This Week in Anime

The Boys in Toyland

Chris
Coop, it was fun to have Steve and Lucas take us through that commercial break earlier this week, but I'm glad we can now return to our regularly scheduled anime programming. Hey, there's even that new You and Idol Precure series that started up a couple of weeks ago!

Wait a minute! It feels like somebody wants to sell me something!

Bird- and bunny-boys broke the glass ceiling on male Cures, meaning I can at last dream of doing my own magical transformation pose and, more importantly, be a target demographic for light-up plastic noisemakers.

Bandai, you already got me with a bunch of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider merch, but I guess you just had to angle for the third arm of the trifecta to keep those quarterly earnings up. Maybe my Cure name ought to be Cure Mark.

Toy shelves can be more of a pain to dust than ones full of discs. Anime and hawking merch have gone hand-in-hand since the early days. Gundam is one of the examples, alongside so many other superhero and magical girl shows. Hell, the pulling of toy sponsorship directly led to the most infamous swerve out of Minky Momo.

Maybe it's merciful that he's been reassigned to merely teleporting hapless Melvins into RPG Maker worlds. In modern times, anime made to show off paper and/or plastic merch specifically is recognized as a key component of the airing lineup. Precure is just one well-known example, and it also stands as an arbiter of another side of these anime: as shows that fans earnestly enjoy in their own merits, apart from any advertorial aspects!

Given how I know these kids' collectibles anime tend to work, I assume Bey Bandits is just a normal occurrence in the series. It's only right that you follow through on your strong sense of justice to set them right!

Beyblade is one of those series that was never really on my radar, save for being aware that the kid from the first anime popped up alongside Optimus Prime and several other entertaining Takara products in DreamMix TV World Fighters for the GameCube.

This just meant Beyblade was prime "Wait, they're still making that?" material for me in recent years as cohorts like you mentioned your love for it, to say nothing of celebrities like Timothee Chalamet strutting the red carpet accessorizing with the contact-sport fidget spinners.
Between all that and a shockingly consistent stream of tie-in anime coming out, I gotta presume there's something that makes fans of Beyblade think they're the...tops.

Still technically not a shelf pic, you're safe!

That's heartwarming to hear, and an indicator of the kind of impact anime franchises like these can have outside the cynical sales side. Beyblade has been around for over 25 years. That's not long enough for Moses to have parted the Red Sea with one of the little spinners, but it is long enough that generations of fans like yourself and your nephews have been able to bond over the sparks in a molded plastic stadium.

Naturally, the anime component is an angle of that, too. Yes, these tie-in cartoons ostensibly exist to entice kids to buy into the play patterns they occupy. As evidenced by similar series in the past like Digimon and the aforementioned Pretty Cure, the stories can be strong and form some pretty foundational early anime memories for some fans.

It's an important part of stewarding the next generation, especially in guiding them to be mindful of their hobbies, even as they indulge them.

Like the way people go feral for packs of Pokemon cards still frightens and confuses me, so perhaps it's more responsible to steer someone towards the comparatively saner shores of Cardfight! Vanguard for their card battling fix.

I know later Vanguard seasons are hit or miss with that element, but I'm happy to report that the latest iteration, DivineZ, is wholly committed to it, with a teaching game taking up a huge chunk of its second episode!

Of course! BanG Dream It's MyGO!!!!! takes place in the Vanguard Cinematic Universe, after all.

Bushiroad crossing it over with my beloved Bandori was my expected introduction into the world of Vanguard, helpfully facilitated by my Cardfight-loving sister who recognized my predictable gateway drug.

Sometimes, the merch a major anime sells you isn't exactly what you expected.

Bushiroad has the tie-in temptation technique down to a science. Powerful when you consider that the inciting setup for DivineZ is just another in a long line of Kamen Rider Ryuki riffs.
"Tatakae."

The thing is, for all its hawking of real-world gacha packs, the Vanguard fandom is another one like your beloved Beyblade that's brought people together. My sister met some people who were special to her through the scene. Having her explain deck construction to me and then play a few games has been an absolute gift of a way for us to hang out.

Sharing is arguably where the material goods sold by series like Beyblade and Vanguard work well since collecting multiples means it's easy to loan them to your impressionable friends and family members, so they can try them out.

And then get them to buy their own afterward, of course, but this, too, is part of the glorious cycle of merchandising.

If I'm bringing Vanguard in, it only makes sense to talk about the grandpa of card battle anime.

For years, you were battling your own personal Seto Kaiba and...whatever the Beyblade equivalent of Seto Kaiba was. Bey-to Kaiba? Yu-Gi-Oh is interesting because Kazuki Takahashi's original manga wasn't first conceived as a merchandising machine. Instead, the popularity of the Duel Monsters in-series card game led to it taking on that focus and evolving into a collectible-compelling empire.

At the behest of real-world Kaiba Corp. Konami, natch.

You're not the only one, to the point that I recall the GX dub started leaning into that particular vibe.

It makes sense, given they're predominantly watched by kids. Still, these series can be formative for people despite their naked capitalistic origins—and sometimes even because of them- if you bond with people over the games.

Granted, the companies behind these properties know this, which is why everything from Transformers to Precure has at least some element of nostalgia backing it now. Usually with their own set of grown-up-targeted toys-ahem-"collectibles" to boot.

They previewed it using footage from an anime you can't stream anywhere anymore! They were genuinely counting on fans just remembering the commercials from two decades ago!

I'll likely end up doing my own free promotion for Hasbro's product with some photos on my socials once it arrives, so I'll certainly let you know. To round things back before I get too cynical (since we've certainly been there with this column and capitalistic excess before), I'll reinforce that a lot of my love for everything from Transformers to Precure to Bushiroad's BanG Dream is based on genuine enjoyment of the attached fiction. Plenty of writers have worked magic with the ol' robots in disguise. Precure can be a showstopper of an action anime a lot of the time, and current-era BanG Dream is so powerful under supervising writer Yuniko Ayana you'd be forgiven for forgetting it exists in service of selling a mobile game...which sometimes also sells you trading cards.

These series persist because at least someone on the projects got something out that speaks to audiences.

Even with anime selling something, there are some parts you can't put a price on.