Anime's Original Big Three

In our modern world post Anime being Revolutionized in the 2000s, the phrase "big three" in relation to Anime tends to mean Naruto, One Piece and Bleach, I'm probably the only Anime fan my age who has never seen a single episode of any of those three shows.

Instead I remember when the top three mainstream Anime franchises were Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and Pokémon.  All three I have fond childhood memories of watching, but only two I am still an active fan of, DBZ and the genre it represents I can respect but they have no appeal to me personally anymore, which is probably why the 00s Big Three never interested me.

What I want to talk about today however is how for us Western fans those three all represent the same era, we got our first taste of Sailor Moon a bit sooner, but it was the late 90s and the year 2000 ruled by all three in daily syndication.

In Japan they are more or less three completely different eras.  Pokémon debuted on the 1st of April 1997 a couple weeks after Sailor Moon's finale.  Sailor Moon started in March of 1992.... so technically Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon's Japanese broadcasts overlap, but after checking various Japanese airdates for DBZ I am very willing to say it's best days were behind it when Sailor Moon started.

Ya know how we often divide Decades into thirds?  Early, Mid and Late?  Well it's almsot like for Children's Anime in Japan the Early 90s is DBZ, the Mid 90s was Sailor Moon and the Late 90s was Pokémon.

Of course people who care more about adult late night Anime would prefer to define the Late 90s as being "post Evangelion".  Well the thing you should remember is Animated shows are in production for a long time before they start airing, on average around 2 years.  Even a show the premiered exactly a full year after Eva's premier like Martian Hunter Nadesico would have had to have already been in production already before Eva became a runaway hit.  So I would be willing to say the first real "post Eva" Anime was a show the premiered the day after Pokémon did, Revolutionary Girl Utena.

What's kind of sad is how the 2010s couldn't produce it's own Big Three, not really.  Toonami and Adult Swim were merged together by Cartoon network so now on western TV Shounen shows air as part of a block their actual target audience is not supposed to be watching, and nothing else airs on TV anymore but on the same streaming apps as the Ecchi shows too raunchy even for Adult Swim to handle.  So Fairy Tail, My Hero Academia and Pretty Cure have been talking points of the established Anime community, but no actual kids are watching them in the West.

I fear this is bad news for the future of the Western Anime community, we need to get the stuff made for kids where kids can actually find them in order to keep reproducing.