---
title: 'American "Anime"'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=WHAXHJm9Ug0'
video_id: 'WHAXHJm9Ug0'
date: 2026-07-01
duration_sec: 1861
---

# American "Anime"

> Source: [American "Anime"](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WHAXHJm9Ug0)

## Summary



## Transcript

You ever wish you could be someone else?
Most of us go through a phase like that
at some point in our lives. Be we
teenagers, adults, or entire country's
animation industries. But today, we're
going to be looking back on one
particularly tender year from my youth
when Oh, sorry. That's um that notes for
my therapist. Today we're going to be
looking at the
28y yearlong phase in which American
cartoons have been trying to be anime,
where they've succeeded, where they've
failed horribly, and what the attempts
themselves say about America's evolving
feelings [music] toward its favorite
cultural import. But before we dive into
that, we'll be looking at one particular
American company that's been doing
amazing things with anime lately.
Today's sponsor, Star Forge Systems, who
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Also, if your gaming room is on the
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And with swappable plate lights and a
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And they sell the cases standalone in
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without accounting for all the extra
goodies they pack in their PC bundles.
Regardless of how you want it, all you
got to do is click the link in the
doobly-doo to get the most beautiful PC
you'll ever own today. Pokemon caused a
seismic shift in the American media
landscape when it hit in fall 1998. As
the first anime to well and truly
eclipse everything the West had to offer
on its own televised turf, the onetwo
punch of Power Rangers and Pikachu sent
execs scrambling to pick up some
lucrative licenses of their own and
develop some homegrown IP that could
compete in this brave new Saturday
morning metag game. But our story
doesn't quite start there. While
mainstream and elite America remained
blissfully unaware of the soft power
nuke headed their way in the late '9s,
the people actually making cartoons knew
what was up a long time before then. As
Disney was still desperately clawing its
way out of the dark age, Japan was
pumping out films like Laputa, Akira,
and Toro, whose narrative nuance and
technical acumen would put most of the
Renaissance era to shame. And many of
the most passionate western animators of
the day were watching those works,
learning whatever they could from them.
Thanks to imports like Samurai Pizza
Cats Starblazers Rootech and
Speedrazer, many future animators of the
day also found themselves enamored with
anime from a very early age. And as they
grew up, renting the likes of Bubblegum
Crisis and Ninja Scroll from Blockbuster
helped keep that passion burning. Add to
that the vast number of cartoons from
the 70s, 80s, and 90s that were
outsourced to Japan, and you'd be
hardressed to find a show that wasn't
influenced by anime in some way, even
back then. Some more obvious than
others, like Frankenstein Jr., which
explicitly shouted out Gigantor aka
Tetsugen 28GO go as one of its
inspirations or the blatantly Japanese
mech designs of the Transformers not to
mention the halfozen Japan exclusive
sequels that dramatically expand on the
continuity of Generation 1 or Inspector
Gadget who literally only exists because
Dee couldn't secure the western rights
to the futuristic spin-off of Lupon III
they were working on. Speaking of Lupon,
the great mouse detective famously
lifted its entire climactic clock tower
fight directly from Castle of
Kagglostro, which would not be the last
time that Disney cribbed Miyazaki's
notes. The creators of Tail Spin were
said to have shown Nasica and Laputa to
every new animator they hired without
even putting subtitles on just to set
the standard for the show's flying
scenes. But ultimately, all of those
examples amount to blending some anime
elements into conventional American
cartoons. For 1992's Batman the Animated
Series, creators Bruce Tim and Eric
Rodomsky made a conscious effort to
emulate the cinematic storyboarding and
intense [music]
atmosphere of Japanese animation. in the
process creating quite possibly the
first ever Wilhelm screamification of
the Akira slide and setting a new more
animeque standard for basically every
action cartoon of the preceding decades
especially the ones about superheroes.
That was true both of the DC animated
universe that would eventually spring
out of Tim's Batman and Superman shows
and many Marvel cartoons throughout the
'9s and [music] 2000s, starting with the
classic Fox Kids run of X-Men and
Spider-Man. Batman Beyond leaned even
harder into those cyberpunk anime
influences to create a monster of the
week vehicle that feels an awful lot
like Bubblegum Crisis for 12year-olds.
And I mean that as the highest
compliment. Well, maybe the second
highest. As forms of flattery go, it's
hard to beat The Big O, an entire anime
from former Batman subcontractor
Sunrise, which was literally conceived
as Batman the animated series. If the
Batmobile was a super robot, it's
[ __ ] awesome. You should watch it. Of
course, there were other anime inspired
'90s classics that emerged before or
alongside Pokémon. 1993's Exo Squad
sought to emulate the mature serialized
storytelling of Gundam and space
battleship Yamato with its morally gray
war story about a slave revolt gone too
far. Hope I won't have to say that
sentence again in this video. One of my
personal faves growing up was 97's
Mummies Alive, whose elaborate
transformation sequences were clearly
inspired by Super Senti and Sailor Moon.
And on that note, The Powerpuff Girls
was designed from the outset as a medley
of high octane shownen battle action and
cutesy magical girl aesthetics. Though
that wasn't actually the first time that
Craig McCracken showed his love for
anime on Cartoon Network. One year
before Powerpuff Girls debut, he
storyboarded Mach 5, an episode of
Dexter's Laboratory that masterfully
spoofs Speedraer with a pitch-perfect
parody of its idiosyncratic dub and a
loving homage to its distinctive style
of animation. The episode was also
co-directed by two notable anime lovers
in Rob Renzetti, who would go on to make
his own maho shojo take on Astro Boy
with My Life as a Teenage Robot, and
Dexter's own creator, Gendi Tardikovski,
who actually [music] got his start
animating on Batman and would go on to
do more than almost any other western
animator to make cartoons more like
anime. From the shownen Chonbara
stylings of Samurai Jack in Clone Wars
to the tragically short-lived super
robot cult classic Symbionic Titan. And
of course, we can't forget the
worldclass waifu engineering that gave
us Mavis Dracula. But before we can get
into any of those, we've got to take a
quick detour with the Mach 5 into the
world of anime parodies, as they'll
better help us understand where
America's head was at with all these
weird Chinese cartoons taking over the
airwaves. Besides Mr. Sparkle, a riff on
weird Japanese advertising from the
Simpsons episode in [music] Marge We
Trust that came out earlier that same
year. I believe that 97 Dexter's Lab
episode is the very first example of an
American cartoon riffing on Japanese
tropes, but it would be far from the
last. As Poke Mania and the anime boom
took hold of the nation's youth,
American artists started lining up to
offer their own commentary and criticism
on the whole phenomenon, which often
came off as a wee bit salty, if I'm
being honest.
>> Your clown is weak and silly WHERE MINE
IS STRONG. WELL, YOU have sacrificed
story content for mindless violence and
lack of [music] structure. My clown has
won and you can too if you go to THE
STORE AND BUY OUR TOYS. BUY OUR TOYS.
BUY OUR TOYS.
>> WITH VERY few exceptions, like that one
Angry Beavers episode, there was little
ball knowledge to be found in any of
these post Pokémon parodies, which
artlessly mashed up the same three or
four anime the creators were all aware
of while regurgitating all the same
tired talking points. Just look at their
cartoon so full of imitatable violence.
They're abusing those cartoon animals.
They give you seizures.
The dubs, they talk so weird and they
try so hard to sell you stuff. American
media would never on occasion one of
these would deliver a solid original gag
or two.
MATRIX, STOP TRYING to hit HIM AND HIT
HIM.
>> SORRY, BOB.
But for the most part, if you've seen
the South Park episode Chin Pokemon,
you've already caught them all. That
reboot made for TV movie even called its
monsters ponsu or trouser snakes, which
is literally the exact same joke as Chin
Pokemon, just worse. As the years went
on though, more cartoons began to
acknowledge that anime actually was kind
of cool and kids might have good reasons
to like it, leading to more balanced and
entertaining parodies overall. And even
some of the less flattering ones were
clearly being made by people who
actually watched anime, perhaps even too
much anime. Just 5 years after Chin
Pokémon, even as their comedy central
contemporaries at drawn together were
busy subjecting the world to lingling
and every lowhanging fruity joke you can
think of about a JRPG protagonist. South
Park came back around with a genuine
love letter to bloody action anime like
Ninja Scroll and Fist of the North Star.
so clearly brimming with passion for its
inspiration that Matt and Trey wrote and
performed their own anime OP full of
Japanese dick and ball jokes naturally.
And in the years since the show's anime
references have only gotten more
specific and accurate to the subculture.
Even back at the turn of the millennium,
you could see hints that Stone and
Parker were at least a little weebi. But
nowadays, they really wear it on their
sleeves. And that's kind of true across
the board in cartoons for kids and
adults alike. Across the 2010s and 20s,
we got Regular Show doing whole TV
specials based on Ava and Gundam.
Gravity Falls turning Toki Mechi
Memorial into horror a couple years
before DDLC. Bob's Burgers using Ttoro
as a metaphor for Bob's whimsical
approach to cooking. The animemaniacs
fending off it circuses. shows like
Gumball and even The Simpsons
contracting real Japanese studios to do
their anime spoofs justice. And of
course, we can't forget all the
brilliant independent animators across
the internet making fun of and paying
tribute to all the anime that have
inspired them. Far too many to name even
a fraction. And yet somehow out of all
of them, not a single one manages to be
conceptually funnier than that time
Warner Brothers unironically turned the
Looney Tunes into an anime type thing.
No piece of media from the mid 2000s
better demonstrates the sheer state of
panic that the anime boom induced in
American TV execs than Lunatics
Unleashed. A gritty post-apocalyptic
sequel to Merry Melodys in which the
teenager with attitude descendants of
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and so on, use
their aliengifted superpowers to save
the world because apparently Duck
Dodgers just wasn't hitting that tween
demographic hard enough. [music]
But while Lunatics is very much the
perfect punchline to every joke about
Americans making anime, it's not really
representative of the broader endeavor.
Sam Register, the president of Warner
Brothers Animation, has singled it out
as a prime example of what not to do.
And while he did say that mainly in
regards to the then new Looney Tunes
show, he has also produced many anime
inspired cartoons throughout his decades
in the industry that do not do any of
the terrible things Lunatics does. And
it's not just him. I remember a lot of
these shows being painfully cringy for a
young me in search of real anime back in
the day. But looking back, most of the
cartoons to come out of this movement
were pretty good and even great. And
they got there almost immediately.
Powerpuff Girls and Batman Beyond were a
little too early to have been made in
direct response to the anime boom, but
they arrived just in time to surf the
wave. And they both absolutely 2000's
X-Men Evolution is notable for putting a
greater emphasis on teen drama than the
'90s version and taking a notably more
anime stylistic direction that must have
been very comfortable for Madhouse and
MOO animation to work on. Though it does
still feel like an action cartoon at its
core. Samurai Jack hit in 2001 and it
still feels ahead of its time. a quiet,
slow-paced, contemplative series that
lets its decidedly anime style action
speak more and louder than its
characters most of the time while
respecting its audience's intelligence
at every turn. But one show which often
gets lumped in with the early anime
likes that really ought to be questioned
more is Jackiechan Adventures. While its
martial arts, action, chi-based magic
system, and mcguffin hunting plot
structure do bear some very obvious
similarities to Dragon Ball, that's
mainly because it taps into the same
sources as Toriyama did of Wuja and Kung
Fu Cinema. Personally, I think it more
belongs in a separate lineage of kung fu
cartoons with Shaolin Showdown, Jake
Long, and Juniper Lee. But maybe that's
a distinction without difference. I
don't know. 2003 is when anime likes
really started taking off and they
started with a bang. Fresh off of
working on Batman Beyond, producer and
character designer Glenn Murakami was
given free reign to put his own stamp on
a DC Comics property separate from the
Timoverse that was then developing. And
the result was a show whose cancellation
we still gripe about two decades later.
[music and singing]
Teen Titans
>> Bang and JRock opening aside, Teen
Titans wasn't quite anime. The comedy
was a bit too cartoony, the episodes a
bit too episodic. But what it was was a
damn good show that stood out from every
other cartoon and anime on the air with
a distinctive style that represented the
best of both worlds. It could be
gutbustingly funny one minute and
devastatingly dramatic the next. The
fight scenes always hit hard and its
interpretation of the Titans would go on
to be arguably the definitive version of
the team as a whole and each of the
individual characters even over the
comics they started in. This is the show
that made Robin the Boy Wonder genuinely
unambiguously cool. Something Teen
Titans Go has been trying to undo ever
since. And it's also almost certainly
the show that convinced Warner Bros.
they could get away with lunatics. So, I
can't even say he doesn't deserve that
on some level. Though, of course, it
wasn't just WB who thought their IP
could benefit from an anime style
refresh. Some legacy series were a
little more subtle about it, huing
closer to the DCAU style, while others
just said, "Ah, [ __ ] it. Let's hire
Gonzo." And then you have the
Transformers, which basically let the
Japanese side run the entire brand for
half a decade before Teen Titansifying
the next fully American iteration. And
while individually, a lot of these shows
were decent or even good, their
collective existence is, I think, what
really put the stink of corporate
desperation on this whole wave of anime
cartoons. networks would also try to
satisfy our bottomless demand for punchy
cartoons by importing and commissioning
anime inspired works from other regions
like Cubix's from Korea, the
Italian-made Winkx Club or France's
Witch and Code Leoko and Skyland and
Oban Star Racers, Totally Spies, Martin
Mystery, Team Galaxy. The French made a
lot of these sort of things back in the
day and they still do. But it feels a
little wrong to cover French and
European animation here. And not just
because I'm going to be AB testing
America does anime for the video title.
Europe and France in particular have a
long history of working with the
Japanese on full-blown anime
co-productions dating way back to the
early8s which has resulted in quite a
bit of cross-pollination of both
techniques and [music] talents between
their industries. As such, many of these
shows have an authentic anime feel about
them that their American contemporaries
would struggle to match for years, even
decades to come. I mean, Oon Star Racers
straight up has an MAL page, so I mostly
just think of these shows as anime. That
is what the French already call it,
after all. That's where Japan got the
word. At the same time though, nothing
from that era quite embodies the greasy
hello fellow kidsiness of fake mid2000s
anime in my mind at least quite so
thoroughly as the marathon media trilogy
with their way too wacky animation and
decidedly western episodic approach to
storytelling. They all sit right at the
bottom of the uncannime valley. And yet,
I do owe at least half of my fetishes to
Totally Spies. So, maybe it is a real
anime after all. It's hard to say.
Perhaps the problem lies with them being
Canadian co-productions. We did have our
hand in quite a few of these sorts of
things in the mid 2000s, too. Some
pretty good, some my life me.
>> Besides, I'm not PMP pom girl material.
I'm going back to skateboarding where I
belong.
I don't [music] want to talk about that
one though. So, let's get back to
America in the early as 2004 saw the
release of Megas XLR, an actual
deconstruction of Mecca anime tropes
about a schlubby burnout from New Jersey
who installs his hot rod as the head of
a giant future robot that he finds
buried in a junkyard and uses it, plus
his gaming skills to protect the Jersey
shore from time traveling aliens and
other space goons, but not himself, who
accidentally blows up at least half the
city like every other episode. It's
fantastic. One of the best things
Cartoon Network ever cancelled and the
first dedicated anime parody show that
really made me think, damn, these guys
get it. Seriously, if there is one thing
that you take away from this video, it
should be watch Megas XLR. 2004 also
gave us Super Robot Monkey Team
Hyperforce Go, which I didn't actually
watch cuz none of our Canadian channels
got it. And Hi Highi Puffy Ammy Yumi, a
cutesy comedy about the real life J-Rock
band behind that banging [music] Teen
Titans OP, who tragically had to change
their original name, Puffy, for fear of
legal trouble with America's third most
famous pedophile. which makes a great
segue into 2005 and one of the first
American anime that really got it. Well,
technically that episode of the Boondocs
is about R. Kelly, but it still very
much applies. In writing terms, the
Adult Swim adaptation of Aaron McGrder's
transgressively progressive manga style
newspaper comic is very much in line
with other adult cartoons of the era.
maybe a touch more slice of lifey, but
in terms of how it looks, how it moves,
how it feels, the rhythm of its editing,
and especially its action scenes, it is
anime through [music] and through.
McGrder and his co-director LeShawn
Thomas were some of the earliest members
of the anime generation to break into
the business, going from mainlining
Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim to airing
alongside Samurai Shampoo just a couple
years later. And their excitement about
that whole situation bleeds through in
every episode. Literally everyone. You
can tell they were watching Shampoo
while they storyboarded the OP. Now, as
an adultoriented sitcom with deep
America ccentric political undertones, I
expect a lot of folks will probably
argue that this one especially shouldn't
count as anime. But that never stopped
King of the Hill and it doesn't even
look like anime. That wasn't the only
anime style hit that CN had on their
hands that year either as just a few
weeks after the Boondocks, Ben 10 would
make its debut on their endofyear sneak
peek week, going on to be one of the
most enduring franchises in their entire
catalog with 22 seasons and nearly 300
episodes spanning multiple sequels and
reboots. Of those, the most anime of the
bunch is probably Alien Force, which
follows Ben as a teenager dealing with
teenager stuff, plus morphing into
aliens to fight other aliens. At least
according to my friends who actually
watched Ben 10. Personally, I never got
that into it. The original series was
more of a cartoon anime hybrid like Teen
Titans. And you know, I already had Teen
Titans, so I didn't feel too compelled
to keep up with that, especially
considering the other thing 2005 had to
offer.
>> [groaning]
>> Whether or not you call it an anime, and
I absolutely do, Avatar the Last
Airbender is a perfect TV show. It too
has a bit of that cartoon hybrid feel
early on. Not necessarily in how it's
scripted or animated 90% of the time,
but rather in the very Nicunes tone of
its humor. Its hero, Ang, is a goofy
little guy whose main goal in life is
doing a bunch of goofy things in a world
full of weird and cuddly magical animals
that he can have goofy little rides on.
Potty humor abounds, and it is not
unheard of for characters to get slimed.
You might think that this would clash
with the more serious tone of a shownen
style magic martial arts adventure about
taking down an evil genocidal empire,
and you would be right. But that is
precisely the point. Avatar uses the
tension between its two identities of
cartoon and anime to reflect the tension
between the childlike whims of its hero
and the very adult responsibilities that
he's destined to fulfill. And as he
accepts that destiny and begins to grow
up, so too does the show with him,
getting darker and more serious with
each passing season, casting away a lot
of the more goofy humor, though never
fully abandoning that naive sense of
whimsy, joy, and hope. It's a work that
could have only emerged out of this very
specific moment in the evolution of
American animation and that only works
as well as it does because its nature is
so in line with what it has to say. And
while it has stayed incredibly relevant
to this day, in fact, I'll be dropping a
whole video about its latest attempt to
stay relevant on the 30th. There was
something really special about living
through that moment. It honestly felt
like western animation was on the cusp
of finally catching up to anime, of
finally telling stories that would
matter to me again on a much grander
scale. Sadly, history is not simply a
forward march of progress. And one year
after Avatar debuted, Nickelodeon proved
they'd learned absolutely nothing from
it with Kappa Mikey, the tale of a
failed American actor who becomes the
star of Japan's most popular tokusatu
series by winning a scratchoff contest.
With the main gimmick being that he
looks like he stepped out of a typical
mid2000s flash cartoon, while all of the
Japanese characters look like they
stepped out of a typical mid2000s flash
hentai quiz. As a child, this was the
show that made me write off almost
everything like it except Avatar and
Teen Titans as cringy and out of touch.
But looking back on it now as an adult,
I think I actually hate it more. The
sound designer's use of whip cracks
could give Johnny Test a run for his
money. Maybe one in 30 jokes is actually
funny. And while the background artists
and animators clearly know at least a
little anime and Japanese culture ball,
none of them bothered to pass it on to
the writer room, who, let me put it this
way, the show's title is a pun on
Kapamaki Sushi, meant to echo Mikey's
status as a fish out of water in Tokyo,
which would be very clever if Kapamaki
had any fish in it. If this show was
about some schlub moving to New York,
the only thing that would have to change
is its art style. The one unambiguously
good thing to come out of Kappa Mikey is
its theme song performed by Beat
Crusaders, who also gave us the only
good thing about Bleach's Bount arc and
hit in the USA from Beck Mongolian Chop
Squad. But sadly, the rest of the show's
vibe sits somewhere between Gwen
Stefani's Harajuku Girls and that
Kirsten Dun cover of Turning Japanese.
Okay, done roasting it now. Sorry, I
just I had to get that out of my system.
The next few years would be relatively
quiet on the American anime front,
mostly seeing continuations of the shows
we've already touched on. But by 2010,
the industry seemed to have learned its
lessons from the big hits of 2005, and
the scene exploded. In one year, Young
Justice gave us a more condensed
serialized narrative than Teen Titans.
[music] Generator Rex gave us even
cooler morphing powers than Ben 10.
Symbionic Titan gave us a Mecca story
just as good as Megas XLR, as well as
Tardikovsky's most mature work to date.
Stan Lee took a trip to Japan to make
his own anime with Studio Bones and
Mystery Incorporated took the Scooby-Doo
franchise in a bold new continuitydriven
direction that is still, for my money,
the best take on the meddling teens to
date. And the shows just kept stacking
up from there. From Thundercats 2011 to
Kora in 2012 to the point that
individual releases kind of stopped
being notable. By 2013, even
internet-based indie animators were
getting in on the fun with Rooster Tease
Rouia telling a high octane tale of
magically empowered battle waifuss
[music] fighting to stop a villainous
slave revolt gone too far. Son of a
[ __ ] America. These days, some of the
hottest cartoons on the biggest networks
are isekai and magical girl stories. The
biggest movie of the now is a
Symphfoggeear clone. And we can't forget
about all the other streaming originals
that call them anime or not are pretty
[ __ ] badass. Not to mention all the
great indie cartoons with obviously
anime influences, some of which have
gotten shockingly big in Japan. Well,
maybe it's not that shocking. Many of
the titles we've just been talking about
have Japanese-made anime of their own.
Enough that I could make a whole
separate video just about those. and
also the entire Japan exclusive season
of Lilo and Stitch in which experiment
626 abandons his ohana to go live with a
brand new Kazoku in Okinawa. See, it's
not just America that ruins things. In
fact, I'd say most of the things that
we've just gotten through talking about
show quite the opposite. From Mega XLR
to Neo Yokio, Avatar to the Dragon
Prince, Samurai Jack to Blue-Eyed
Samurai, almost none of them have been
making anime worse. They've just been
making cartoons better, moving past the
corporate roadblocks and cultural stigma
that have held the medium of animation
back in the West for so long by
following in the footsteps of artists
who figured that [ __ ] out in the 70s and
80s, without which we simply would not
have all of the vibrantly creative and
expressive cartoons and American anime
that are getting written off for tax
purposes today. I'm Jeff Thu,
professional anime identifier, saying no
to Kappa Mikey, but yes to King of the
Hill. Only the first six seasons though.