Two of Long Island’s biggest cons that are dedicated to anime, manga, trading card games, as well as pop culture made waves recently getting quoted in a Newsday article that broke down the growing popularity of anime. While it might be old hat to many of our readers who have been anime fans for decades, the general public is just queuing in to the culture, and it’s exploding.
In a discussion with the writer of the piece to get background on how anime has affected Long Island’s geek scene, SciFiSland.com editor Long Cohen outlined his take on the reasons for anime’s explosive growth.
“One is the fact that you can find a number of new and legacy anime shows and movies on so many streaming apps now,” said Cohen. “So it’s about accessibility. Also, the kids have grown up. Millennials and Gen Z raised on Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and the like have gotten older and created a market for themselves.”
The current generation of anime consumers see it as mainstream and part of their regular diet of entertainment.
“Sure Gen X (myself) grew up on some forms of anime like Speed Racer or Battle of the Planets but they never really got into the culture the way Pokemon did,” he said. “That opened up a whole world for 90s kids. Now shows like One Piece are becoming more and more popular also with live-action adaptations on Netflix.”
Once relegated to the home video shelves on VCR tapes and DVDs, anime movies are getting wider releases and anime adaptations of classic stories are also proliferating, like the recent The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a 2024 anime fantasy film released in theaters last year.
Pat Madden, co-founder of Tropic Con, spoke about how anime is becoming something of a phenomenon that used to be the purview of real geeks, while Rebecca Seepersad, founder of the Long Island TCG Show, said the appeal is that anime just has good stories.
You can read the full article over at Newsday now.
