Urban legend says that toilets flush backwards in Australia. This is correct, but slightly mis-aimed – move the location a few thousand kilometers north to Japan and change “toilets” to “comic adaptations”. In the west, film adaptations tend to be worse than the books they’re based on. In Japan, anime films tend to be better than the comics they’re based on.

Shut your piehole. I have history on my side.

Tony Tanazaki’s Genocyber manga was a confused melange of ideas jacked from Blade Runner. Under the direction of Koichi Ohata it became a series of stylish, brutal anime OVAs. Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga was a futuristic counter-terrorism story that happened to tackle some philosophical master/puppet stuff. The movie stripped away much of the uninteresting police crap and showcased the existential climax as the story’s principle feature. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira manga was a sprawling, unfocused sci-fi epic of tree-massacring length. The film incarnation burned away all the unnecessary additives, turning 2200 pages of comic into an efficient two hour film.

OVAs and anime adaptations have a good track record.

Why? I have some theories. Jews. Illuminati. The fact that manga are traditionally made in a high-pressure sweat shop atmosphere where the deadline is king, while animated movies are so expensive and slow that you can’t afford not to have everything planned out properly. Hollywood hates creativity, and I’m sure the anime industry does as well. The difference is that the manga industry hates creativity even more, so the effect of an anime adaptation is a net improvement.

So what potentially amazing anime adaptations are we missing out on? How would they be different?

Iqura Sugimoto’s Variante comes to mind. It’s action packed. It has an appealing moe heroine. “Everyman who fuses with a monster” is a hopelessly cliche’d premise, but if they could reproduce the manga’s murky groping-in-the-dark-for-answers atmosphere it could work.

Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom is another. There was a low budget live action version, but we’ll forget that. We need Akira treatment on this one. It’s a powerful story, but there’s way too much going on in it. A stripped down version with some of the more bizarre subplots removed (like the dreaming kid) would be something to see.

Junji Ito’s Uzumaki might work as a manga. Again, there’s some arcs that could be cut while preserving the integrity of the work.

Hideo Yamamoto’s Homunculus is a disturbing and bold manga that really needs to be adapted in some way. But Satoshi Kon was probably the only guy who could do it justice, and now he’s dead.

“If you want to shine like the sun, first you have to burn like it.”
– Adolf Hitler

“He was marooned in the jaws of a human minefield, and with every step the noose grew tighter.”
– Paul and Anthony Cuneo, quoting sports columnist Jerry Izenberg in the New Jersey Star Ledger

“I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue.”
– M. Boots

“When I was a kid I found a pocket dictionary that defined ‘bucket’ as ‘pail’ and vice-versa and realized that no one’s in charge of anything.”
– Daniel Kibblesmith

“Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.”
– Merlin Mann

“It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.”
– Weinberg

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,”
– CS Lewis

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”
– John Adams

“He who laughs last thinks slowest”
– Anon

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”
– Stephen King

“You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
– H.L. Mencken

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
– Borges

Humanity’s most pointless endeavor: trying to get girls to like boy stuff. At least Prometheus is getting some acupuncture out of his deal. At least Sisyphus is getting in a workout.

In 1973, Playgirl was conceived as a female-friendly riposte to male-aimed porn magazines. The magazine ended up with a loyal readership…of gay men.

In 1998, Powerpuff Girls was launched as an action-focused cartoon that gave girls butt-kicking role models. By 2002, 70% of its TV audience was male.

More recently, girl-aimed My Little Pony attracted a rather odd male fanbase that disturbs Lauren Faust and almost everyone who works on the show. (I’m trying to find that Tara Strong twitter reply where she say something like “no, you can’t have sex with an animated horse”)

I think a lot of people who work in TV have the arrogant belief that they’re the shapers of public taste. When f*m*n*sts get involved, that manifests as ideas that media is brainwashing young girls, and that girls only play with Barbie because they we didn’t give them Gina Rinehart dolls, or something. If girls seem any different to boys, it’s the fault of TV shows and toy companies. We’ve gotta fix this right now. No more pink toys. No more girls shows that focus on romance.

All such attempts fail, but let’s assume the premise is correct. If young minds are malleable to such a degree, why stop there? We could easily be building a race of superhumans.

Lovable “slacker” characters should be banned from TV. Seriously. They’re clearly a bad influence. No more Homer Simpson or Beavis and Butthead. All TV characters should be type-A overachievers who go to church and never forget to call their mothers. We’ve got impressionable young brains watching this stuff, and we can’t allow them to be lead astray.

No more villains and crimes depicted on TV, either. Maybe we should have Batman putting the fear of God into people who pick their nose or chew with their mouth open. Obviously TV is the fount of all human behavior, so if we accomplish this we can eradicate crime in one generation. That was easier than I thought.

Obviously, humans have no biological limitations, it’s all cultural. TV has to teach kids to dream big. We should show crippled kids NBA matches, and triathlons. Maybe it will motivate them to be less crippled. It’s worth a try, surely.

(I’ve noticed though, that nobody gives much of a damn about negative stereotypes about boys. Nobody thinks Beavis and Butthead is a misandrist conspiracy to discourage boys from being ambitious. They flip shit when Barbie says “math is hard”, though. I agree with Barbie. Math is hard.)