes by "Ed" for most of the show. "Bebop" in the anime's title refers to the main characters' ship, the Bebop, as well as the music style featured in the soundtrack. "Cowboy," the slang term for "bounty hunter" used in the world of the series, refers to the main characters' profession.
 * In a mix of this and Covers Always Lie, the text at the back of the VHS covers of the Finnish release of Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin is infamous for making little to no sense. The back of the first VHS, for example, claims that the show takes place in Alaska and the people raise bearhounds to protect themselves from ferocious grizzly bears.
 * One gossip magazine during the 2003 Finnish accusations of pedophilic content in the recently arrived Dragon Ball manga (the usual story and accuracy). It opened by calling the comic Dragon Balls and went from there.
 * The most hilarious research failure was how the Moral Guardians commented how the neighbouring country of Sweden is free of such vile products... when their most sold comic that year was none other than Dragon Ball.
 * Speaking of Dragon Ball and pedophilia, there's the case of Lloyd de Mause and "psychohistory". In his attempt to prove that all human history has been cases of child abuse, he used the phallic humor in Dragon Ball ("That poor dragon...", Goku's tendency to "check" to make sure people are male or female, etc.) and the underage male nudity to somehow prove that all Japanese mothers masturbate their sons. Okay, that's all fine, but because of Goku's Noble Savage origins, he referred to Goku as Tarzan throughout!
 * TV Guide years ago that reported on the popularity of the anime at the time. While not negative in tone, the writer openly admits his bafflement, titling the article "Fusion Confusion" and claiming "It's harder to understand than computer schematics." He also credits Goku with protecting us from "the ferocious Saiyan", a statement that's not too wrong, per se. He then adds that he only understands as much from reading some fan sites. He lists Goku's sons as "Gohan and Gotan", and closes by saying that he watches the show for its "fantastic" animation. Well, there's far worse media coverage examples in this list, but this one is amusing as well as heartwarming in a "He's trying his best" sort of way. It also demonstrates the principle of the Generational Gap, where "grown-ups" just can't get "kid's stuff", something we see time and again in this list.
 * A French article about manga had a picture of Krillin/Kuririn from Dragon Ball Z with a legend along the lines of "When little Trunks goes mad, there's going to be hell to pay!".
 * An article from a Scandinavian country advertised Code Geass as a comedy series about a delightful youth named Rerouch who became the King of Britannia through use of his mystical Geass, which allowed him to gain control over any individual whose name he had written down in a black note book. Unfortunately Rerouch is countered by a revolutionary named Jeremiah Suzaku who fights against Rerouch by using a mecha named EVA. At some point, you have to wonder if they actually deliberately made this crap up because no sane human being could possibly get this much wrong if they had seen even 30 seconds of the show.
 * To make matters worse, it spelled the series' name as "Code Geese: Rerouch of the Reberrion". The "rebellion" part isn't even Gratuitous English in the Japanese original (the title uses the actual Japanese word for "rebellion"), leaving the misspelling just plain baffling.
 * They even have the phonetic spelling of Geass wrong.
 * A newspaper article on Yu-Gi-Oh! confusingly stated that Joey had made the common mistake of using powerful cards. This was the only information on the character. In actuality, the problem was that Joey used powerful monsters and nothing to support them.
 * A review for The Movie said it was 11 years old. The 11-year-old movie never got to America, and this one (Pyramid of Light) is completely different.
 * The website of the German network that aired Yu-Gi-Oh provided us with hilariously ill-researched character descriptions. To provide a few examples: Yami was banned because he tried to seize the throne of the pharaoh with his shadow powers, Shizuka is blind, Anzu (Ms. Fanservice in the early manga) is eleven years old and has been the boss of a cheerleader-group for years, and Seto became the CEO of KaibaCorp by beating Gozaburo at another game of chess, not to mention that he's two years older than everybody else. Suprisingly subverted with Bakura, whose sister Amane they mention.
 * Said German network, RTL 2, never really seemed to cared too much about their animes anyway. When Attack No. 1 (Mila Superstar in Germany) aired, the summary on their webpage was actually for Attacker You (Mila e Shiro in Italy! The show never even made it to Germany) and the summary for Captain Tsubasa used the names from the Italian translation. Really makes you wonder what the heck was going on there.
 * An Italian TV guide summarized Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's as "the story of a boy and his five dragons".
 * An interesting example here. If the link is broken (or you don't speak Swedish at all), it talks about Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, in which Yugi's grandfather is kidnapped by Pegasus...Which was the plot of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters, not of GX.
 * In March of 2008, a ten-year-old boy died from being buried alive in his sandbox. The news claimed this happened by him and his friends imitating "Nurutu", which the news described as a television show where samurai use sand as a tool and to kill each other. It's also been called "Nurutu Sand Ninjas". This story in particular has several major mistakes.
 * 1) Mispronouncing it as "Nerutu", despite featuring clips with the correct pronunciation "Nah-Ru-Toe"
 * 2) Despite avoiding calling it "Sand Ninjas", the reporter says that it is about Sand Ninjas.
 * 3) Suggesting Gaara buries himself in sand, when showing him doing his Armor of Sand Jutsu. The only legitimate "sand burial" techniques are used against enemies.
 * 4) Relying on YouTube clips to inform themselves about the show.
 * An infamous article by The Edmonton Journal from Canada features gems such as "Hentae" and that all Hentai is essentially lolicon-BDSM-rape.
 * TV Guide once described Tenchi Muyo! in Love as "Police partners hunt an escaped convict," which is technically accurate, but didn't even bother mentioning that they're Space Police, or that there's time travel, alien princes, or any other elements that are fundamental to the plot.
 * TV program guides seem to suffer from this a lot. While describing Rurouni Kenshin (which was being aired on Animax), they said Kaoru was a guy, indirectly calling Kenshin gay, and mixing her up with the other Kaoru whose show was airing on the same channel.
 * A September 11th, 2008 MSNBC report on "sexy anime going mainstream". It said "Lolicom" is a combination of "Lolita" and "comic". And that "Otaku" is a word meaning "Techno-geek".
 * Not to mention that one of the girls' "maid costumes" in the supplied photograph is actually a cosplay of Cure Black, who has never been a maid.
 * The other one is Escalayer of Beat Angel Escalayer who is also not a maid.
 * At least they covered the 2D/3D deal pretty well.
 * A reviewer of the Digimon Adventure movie apparently never actually saw it, as she claimed that "the original Digidestined children are abducted by Diaboromon, and a new group of kids must save them". The same malicious lie was perpetrated by the back of the VHS and Fox Kids' official site. Diaboromon never abducted anyone. He just stalked a twelve-year old boy and then tried to blow up the world. Then, when the new kids get involved, it isn't even to deal with Diaboromon. It's to deal with Antylamon/Kerpymon.
 * Not to mention the fact that Antylamon/Kerpymon only abducted anyone in the Japanese version, and that particular plot was completely cut out of the American version. Which may make this a case of someone doing too much research?
 * Even magazines dedicated to Anime itself wind up making these mistakes:
 * Protoculture Addicts is particularly guilty of this. When reporting on Gundam Wing, PA decided to completely ignore most "r" and "l" translation conventions and generally go with "it's always l," giving us characters like "Heelo Yuy" and "Lelena Peacelaft."
 * The early issues of Anime Insider. Particularly horrible errors include listing the character of Lacus Clyne from Gundam Seed as "Fllay Allster" (another character from the same show, who doesn't even share the same hair color). Their entire article on G Gundam reached levels of CBAHC that must be seen to be believed -- things such as listing Schwartz Bruder as Domon's Master and the previous King of Hearts (Master Asia is both) and giving the Master Gundam the profile of the Dark/Devil Gundam.
 * One of the first AI issues captioned a picture of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke by identifying him as "Mononoke".
 * Anime Insider's sister magazine Wizard once ran a review of The Slayers saying Lina Inverse traveled with the sorceress Naga and "a girl named Gourry".
 * There was an AI issue with an article about the (development hell-induced) live action Evangelion adaptation that said Shinji was a girl.
 * One issue had an article about Trinity Blood with a picture that incorrectly identified Count Gyula as Cain.
 * An article on the Oregon Daily Emerald criticizing anime for destroying American society says that Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! (which at first is spelled "Yugio", but after that, "sorry, Yu-Gi-Oh!") all began life as trading card games. In reality, while they all have had card games, none of them started out as that. Pokémon began life as a pair of Game Boy games created by Game Freak (and the card game came to the U.S. just a few months after the video game was released there), Digimon was originally a virtual pet (hence "Digimon", or Digital Monsters), and Yu-Gi-Oh! started out as a manga written by Kazuki Takahashi.
 * And funnily enough, Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn't actually about a card game - it was about gaming in general.
 * While reviewing a Ranma ½ fighting game for the TurboGrafx-16, GamePro Magazine must have thought Ranma to be some sort of transforming superhero, having summarized the title character's background thus:


 * An issue of Game Players Magazine did something similar when previewing the Ranma SNES game. They said the series was about "a family of fighters where the kids are trained by their parents. The kids become masters and beat up would-be bullies."
 * During a Trainer's Choice quiz during the Hoenn season of the Pokémon anime, they asked which Pokémon evolved into Seviper. The answer was Arbok. Arbok doesn't evolve at all, and Seviper doesn't evolve from anything, so breeding Seviper doesn't get an Ekans (which evolves into Arbok). While this was quickly picked up as ammo against 4Kids (who, as in the movie example above, either didn't notice or didn't change the mistake) it later turned out that they got quiz questions and answers from Pokémon USA -- the company in charge of the franchise in the United States. Apparently, the employee they stuck with that role hadn't paid enough attention to the episodes in early Hoenn where Jessie releases her Arbok and then catches a Seviper.
 * "Pikachu, a character from the popular children's television show "Pokeman" (...)"
 * The anime's dubbers themselves totally misnamed the Pokémon that appear in the 'Who's that Pokémon?' section of the first movie. Granted, it was the Team Rocket trio naming the Pokémon, but those mistakes weren't present in the original Japanese version and the dubbers just made the Rockets look like idiots as an excuse to leave the errors in. Doesn't excuse the "Sandshrew" and "Pidgeotto" bits elsewhere, either.
 * According to TV Guide and the Comcast information guides, the plot of Pokémon: The First Movie has Ash and friends battling Mewtwo and the scientist that created him -- despite the fact that Mewtwo killed said scientist within the first few minutes of the film.
 * Also, some information guides describe Lucario and the Mystery of Mew with, "The Pokémon must rescue Pikachu from the clutches of evil Mew."
 * Italian DVD listings for Zoroark Master Of Illusions states that Zoroark is "a terrible 3rd Generation Pokémon who came back on Earth searching his beloved son Zorua, lost into an astral accident". Well... first thing, Zoroark is a 5th Generation Pokémon. Second, she doesn't come from space. Third, the Zoroark in the film is a mom. Are you confusing Zoroark with Deoxys, maybe?
 * In the months leading up to the release of Red and Blue, an issue of Disney Adventures gave an extremely vague description of a "fuzzy yellow creature named Pokémon."
 * Disney Adventures also made the mistake of labeling Tracey as Brock in a blurb for the second movie.
 * The same magazine has also labeled a picture of Anubis (from the first Yu-Gi-Oh! movie) as "Seto Kaiba". (They apologized for the mistake in a later issue.)
 * Also in regards to the second movie: A Pokémon-centric magazine ran an article summarizing the second movie, and even though they clearly knew Brock wasn't going to be in it (at least not the main plot), they somehow did not mention Tracey alongside Ash and Misty throughout the entire article. To be fair, though, the only thing Tracey did that had an impact was when he stopped Ash at one point.
 * An early VHS promo for the show listed Sabrina as one of Ash's companions.
 * In the Magazyn Plus's (the magazine for Cyfra+'s subscribers) Polish information guide of Diamond and Pearl season, they described Ash as a Pokemon, fortunately this was the only that they screwed.
 * A caption on this names the green-haired girl in the picture (from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) "Rena", who is actually a different girl with orange hair; the girl in the picture is Mion. Also, she doesn't have a split personality; you could say that it's slightly implied at first, but those implications were dashed against the rocks in the arc before the DVD being advertised.
 * While in that arc she probably doesn't have a legitimate split personality, she acts in accordance with a different personality (the "demon"), so the label can still apply in a colloquial sense.
 * Back when Sailor Moon was still airing in Russia, a local newspaper containing TV program guides would occasionally write something about it in the kids' section. This sometimes resulted in the Sailor Moon-themed mini-articles mixing up the timeline (i.e., calling the Crystal Tokyo the capital of the destroyed Moon Kingdom) and/or mixing up the continuity (calling Anime!ChibiChibi Sailor Cosmos). One would think they could've at least visited one of the local fan websites or ask somebody familiar with the show.
 * DVD Talk's reviews of DiC Sailor Moon DVDs constantly call Tuxedo Mask, "Tuxedo Max," despite his name appearing on the front cover of one of the volumes discussed ("The Man in the Tuxedo Mask").
 * Naruto Forever: The Unofficial Guide repeatedly refers to Hinata Hyuga as "Hina" (possibly the result of her abbreviation in pairings like Portmanteau Couple Names like "NaruHina"), only getting it correct in the character index, and even refer to "Hina" as him.
 * An article in a Swedish newspaper about a comics/art workshop or somesuch being hosted at a local library featured a most amusing comment about how "Jolina Homlström, [class] 8E has chosen to draw the motives the way the Japanese Asian comic artist Manga does them."
 * The Yahoo TV summary of Fullmetal Alchemist seems to have swapped around its anime: "While playing a game, brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric get transported to another dimension where Alphonse is trapped in a robotic body and Edward has become the Fullmetal Alchemist."
 * An Anime News Network review of Overman King Gainer criticizes the opening for being silly in a series that has a "High serious nature". King Gainer is a comedy which just happens to have been made by Yoshiyuki Tomino, who is best known for his serious anime like the Gundam franchise.
 * A Hungarian TV spot for D.Gray-man began summarizing the story along the lines of "Under the spreading darkness of the evil god Akuma..." According to the channel's forum, the producer doesn't speak Japanese but still had the promo made before a single episode was translated. The error was later fixed, though.
 * A 2006 New York Times article seems to think Samurai Champloo is about a ninja in training.
 * Interestingly, the article itself avoids this entirely; the caption in question, however...
 * When Spanish network La Sexta gave the news on the failure of the lolicon pornography ban, they somehow decided that "loli" meant "schoolgirl", so they talked about the "ban on schoolgirls"... which wouldn't have been THAT bad if all the clips they used were of Hentai movies with busty schoolgirls (Except one, which did have a little girl in Hadaka Apron).
 * And before that, La Sexta used to show hentai movies, but had to stop because (ironically) some movies had little girl and people complained. When they gave the news on that, they started claiming "manga" meant "erotic animation" and it went downhill from there.
 * There was an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about how the rising popularity of anime was due in part to its depictions of strong female characters. The article featured a picture of Inuyasha. Uh...
 * Back in 2005, a mother looked through a volume of the Peach Girl manga, which happened to have a date rape scene. Cue an article claiming that Peach Girl is about girls being drugged and gang-raped and that Tokyopop only publishes porn comics marketed toward children.
 * And the other Tokyopop series about "swingers" referenced in that article is obviously Marmalade Boy.
 * A store in Amazon.com sells JoJo's Bizarre Adventure gashapon (small collectible figurines) of some stands from Part 3 (Hierophant Green, Silver Chariot and The World to be specific). But what makes them an example of this trope? Their names. Respectively are now Green character, Silver Villain and Johnny Joestar.
 * There are character figurines from shows like Sailor Moon, Tokyo Mew Mew, and Ojamajo Doremi being sold as "Pink one, Blue one, Yellow one, Green one, Orange one, Purple one, etc." with "one" sometimes replaced by "character", "girl" , etc. VERY rarely they may say "Sailor", "Mew Mew" or "Ojamajo," but one wonders why, if they knew that much, why they wouldn't just use the character's names.
 * When Sonic X premiered on CITV in the UK, the presenters repeatedly referred to the main character as, you guessed it, "Sonic X". This was carried on by Fox Kids/Jetix, who also referred to the bad guy as "Dr. Egg" in one promo.
 * Same goes for a Singaporean magazine called Kids Company, which is kinda sad, seeing as they probably had prior footage and ample time to do research. They started showing the show on Singaporean airwaves a year late.
 * A relatively minor one, a video by TIME Magazine interviewing female fans at Comicon mentioned an anime/ manga called Access Powers Hitalia. The misspelling is made more confusing because they showed official images, such as the cover of the English release of the DVD, with the title spelled out right on them.
 * And then there was the The New York Times' coverage of Comic-Con, where an England cosplayer was referred to as "the character Hetalia in 'Axis Powers,' a popular video game."
 * The article now features a correction, getting most of its facts right but saying that Hetalia is not a character. Whoops.
 * A book that listed the main protagonists and antagonists of well-known manga claimed that the main-character of xxxHolic was Yuka Ichihara, a fifteen year-old part-timer at the magic shop who despite her age drank a lot of alcohol. Although they got her being a Hard-Drinking Party Girl right, Yuko, is in fact the fully mature owner of the shop.
 * A recent midwest US article claimed that the local library would show "two or three episodes of an anime series, such as Full Metal Panic!, CLAMP or Death Note." Clamp has made a manga called CLAMP School Detectives which can conceivably be shortened to just Clamp...
 * According to the Verizon television listings, one of the shows on the current FUNimation Channel lineup is "Dr. Gray Man."
 * An in-media example for Gundam Sousei: a newspaper announcing the release of the Gundam movie features a picture of Sayla, while captioning it as "the hero, Amuron".
 * The American Family Association wrote an article on the dangers of video games and this somehow segued into h-games. This would've been fine and all....except the article misspelled it as 'hentia'. Again, wouldn't have been a problem except the article KEPT ON spelling it in that manner. Did Not Do the Research, indeed.
 * One 4Kids promo has Sonic the Hedgehog giving a synopsis of Dragon Ball Z Kai...and apparently Piccolo's a Saiyan.
 * Bleeding Cool, a comic book news website, has an article called "Swap File", where they show different background items being used in two separate comics. A recent one showed that a Clow Reed circle was used in one of the Brightest Day spin-off covers. Not so bad. The bad part is when they show clips and pictures from Cardcaptor Sakura and kept saying it was from Tsubasa. Readers were quick to correct them on their mistake.
 * There have been some articles on anime sites that refer to Chiba from Wandering Son as "Saorin Chiba". "Saorin" is a nickname, as putting -rin to the back of a name is common for girls in Japan; her name's just "Saori".
 * The Amazon editorial review for the One Piece movie that remade the Alabasta arc calls the film "recut footage from the "Alabasta" story arc of the TV series with some bits of additional animation." Movie 8 was a complete remake from scratch (the higher quality wide screen animation featuring slightly alternate character designs and should have given it away), but this reviewer seems to mistake it for a Compilation Movie.
 * On February 18th 2012 The Sunderland Echo, a British local paper, had an article about the city's upcoming Anime Convention, Sunnycon and how Chris Sabat and Veronica Taylor were guests. It was accompanied by this image ...yeah no, that's not Vegeta. Then at said convention, said guests were asked if they'd be happy to swap lines.
 * The Secret World of Arrietty was slammed on Fox News for being made to be pro Occupy Wallstreet ... wait, what? Considering the book it was based on was written in the 1960s and the film itself is now 2 years old the complaint was rather ... awkward.
 * Whoever was in charge of translating the summary for the Rave Master manga on the back of the books didn't bother to actually read the series, or even skim through. Otherwise he may have known the main villain's gender.
 * Crunchyroll shows School Days's summary as follows: "Will Makoto win his love by taking a picture of Kotonoha without anyone knowing?" However, Sekai finds out Makoto's crush on the first day of school! (i.e. the first episode)