The 1990s and the Monsters
Back when Digimon game to the west, everyone was very quick to decide that it was a rip-off of Pokémon. Every Digimon fan obviously knows that this is not true, given how close the origin of the franchises lay too each other in Japan. The first Pokémon game released in Japan in October 1996, the Digital Monster Tamagotchi release in Japan in June 1997, not even a full year later. In fact, we do know how Digimon started: By Bandai trying (and somewhat failing) to market Tamagotchi to boys. (Digimon was still a lot more popular with girls. lol Turns out girls love monsters, too.)
But here is the thing: Monster taming was a popular genre in Japanese media for decades at the time - and something about the second half of the 1990s made several companies go: "You know what we need right now? A monster training franchise!"
While Pokémon is by far the most famous of the franchises, and Digimon probably follows in second place -internationally - those two were by far not the only ones. As someone who grew up at the time, had access to the internet, and was very liberal in regards to downloading anime... Oh boy, there was a lot of monster stuff happening at the time.
Some of it was great. Most of it never came to the west. A lot of it never got a second, let alone a third season. And oh boy, I want to talk about it. Which is why I will do this during the next couple weeks, because... You know what? You deserve to know about all those monster shows that came out between like 1995 and 2005. It sure was a lot. And you might find something in there that you are going to absolutely adore.
And mind you, while YGO never was intended to fall into this, it ended up falling into it too. But YGO you all probably know, given that it is fairly popular in the west. Monster Rancher also came out in the west - though somehow barely anyone seems to remember it existing. I am not quite sure why.
But generally speaking, this particular time had a ton of stuff that was based around the idea of "kid teams up with (somewhat) sentient non-human creature(s) to do stuff". This stuff could be anything. Saving the world, fighting in some sort of tournament, or - quite often - hacking stuff. It was after all the millennium and computers were the new hot shit. The internet was finally starting to be more widely used ans such.
I think next to this, the Japanese idea of living "things" (an even more literal ghost in the machine) and also a variety of traditions - such as Onmyouji - were playing a role into why this particular idea was becoming so popular in Japan. Though I guess no one can doubt that some part of it also was that Pokémon came out in 1996, became popular, and everyone was trying to jump onto the bandwagon. While I will still maintain that this was not thetruth for all of it (Digimon and Monster Farm released as games too close to Pokémon to be inspired by it and as I noted: YGO was inspired by MTG, not Pokémon).
Still, as someone who grew up on those shows, I am fascinated by them - and especially by those that got forgotten by the wider audiences.
And yeah, I think the others never came out over here. So, yeah.
Over the next weeks I am going to talk about them.
