Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don't want largely female audiences

[Johnny Novgorod]

They could take a hint from My Little Pony. If dudes buy toy ponies made for girls, what's stopping girls from buying boy's stuff?

 

[norashepard]

My guess as to why this is is that, in general, society thinks anything that girls like has to be stupid drivel like Twilight or 50 Shades. They don't want that image for their product, so they want to turn them off to regain their 'cred.'

Of course that image will never change if execs like this keep believing it and refuse to give girls opportunities to prove that they actually like good shit.

 

[Fox12]

Because everyone knows that it's impossible for a cartoon series or toy brand to branch out past its original target audience...



http://www.themarysue.com/girl-talks-black-widow/

This is the reason I don't watch much t.v. anymore, too many stupid people in charge. I grew up with Toonami, which had a pretty good track record of having strong male AND female characters, as well as intelligent, well written plots. Cartoon Network took its audience seriously, even though the were children. Cartoon Network has never had higher ratings then when they aired classic Toonami. As a result we know for a fact that it can be done, and it can be done successfully. Unfortunately the new CEO canned it because he felt it was too expensive. Instead he replaced with all sorts of weird shit.

 

[blackrave]

Everytime someone goes around saying something like "we must make stuff A for demographic B"
I want to laugh in their face.
Idea that bunch of managers can predict what viewer base in the end will be is ridiculous.
All they can do is order to make stuff A to be like stuff C, because stuff C attracted demographic B and they also want demographic B (aka "CoD method")
And as we all know that usually ends well.

 

[Vegosiux]

*Sigh* And cue another landslide of slacktivism. But hey them execs are kind of stupid. And you know, people being stupid (which is different from ignorant - you solve ignorance with education, but for stupidity you need a mallet) is kind of infuriating.

Especially if they stupidly cling to this "We know best" and "It's for your own good" PR speak. MLP has been mentioned a few times already. As divided as the opinions on that one are, it's proven how "boys" don't necessarily only like "manly man action". And besides, real men wear pink. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealMenWearPink]

And you know what? Guys can, and do, like cute things too.

 

[WindKnight]

It's funny, because there's a certain cartoon aimed at young girls that has managed to pick up a pretty good-sized adult audience, both male and female, and has become quite successful as a result. Why would it not work in reverse?

Considering Nickleodeon had a really big hit with both genders with Avatar TLA, and yet seem to have been doing a lot of dicking around with the sequel to keep the boy audience, it may be these guys just don't learn.

And lets not bring up the company that licensed an anime aimed at girls that when it turned out to be more popular with girls than boys cut out the first 7 episodes entirely, tried to make a male supporting character introduced in episode 8 into a full blown main character 'equal' with the female lead and generally made the characters more obnoxious and bratty to sell it to boys.

 

[JoJo]

"Girls don't buy the toys"

Well, there's your problem. I guess they're thinking that a show which attracts a large female following might also be losing a certain percentage of their male viewers who are being turned off by the same content the females want, and since the boys are more likely to buy their toys, that's potentially revenue lost. Impossible to know without the sales figures whether that line of thinking is right or wrong but it's understandable, at the end of the day their job is to make money for their company, not to advocate gender equality.

Wait, you've lost me here, how is it understandable that they think an increase in female viewers requires a proportionate decrease in male viewers, that seems like a massive logical disconnect that would require the executives to be making leaps in logic without any real evidence, they have the numbers breakdowns by gender (although demographics numbers are hardly 100% correct so they are making educated guesses about the numbers at best), the show was apparently popular with boys as well as girls, and families too, but they canned the toy line before even trying so they have zero statistics on who's buying the toys as it is.

Presumably, if they thought that boys and girls generally had mutually exclusive tastes, they might believe that a large female fanbase would indicate that their attempts to target the male market had failed to reach full potential. That's not necessarily true, just what they might assume. We don't know that they had no evidence either, after-all we're only getting the story second-hand through someone-else. Maybe they made the assumptions based on decades of experience from previous toylines?

Kurupt87 hit the nail on the head, targeting a product at a certain demographic does not equal misogyny. This isn't about hatred of the female gender or deliberate attempts to make them unequal, at worse it's just your generic corporation sticking to outdated ideas because they want to play safe with their investor's money. At best, they may even be right, none of us have the data on how toy sales break down by gender and while everyone has their own anecdotes about girls playing with boy-oriented toys, perhaps girls ultimately don't buy enough of those sorts of toys to make deliberately aiming for them worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

Several people have quoted the success of MLP:FiM but don't forget that the Brony thing was an unexpected bonus and couldn't be relied on happen again for another franchise to make a profit. Also consider that the peripheral demographic of young adult males tend to have a lot of disposable income, which makes targeting them with merchandise more attractive. The same cannot be said of preteen girls.

 

[Agayek]

Also also to nobody in general: Come on, it's more than possible to create a superhero story whose cast is mostly positive female role models good female characters; Worm [http://parahumans.wordpress.com/] has already done it. If a network picks up that story and plays their cards right, then they'll have the new Game of Thrones in their pocket.

EDIT: I remembered the major arcs and themes in Worm after I posted the post, and edited accordingly.

+1 for the mention of Worm.

Now I kinda want to see what a Worm TV show would be like. Especially Crawler. I want to actually see him at some point.

OT: It's suits making apparently boneheaded decisions based on circumstantial evidence. I'm not sure why this is news.

 

[Dragonbums]

I wonder how the League of Legends fans will feel knowing that their awesome show was cancelled because execs still haven't grown out of their cootie phase.

... Please elaborate? I don't much follow League's outlier stuffs, but this part here intrigues me.

Sorry, I meant Young Justice. The show was noted in there as a series that got a humongous female following that got even larger ( with family members in the mix) when they fleshed out their two female characters and despite its air time popularity they axes the show because they purposefully butchered their toy line with high prices and characters nobody cared for to meet their self fulfilled claim that "girls don't buy toys"

I remember the huge outrage at the shows cancellation from just as many men and women. So CN was willing to can a good show with high viewership because of sexist beliefs and toy money.

 

[Vausch]

"Girls don't buy the toys"

Every girl friend I have has a collection of Marvel, DC, or Power Rangers toys that rivalled mine growing up. And I collected all of those spandex-clad teams up until and including Time Force.

 

[EternallyBored]

"Girls don't buy the toys"

Well, there's your problem. I guess they're thinking that a show which attracts a large female following might also be losing a certain percentage of their male viewers who are being turned off by the same content the females want, and since the boys are more likely to buy their toys, that's potentially revenue lost. Impossible to know without the sales figures whether that line of thinking is right or wrong but it's understandable, at the end of the day their job is to make money for their company, not to advocate gender equality.

Wait, you've lost me here, how is it understandable that they think an increase in female viewers requires a proportionate decrease in male viewers, that seems like a massive logical disconnect that would require the executives to be making leaps in logic without any real evidence, they have the numbers breakdowns by gender (although demographics numbers are hardly 100% correct so they are making educated guesses about the numbers at best), the show was apparently popular with boys as well as girls, and families too, but they canned the toy line before even trying so they have zero statistics on who's buying the toys as it is.

Presumably, if they thought that boys and girls generally had mutually exclusive tastes, they might believe that a large female fanbase would indicate that their attempts to target the male market had failed to reach full potential. That's not necessarily true, just what they might assume. We don't know that they had no evidence either, after-all we're only getting the story second-hand through someone-else. Maybe they made the assumptions based on decades of experience from previous toylines?

Kurupt87 hit the nail on the head, targeting a product at a certain demographic does not equal misogyny. This isn't about hatred of the female gender or deliberate attempts to make them unequal, at worse it's just your generic corporation sticking to outdated ideas because they want to play safe with their investor's money. At best, they may even be right, none of us have the data on how toy sales break down by gender and while everyone has their own anecdotes about girls playing with boy-oriented toys, perhaps girls ultimately don't buy enough of those sorts of toys to make deliberately aiming for them worthwhile. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.

Several people have quoted the success of MLP:FiM but don't forget that the Brony thing was an unexpected bonus and couldn't be relied on happen again for another franchise to make a profit. Also consider that the peripheral demographic of young adult males tend to have a lot of disposable income, which makes targeting them with merchandise more attractive. The same cannot be said of preteen girls.

Alright, fair enough, it's shortsighted, but I can see where they would get that logic from, we don't have access to all their information, and a major company relying on spotty outdated metrics that like they are gospel handed down by angels is hardly limited to toy and tv companies, I mean I've had some personal experience with that attitude in companies, it's annoying, but with the amount of money people at the higher up levels throw around, the few upper management types I've known tend to be cautious to the point of paranoia at times.

I don't know if the second paragraph was directed at me, but I mostly agree, the companies doing this are relying on stereotypes, some of which are insulting at best, but I wouldn't call them misogynistic, unintentionally sexist, yeah, but they are doing this for money rather than trying to be intentionally malicious.

As for girls not buying enough to justify it, it's hard to tell as its a chicken and the egg scenario, as people have mentioned, the Avatar franchise was popular with both girls and boys, but the toy manufacturers didn't even bother to release figures of the female characters, its the same for the Young Justice lines, the female characters are pretty much non-existent in the toys. BTAS fans clamored for a Harley Quinn figure for years, the toy company making that line of toys basically just kept waffling back and forth telling them that a female action figure just wouldn't sell. They eventually caved and released a Harley Quinn figure in stupidly limited quantities, the thing sold out so fast it was impossible to find, and the price shot up as both male and female batman fans wanted to own a figure of one of the series most popular characters. Even if they do have some data, I haven't seen a single honest attempt in so long, they would have to be operating on either focus groups (which have their own set of flaws), or fairly old data, so all we've got is guessing at this point.

As for the MLP comparisons, yes the Brony phenomenon was unexpected, and no company should ever try to intentionally bank on something like that happening, but the story here is that the female audience was already known about, the CN was apparently specifically complaining about them. Also saying that the female fans were all preteens is an assumption, we don't know the age of the female fans CN was complaining about. The comparison between the two comes about because Hasbro actually attempted to cater to the Bronies through licensing and their own lines, rather than just running in fear, or not even trying. Now that doesn't mean every company should put as much money and resources into a periphery market as Hasbro did, even among unintentional demographics bronies are sort of unique in their prolific size compared to just how wildly far out of the target market they are. But like the podcast said, they didn't even try to market to them, they just whined about changing the show and forcing changes to cater solely to a narrow stereotype of a market they think will be successful.

There could always be other factors involved too, in Young Justice's case, from what I hear, the toys were of particularly low quality, and the other example was one of those live action shows that are kind of difficult to market toys to no matter what, and Beware the Batman didn't get a specific reason for its potential cancellation, although the theory is that in that case it was because CN wanted shows closer to Teen Titans Go!, and BtB was targeted at too old an audience for their taste.

 

[Khrowley]

Girls don't buy the toys? BULL&*%@! My older sister has over 100 Transformers toys in her room. I'm also willing to bet they'd be joined by zombie merch once she has the expendable cash.

 

[mecegirl]

Maybe girls don't buy toys. Or maybe girls would buy toys if you made and marketed them to them. I know that they existed, but I don't remember seeing too many Artemis or Miss Martian toys in stores, just on the internet. I don't remember seeing any Rocket, Zatanna, or Wonder girl toys either. I remember when YJ had McDonald's toys, but they only had the male members of the team in that set.

What I know is that Hot Topic exists. And that they sell superhero themed merchandise. As well as merchandise for the Adventure Time and Teen Titans show. What I don't get is why by the time the second season came around they didn't look at their numbers, notice the percentage of female viewers, and make a couple of damn t-shirts to put in Hot Topic. By then they knew that people weren't buying their $20 action figures, so why not sell $20 t-shirts instead?

 

[NyxNox]

this is crazy...I liked young justice alot and they canselled it right at the end of season 2...now i will never know how it all ends...becuse the corprate heads of CN want boys to buy there toys and watch there shows...They could have at least posted how it should have ended but now... i find i don't like CN anymore..

it use to be great but now it is like EA...money hungry...and they arn't doing it right...

You can't pick who you get your money from so if girls like a show and are your main audiance then go with it or try to change your toys or something jsut don't stop something cuse its not what you plaind...

also sorry for bad spelling...darn mulittasking...

 

[Roxas1359]

I wonder how the Young Justice fans will feel knowing that their awesome show was cancelled because execs still haven't grown out of their cootie phase.

Well I already have known that Ted Turner is a complete and utter dumbass, so the fact that his staff is probably a bunch of little kids wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Especially since I've seen many awesome shows cancelled by Cartoon Network, which makes me sad.
Let us all take a moment to remember these shows:

Spoiler

The list goes on. Really all those shows, especially Time Squad and Thundercats 2011, were cancelled way too early. Hell, it's pretty much impossible to find Time Squad online anymore and I know many people who don't even remember it much. T^T

 

[Dragonbums]

I wonder how the Young Justice fans will feel knowing that their awesome show was cancelled because execs still haven't grown out of their cootie phase.

Well I already have known that Ted Turner is a complete and utter dumbass, so the fact that his staff is probably a bunch of little kids wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Especially since I've seen many awesome shows cancelled by Cartoon Network, which makes me sad.
Let us all take a moment to remember these shows:

Spoiler

The list goes on. Really all those shows, especially Time Squad and Thundercats 2011, were cancelled way too early. Hell, it's pretty much impossible to find Time Squad online anymore and I know many people who don't even remember it much. T^T

I find it extremely disheartening that all of those shows listed are not only the ones I enjoyed as a child, but were one of the literal reasons Cartoonnetwork back then was BETTER than any other cartoon program.

Thundercats is especially disheartening.
It had a really good cast redesign, the story was much darker (and it certainly was a breath of fresh air to see that the cats were far from innocent victims to Mumra) and it was overall looking to be the answer to Nickelodeons' avatar.

I hope something outrageous happens like Toonami picking it up again.

Now, what does CN have now that's even remotely good- Adventure Time, Gumball (for aesthetic reasons), Regular Show. that's it.

I have a feeling Steven Universe is going to get the axe for the same reason Young Justice did

 

[Roxas1359]

I hope something outrageous happens like Toonami picking it up again.

Now, what does CN have now that's even remotely good- Adventure Time, Gumball (for aesthetic reasons), Regular Show. that's it.

I have a feeling Steven Universe is going to get the axe for the same reason Young Justice did

The reruns were playing on Toonami for a while, along with Symbiotic Titan as well, which I find ironic that the creator of Samurai Jack went back to Cartoon Network to create that, as they cancelled that show in a similar way that they cancelled Samurai Jack. T^T

Also, when Thundercats was cancelled, and on a cliffhanger like how the ending for the first season was I was so upset. Then Young Justice and Green Lantern were cancelled and replaced with Teen Titans Go! and...Beware the Batman...>.>

Really all I watch on Cartoon Network now is just Adventure Time, Regular Show, Gumball sometimes, and Steven Universe. If those are all gone then I guess Cartoon Network is gone from my life as well. Now I'm off to go and watch some Samurai Jack.

 

[Dragonbums]

I hope something outrageous happens like Toonami picking it up again.

Now, what does CN have now that's even remotely good- Adventure Time, Gumball (for aesthetic reasons), Regular Show. that's it.

I have a feeling Steven Universe is going to get the axe for the same reason Young Justice did

The reruns were playing on Toonami for a while, along with Symbiotic Titan as well, which I find ironic that the creator of Samurai Jack went back to Cartoon Network to create that, as they cancelled that show in a similar way that they cancelled Samurai Jack. T^T

Also, when Thundercats was cancelled, and on a cliffhanger like how the ending for the first season was I was so upset. Then Young Justice and Green Lantern were cancelled and replaced with Teen Titans Go! and...Beware the Batman...>.>

Really all I watch on Cartoon Network now is just Adventure Time, Regular Show, Gumball sometimes, and Steven Universe. If those are all gone then I guess Cartoon Network is gone from my life as well. Now I'm off to go and watch some Samurai Jack.

Teen Titans GO is a heartache.
Not because it's bad, but because it kept so much of the humor in tact a part of me was wishing they would go into their awesome battle sequences. The aesthetics of the show is the bomb as well. It's just...a shell of the show it's derived from.

 

[Karthak]

Considering Nickleodeon had a really big hit with both genders with Avatar TLA, and yet seem to have been doing a lot of dicking around with the sequel to keep the boy audience, it may be these guys just don't learn.

Are they still meddling with Korra? I thought they just complained about the protagonist being a girl for a while.

 

[Realitycrash]

I wonder how the Young Justice fans will feel knowing that their awesome show was cancelled because execs still haven't grown out of their cootie phase.

Well I already have known that Ted Turner is a complete and utter dumbass, so the fact that his staff is probably a bunch of little kids wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Especially since I've seen many awesome shows cancelled by Cartoon Network, which makes me sad.
Let us all take a moment to remember these shows:

Spoiler

The list goes on. Really all those shows, especially Time Squad and Thundercats 2011, were cancelled way too early. Hell, it's pretty much impossible to find Time Squad online anymore and I know many people who don't even remember it much. T^T

Awh, man, I miss Time Squad. Or, well, I miss the big surly action-hero-cop-pastiche. The rest of the team was rather 'meh' and served as foils for his awesomeness.