Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan, by Marc Steinberg.  Illustrated.

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, February 2012, 978-0-8166-7549-4 hardcover $75.00 (xvii + 314 pages); 978-0-8166-7550-0 trade paperback $25.00 (xvii + 314 pages).

* Editor's Note - Each image below is a thumbnail to an excellent higher-res image. Just click the image to open up the larger version.

Advertisement for Marble Chocolates from the

back cover of Shōnen magazine, April 1964 issue.

The Marble Chocolates cylinder, Atomu stickers,

and Marble ad icon Uehara Yukari are featured there.

Images used with permission from Anime's Media Mix,

University of Minnesota Press.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of studies, both popular and academic, on Japanese comics and animation; on the genre, the industry, and the individual characters, on the cartoonists, on the social phenomenon in Japan and in America, even on the “cosplaying”: the dressing-up as favorite cartoon characters by their fans.  Marc Steinberg, an assistant professor of film studies at Montreal’s Concordia University, takes an original approach.  He has studied what he calls “the media mix”; the merchandising of the anime characters that he argues has been of equal importance in leading to their popularity and cultural influence.

“According to Steinberg, both anime and the media mix were ignited on January 1, 1963, when Astro Boy hit Japanese TV screens for the first time. Sponsored by a chocolate manufacturer with savvy marketing skills, Astro Boy quickly became a cultural icon in Japan. He was the poster boy (or, in his case, “sticker boy”) both for Meiji Seika’s chocolates and for what could happen when a goggle-eyed cartoon child fell into the eager clutches of creative marketers. It was only a short step, Steinberg makes clear, from Astro Boy to Pokémon and beyond.”  (publisher’s blurb).

Advertisement for Meiji Chocolates, from the

back cover of the December 1964 Kappa Comics

publication of the Tetsuwan Atomu Manga,

Volume 12. The packages and their chocolate

contents were molded in the shape of Atomu characters,

and their send-away premiums were also based on

Atomu characters.

Anime’s Media Mix is a very academic study.  Steinberg first defines his terms. “Otherwise known as transmedia or cross-media seriality, or by the North American media industry terms repurposing or media synergy, the term convergence now refers to the ways in which particular texts are made to proliferate across media forms, from television to novel to comic to video game to toy.” (p. vii).  He defines media mix broadly: “The rise of the media mix is thus intimately bound up with social, economic, and cultural transformations that many writers have associated with the term postmodernism or post-Fordism.  These changes were facilitated by the rise of the animated character as a central element of media forms, advertising and consumption that began in Japan of the 1960s.” (pgs. xi-xii).

Advertisement for Tada Seisaku's Atomu Super

Express train (Atomu Chōtokkyū), its Atomu candy truck,

and its Atomu car, in Gangu shōhō, December 1963.

Steinberg focuses upon two models and examines them in depth.  First is the cartoon character Tetsuwan Atomu, known in America as Astro Boy.  Although he was a popular magazine comic-strip or comic-book character in the 1950s, Steinberg concentrates on the merchandising of his television animation persona beginning on January 1, 1963.  The foundations of Japanese cartooning and animation are covered in pages 1 to 36; “Candies, Premiums, and Character Merchandising: The Meiji-Atomu Marketing Campaign” in pages 37 to 86; and “Material Communication and the Mass Media Toy” in pages 87 to 132.  In the latter Steinberg traces the merchandising of Japanese popular cartoon characters back to the 1930s with Tagawa Suihō’s Norakuro puppy-dog-soldier in the 1930s Imperial Army, concentrates again upon the Tetsuwan Atomu merchandising around the megapopular 1963-66 TV series, and casually mentions the cartoon character merchandising since then that needs no introduction such as Hello Kitty and Pokémon.