How Does Adult Animation Rate?
“I’m not positive what’s going into Showtime’s mandate right now. I know they had a change in leadership recently [with a new president of the channel’s entertainment division], that’s part of the equation too. Free for All is a terrific series, may do well, but it just may not fit into the strategy of the new leadership.”
Clifton sees the boom in adult-directed animation as a result of a number of factors, including the simple fact that “the audience likes them. Adult audiences know that cartoons aren’t just for kids anymore. Anime has helped, videogames with sophisticated animation have been around for a while now and the gamers are getting older — that’s also had an impact.
“Of course I’m biased towards The Simpsons, but I think South Park really opened up the field,” she continued. “Comedy Central took the chance, and audiences responded. South Park made it cool to watch cartoons. People saw it can be funny, it can be outrageous. The show has levels of social satire that people tend to forget about while they’re counting how many times they say ‘shit’.”
According to Clifton, things are more open in cable because production has gotten less expensive and the cable outlets cater to a certain kind of niche. “The networks know their audiences, and the writers write to them. In cable there are obviously less restrictions, you can get raunchy and your audience usually responds positively.” she said. “A lot of these shows just are what they are. They’re aimed at a specific demographic and they do what they’re supposed to do. Stripperella is the most demographic-specific. It’s aimed at young adult males who are watching and playing out fantasies.”
The cable channel that first introduced anime to the U.S. market — and then walked away from the genre — will soon return to animation via its first original toon series. Like Spike TV’s Gary the Rat, the Sci Fi Channel is developing Tripping the Rift from its Internet origins into a full-fledged CGI-animated series, developed by DPS Film Roman and produced through CinéGroupe in Canada.
“We never really went away from animation,” according to Thomas Vitale, Sci Fi’s svp of acquisitions, scheduling and program planning. “We’ve aired features like Fantastic Planet, Cool World — we just aired the Final Fantasy movie, and animation is a regular part of our Exposure shorts series.
Sci Fi gave up on anime, and animation programming in general due to a number of reasons. “At first we got ratings with anime. The viewers responded and the press wrote about us. But once the genre got familiar the ratings went down. Once the excitement wore off viewers stopped watching and the press stopped talking about it. Other networks jumped on the bandwagon too — Cartoon Network started airing more teen and adult-oriented cartoons, not to mention competition from video and DVD.”
Vitale expresses no regrets at dropping anime. “Too many other networks were there, it couldn’t have become something we would’ve owned. Our viewership is still mostly adult men and women. We need stuff that appeals to a very broad range of viewers. We didn’t have the door closed to animation either — we took animation pitches like we took any other pitch
“It wasn’t like ‘we have to have an animated series’ as a stated goal, either,” he continues. “It was more like ‘we have to find programming we think will get ratings, shows that people will care about and we care about internally.’ We had always kicked around the idea of doing animation someday — could we have our own version of success with animation like Comedy Central with South Park or FOX with The Simpsons?”
Tripping the Rift made it onto Sci Fi’s schedule for starters because “the short made us laugh out loud,” Vitale explains. “The pitch was really smart in terms of what they wanted to do with the characters and where the plot they created for the series would take them, since the short was just a one-shot.
“They didn’t come to us with 13 fully fleshed out episodes,” Vitale continues. “There was an idea for a series, the characters and potential episodes, and we got them into development. We hired the writers and started developing scripts, started working on the voices and the casting.”
Tripping the Rift turns space opera on its head, focusing on a smuggling ship (the Free Enterprise) in place of the usual hierarchical military vessel. The ship’s crew features an assortment of motley characters, including a purple alien captain and his slacker nephew, a robot slave, and (with a nod to Star Trek: Voyager and perhaps to The Prisoner as well) a sexy and super-intelligent cyborg who goes by the name (actually number) “Six.”
Rift is set to premiere March 2004, pushed back from a 2003 start. Vitale dismisses rumors the delay was due to conceptual or production problems: “We’re planning to pair it up with another half-hour show that will appeal to a similar audience — possibly the second season of Scare Tactics (the channel’s prankster series) or a new show we have in the works called Mad, Mad House.” According to Vitale, the chances of a second animated series eventually joining Rift depends on how well Rift itself performs.
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