Preferences

Japanese cultural exports (anime and manga) are quite popular in France, tapping partly into an existing comic book culture.

Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.
Spain, too. We followed the French way since the Bruguera school in the 50s/60s copying the Franco-Belgian comic books (ahem, Francisco Ibañez and Spirou) and then Mazinger Z in the 70's and Captain Tsubasa in the 80's, along DB in 1989.

This craps me up in Reddit: While we, Western Europeans (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...) have been watching manganime since forever Americans keep lying about DB and manganime availability in the West in early 90's as if the West was just the US.

For instance, the big lie on DBZ knowledge on SNES/MegaDrive games from the West. Fore sure the US didn't know nothing at all. Meanwhile, we were nearly finishing the Buu saga. So we were pretty aware of DB games in arcades, the SNES, the MD and any platform.

Not just France, I think the majority of Europe is like that. Here in the Balkans, local dubs of anime (Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ...) were 90% of what we watched on TV as kids.
Add on Pokemon and Sailor Moon and that also describes the US.
In Spain we finished DBZ in ~1993 or so.

That makes me smile when some Americans say "in the West, in early 90's, no one knew about manganime/Japanese video game"... while in Spain, France and Italy in the 90's we already had a long way along that culture.

By 1998-9, go figure, we were watching Dragon Ball GT. Yes, we saw DBGT before Pokémon. In the West. Something very odd to explain to Americans, often they didn't believe me. Until I show them the printed proofs of Spanish magazines about DB with a clear Copyright date, which is understood from nearly anyone in the world.

To add to this, France holds one of the largest Anime conventions in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Expo

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal