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karigarihakase · 6 months

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Drive Head and Earth Granner were not flops in Japan

Let me start with a small disclaimer. I’m not writing this because I’m a big Tomica fan and I don’t like seeing their anime slandered. I’m also a big Spider Riders fan and have no problem telling you that it was a flop of epic proportions. I’m also not writing this to slander Shinkalion. I think it’s a great show.

This seems to be an ongoing misconception, mainly outside of Japan though I’ve seen some Japanese fans too that assume this (and usually get shot down right away because this is just not true).

I should start by addressing the elephant in the room, which is Shinkalion, as it’s often the context for this discussion coming up in the first place. Shinkalion was a smash success in Japan. It was the perfect storm. Trains are huge, so a series devoted to them, packed with accurate train facts and detail, was going to be big. The work was targeted at young children, but attracted an audience of older railfans as well. The series had a ton of popular seiyuu, so it attracted older otaku who watch for seiyuu. The series had Google as a sponsor, so it had big money behind it from the getgo. It had collabs with hugely popular properties, including Vocaloid, Evangelion and Godzilla. So yes, it attracted fans of Vocaloid, Evangelion and Godzilla who weren’t going to watch it for any of the other reasons listed above. So yeah, there’s no denying Shinkalion was a big success in Japan. But there’s no denying Frozen was a big success in the west (and Japan, and all over the place.) An argument that Drive Head and Earth Granner weren’t successful because they never reached Shinkalion’s level of popularity is like saying Tangled or Big Hero 6 were flops because they weren’t as big as Frozen. (And to be honest, I’m not in Disney fandom. Maybe there are people that argue that? But if there are, they’re idiots.)

Let’s start by talking about the origin of Drive Head a bit, because it’s rather important for explaining what happened. Drive Head was the first TV anime made to promote the Tomica brand of die-cast cars. It was neither the first Tomica anime, nor their first TV series. But it still was something of an experiment, given the brand has existed since 1970. Drive Head was billed as a co-production between OLM (a.k.a. the Pokemon studio) and XEBEC. But as anyone who takes the time to look through the credits can tell you, OLM had very little actual involvement in it. And XEBEC was on its last days. Drive Head had a dismally low budget, with constant off-model animation and two recap episodes, which is another reason that western anime fans were not impressed. Ignoring the fact that the series was aimed at children in Japan as a vehicle to sell toys, not sakuga fanatics.

And the reason that the creators just didn’t care? Well, besides the fact that it was experimental in ways, and that it was just made to sell toys to pre-schoolers? Because Drive Head was merely designed as a placeholder for Shinkalion while it was in production. Takara Tomy wanted Shinkalion to be big. Drive Head was a throwaway. Even the toys themselves were just retools from the Hyper Series line in the first wave.

But Drive Head was a big surprise to the Takara Tomy execs. Because it was big with its target audience. Now, the target audience of Drive Head is not on social media. They’re not the type pouring out fanart on Pixiv. Probably, they can’t even draw (some of the fan-submitted art on Drive Head News Channel, the live-action variety show it spawned proves this.) They’re pre-schoolers! That being said, Drive Head does have aspects that can appeal to adults (as long as they care about more than sakuga). Yeah, I did write that essay and a million fanfics about the villain/heroine romance straight out of Megamind that probably wasn’t written with the target audience in mind. Drive Head did somehow manage to trend on Twitter whenever new episodes aired. Heck, the series character designer posts fanart on Twitter that often treads NSFW territory and has an audience for it. But, Takara Tomy also doesn’t care about that audience, nor should they. They care about selling toys to kids.

Now, the first wave of Drive Head toys went out of print pretty quickly, when the robots were replaced in-universe by their mid-season upgrades. And the price of Sonic Interceptor, the main character’s first mech spiked up right away. There was still a demand for it. This probably should’ve been the first sign the toyline was doing well. Takara did take notice, and this placeholder show that was originally only planned for 37 episodes (an unusual amount when most kids shows run for 4+ cour) was expanded to have a sequel web series and movie. It has been officially stated from the staff that the series was planned to end at episode 37, and changes did have to be made to expand the plot. It must have been early enough in its run for this to be decided. However, given that the web series was primarily recap episodes (and even the entirely new ones were short episodes) and the movie was about an hour long and didn’t have significantly higher production values than the TV series, they clearly still rushed to get these made. The success of Drive Head was said to be unexpected. Even with the movie, they were still surprised. They had planned for two interactive Drive Gear linked screenings (the Drive Gear being a toy that made certain sounds in response to the show itself). Drive Gears were available for loan at these showings. Not only were these showings sold out so quickly that they set up a few more, but many kids brought their own Drive Gear from home, not needing to borrow one. The movie itself was also shown only in limited theaters, which led to enough complaints that they were forced to expand locations (and it still wasn’t enough). Though the movie wasn’t a box-office topping success and it’s actual revenue remains unknown barring in Korea where it seemed to indeed be a flop, it still proved popular with (once again) its target audience. Two theatres even kept playing it for a couple months after all the rest stopped.

Drive Head has continued to be rebroadcast on satellite networks and various streaming services. It is -still- popular with its target audience. You get posts on Twitter like, ‘my kid loves Drive Head and is asking for the toys, but they’re $200 on Amazon. Help!’ There’s still that much demand for these toys.

Unfortunately for these kids and parents, Drive Head hasn’t seen a single re-issue on the toys since its end, and has barely been acknowledged by Takara Tomy at all. There are a number of reasons for this. One is Shinkalion itself. The show that Drive Head was designed as a placeholder for and that Takara Tomy expected to be successful was so successful that it ended up running for longer than planned as well. It held onto the timeslot on TBS where Drive Head once aired until it was prematurely cancelled itself thanks to TBS wanting that timeslot to promote the ill-fated 2020 Olympics. So while there was talk from reliable sources about a Drive Head season 2 happening, it never got its chance to happen. The next reason is TBS itself. They screwed over all their anime programming, barring late-night fare, and it wasn’t until Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury came out in 2022 that they would even consider daytime anime again. So all of Takara Tomy’s properties jumped ship to TV Tokyo. And Drive Head, unlike Shinkalion, is so intrinsically tied to TBS that the likeness of their headquarters and even some of their staff members are featured in the anime. Though, given that real-Sasagawa no longer works for TBS, and has expressed interest in reprising her role one day, it could be feasible to get her on board if a TV Tokyo sequel ever happened. But for a time, there would definitely be some messy legal hoops involved, and there still could be for all I know. Thirdly, XEBEC. While Drive Head could be given to another studio easily enough (perhaps Studio Mother?), XEBEC is no longer of this world. A sequel under a new studio could lead to a radical staff change which might help or harm it. That and well… time’s passed. The time Shinkalion had the timeslot, Covid screwing with anime production after that… Despite new kids discovering the show through streaming platforms, the original target audience is older now and has moved on. It’s the kind of show that could get a nostalgia sequel 10 years from now but for a direct sequel at this point, that ship has sailed, for better or for worse. Even when Shinkalion got its long-awaited sequel, it was mainly focused on new characters and mecha, with the old cast reduced to cameos. And Takara has been releasing toylines with similar gimmicks and aesthetic, such as the currently-running Jobraver. So for that reason, the coveted re-issue of the Drive Head toys is basically doomed.

But now, Earth Granner. The special anime released to commemorate Tomica’s 50th anniversary. I mentioned above that the Tomica brand was born in 1970, so you do the math. You should see right away why that was an unfortunate year for a big 50th anniversary celebration.

When Earth Granner’s toys first hit the shelves, late April 2020, the biggest of the lockdowns were happening worldwide. While Japan’s lockdowns were not as long lasting or extreme as some countries (barring its extreme embargo on foreign tourism), they did happen, and toy stores were certainly deemed nonessential and were shut down for a brief period. So while yes, you could order the toys online on Amazon or the like, right from the get-go Takara Tomy lost their chance to have kids see the big cool $50 robot toy in the store and beg their parents for one. When it was revealed in a first-quarter sales report that the Earth Granner toys sold less than expected, there was almost gloating from a certain section of Shinkalion fans (-not- the target audience of either show) who were not happy that a new Tomica anime debuted before Shinkalion’s season 2 did. Despite the fact that new Shinkalion toys were still being produced and the brand was still very much alive even without a currently airing anime. This clearly ignoring the global crisis which was quite likely to blame for this new line to not have stellar sales from day one. And note that these low sales were quite temporary. Come December, Earth Granner was -the- hottest toyline for young boys. According to lists of the top Christmas toys, it was outselling both Rider and Sentai. That does not seem like a flop to me.

Earth Granner actually appeared to be a quite ambitious project from Takara. They’d learned from the success Drive Head had and planned all sorts of things for it. This included having tokusatsu-style costumes designed in real life of the two main heroes, who would allegedly appear at events and perform stage shows. But again, this was 2020. There was never one stage show. The costumes were only used for a few special events late into the anime’s run where they had drive-in advance showings of new episodes and Raiga and Kuga would be around to greet the kids though their car windows, assumedly. It’s unknown if there were ever plans to make suits for the remaining three Granners, or exactly what would’ve become of the franchise if it had the chance to be what Takara Tomy clearly wanted from it. But Earth Granner simply ended after its year run without even getting a movie like Drive Head and Shinkalion did, and it’s gimmicky extra-packed Blu-Ray box was canceled, having done poorly on the crowdfunding. Clearly, the show was again not a huge hit with adult fans, perhaps even less-so than Drive Head in Japan which did get a BD release. But the toys were still a top seller that year, despite the circumstances they had to deal with.

Again, Takara Tomy barely acknowledges the franchise anymore, and the toys are out of print. However, it also seems that Takara Tomy is going in a direction of less new anime, given their toys themselves prove to be more successful than the probable cost of the shows that promote them. With Tomica’s current Jobraver line, it’s clearly doing well enough that it’s survived for over a year. Its anime is merely sporadically-released all-CG-animated episodes on Youtube. The other currently airing Takara Tomy works include Go! Go! Vehicle Zoo (2-minute long episodes that air sporadically, and cross-promoting three toylines at once, including Tomica), Bouken Tairiku Ania Kingdom (10-minute episodes, and entirely done in stop-motion), a rebroadcast of Punirines (an all-CG 10-minute-episode anime from last year), Duel Masters (which has been running near-endlessly since 2002), and Beyblade (another long-running franchise which only recently made its return to TV after being relegated to streaming only for a while). Shinkalion may be a special exception due to its massive crossover appeal, but even that has no anime currently, rumors of an upcoming new series aside.

Tldr; Drive Head and Earth Granner did great with their target audience despite being screwed over by outside circumstances. You just don’t hear about them because you don’t chat with too many 4-year-olds in Japan.

#drive head #earth granner #takara tomy #shinkalion #tomica #god this mobile app seems to be destroying my formatting but I’ll have to try and fix that later

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