Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Anime and Manga

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Seinfeld Is Unfunny in Anime and Manga include:

  • Cutey Honey will make you cringe, until you realize it created the template for anime fanservice, for the Warrior Magical Girl achetype and possibly featured the first Action Girl main character. If you don't remember it's from the early '70s, you'll think its just another typical high-schooler gone superhero story.
  • Doki Doki School Hours got hit by this hard. The manga is one of the early examples of the "Wacky Homeroom" format, up to and including a childish teacher, and likely formed the inspiration for other manga like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star. Alas, the anime got released after those other series, which made a lot of viewers cringe at the "tired and old" jokes.
  • Dragon Ball for that matter. It seems horribly cliché now (even more so than Fist of the North Star, if only because it was copied more, or at least more directly) but it was refreshing at the time. One of the big ones is the Idiot Hero, which has been done to death in Shonen, but Goku was more or less the first (and besides that Goku is more naive than stupid. That's the Theme Park Version for you).
  • Fist of the North Star seems like horribly cliché shonen, but keep in mind it more or less helped create many of the shonen tropes that exist today.
  • Ghost in the Shell. The English dub of the original most likely comes off as Narmy to most modern-day viewers, but in the 90s it was considered a major step forward for anime dubbing, featuring a reasonably faithful translation of the source material, correct pronunciations of Japanese names, and semi-believable voice acting.
    • Since the standards for anime dub voice acting have improved so much in recent years, many dubs that were considered huge steps forward in quality for their time have become increasingly unpopular among modern viewers. Examples include Ranma ½ and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • Hayao Miyazaki. Many of his movies have been copied so extensively by both anime and manga that people complain about them being "cliché". No, Laputa isn't just "another ancient civilization on a floating island", it is THE ancient civilization on a floating island. Ironically enough, even though it was this movie that really started Japan's fascination of highly advanced, extinct ancient civilizations, both the name and the concept of the floating island of Laputa comes from Gulliver's Travels, written more than two centuries earlier.
  • Key the Metal Idol. When it was released, it was described as the strangest anime ever made. Too bad that its better known Spiritual Successor Serial Experiments Lain was even stranger...
  • Love Hina. Yes, if you just started reading or watching it today, it just seems like another cliché harem anime. This mainly comes from the fact that the show redefined nearly every rule of modern anime romance/harem comedy, and has been copied relentlessly since.
  • Magical Girls. If you're not an old-school, die-hard fan, you'll probably think that everything in the genre is a ripoff of Sailor Moon. Please do not mention this to said magical girl fans.
    • Sailor Moon itself gets this as well, as it created a sub-genre, and in many countries also contributed to make Anime popular in the first place. When compared to some more modern shows, it can look overly cheesy, Filler-ridden, and low-budget.
  • Mariasama ga Miteru is gradually getting there; the series has been copied and especially parodied mercilessly, to the point where viewers suspect it to be a parody itself. Admittedly, the romantic entanglements between the girls of the depicted all-girl school do get rather fluffy and melodramatic at times, but it mostly kept in check by the tight storytelling and outstanding voice-acting in the anime.
  • Mazinger Z, the Trope Codifier for Super Robot shows, never got that much love outside of Japan, due to the fact that it was usually picked up sometime after successive shows, such as Voltron and even Grendizer got popular, leading to Mazinger often being called a ripoff of it's own derivatives.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion, quite possibly, won't be considered that much of a Deconstruction by a modern viewer, as opposed to those who watched it when it first aired. Especially if you compare it to various series which have be called the "Anti-Evangelion". Examples? Look no further than this wiki.
  • Osamu Tezuka falls victim to this in the American market. His characters look much closer to Disney and Fleischer cartoons than modern anime and manga, making his art look quaint to modern manga readers. Additionally, it's hard to spot the sheer innovation in his page layouts and stylized pacing when they've more or less become the norm after around fifty years (though to be fair, his manga still has more thought put into the layout than most modern mangaka).
  • Robotech. With its dramatic tone and unvarnished depictions of the death and destruction caused by war, it was the first localized anime to really display Japanese animation's capacity for weighty, dramatic stories to a western audience. With uncut translations of space opera now a dime a dozen, and with the series' multiple flaws now harder to forgive, many now ignore the series' achievements and instead focus on the compromises made in the franchise's creation--namely, the stitching together of three distinct and unrelated anime series into one narrative, necessary for the series to get a syndication deal. The Macekre page goes into greater detail about the significance of Robotech, despite the title being a Take That to Carl Macek for said compromises.
  • Saint Seiya suffers from this quite badly if one were to watch if after seeing more recent Shonen series, especially during the Gold Saint arc. It pretty much created the Rescue Arc, and if not, it certainly was what popularized it.
  • Katteni Kaizo, a comic about a boy who believes his world to be a Fantasy Kitchen Sink and forms a club based around it, in the end it all turns out to have been a Cuckoo Nest. That description makes it sound like a parody or a Deconstruction of Haruhi Suzumiya; thing is, Kaizo predates Haruhi by a couple of years.
  • Sister Princess. When you watch it now, it seems to be incredibly cliche. But it's one of the Trope Codifier of "otherworldly harem" anime.
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