Word: topness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...affordable; the flashier and high-tech new models were out of reach. Kubo's publishing company did the math and decided to back Pokemon, coming out with a line of comic books that included the first trading cards as giveaways. While best-selling games like Final Fantasy grabbed the top slot for a couple of dramatic months and then faded, Pokemon sales grew slowly and steadily--and they did not stop. Tajiri generated further word of mouth by designing a secret twist into the programming. Officially there were only 150 species of Pokemon. Unknown to Nintendo, Tajiri...
With a hit on its hands, Nintendo decided to animate the game. The show, produced in anime style (see following story), quickly became the top-rated children's TV series in Japan, appealing to both girls and boys. Then came an unpleasant surprise. In December 1997, about 700 children had sudden and simultaneous seizures while watching the show. The specific episode involved a bomb attack on Pikachu and its pals. In a microsecond, animated flashes interacted with frenetically changing colors as Pikachu blinked out its lightning bolts across the screen. Apparently such combinations of light can induce seizures in some...
...cross-marketing! A few players are onto anime already. Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, is a big investor in Manga Entertainment, the premier U.S. arm for anime. Its spectral cyborg parable, Ghost in the Shell, was the only anime to reach No. 1 on Billboard's Top Video Sales chart. Perfect Blue (a kind of All About Evil, in which a pop diva is both the star and her twisted alter ego) has played in 30 U.S. theaters. And there are hints that two Hollywood titans, Francis Coppola and James Cameron, may make separate deals for co-productions with...
...Ghibli to release video or theatrical versions of nine films, including the anime auteur's delightful My Neighbor Totoro (about two kids who befriend a chubby forest sprite) and Kiki's Delivery Service (a cute teenage witch launches her own broom-propelled FedEx). Disney now has the world's top-three animation studios: its own unit and the computer tooners at Pixar and Ghibli...
Hundreds of works are on view, all of the Whitney's rooms and corridors crammed with pieces dating from AbEx to those practically yanked off the walls of today's downtown galleries. Yet nowhere is the primal battle pitted so bluntly as in the opening salvos on the top two floors of the show. First is Pollock's Number 27 (1950), its swooping marks scraping away the recognizable shapes of the world, implying in the skeins of paint a web of pure energy, limitless and deep. Its yellows and pinks, its muted greens and blacks are autumnal; a pure buzz...