Ask any anime or sentai fan what they think of Saban Entertainment, and they'll probably start convulsing on the floor, apoplectic in their hatred of the company, most notable for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Dragon Ball Z, Digimon, and literally dozens of other shows, including a lot of the Marvel comic animations.
But most kids don't care about fanboy rantings about altered English dubs or bastardized adaptations or 3-frames-per-second animation quality, and are quite content to plop down in front of Saturday morning television and revel in the cheaply-produced glory that is Saban. Those pesky fanboys... now they've got ME doing it.
Anyway, the Hollywood Reporter has an interesting story about ol' Haim Saban and his merry cohorts (Saban Capital Group), and how they will be putting together a "virtual studio" to produce new properties to peddle to the world's vegetative youth. What I found interesting about the piece were two things...
The first being that SGC's first venture under this new virtual studio thingy is going to be Hollywood Star Dogs, which sounds dreadful. Live-action talking dogs (via CGI) acting out famous movies like Robin Hood, Frankenstein, and Heidi. Yes, that's right.... MORE CGI talking animals. The horror.... the horror....
The other thing is that the story intimates that SGC plans on ripping off as many people as possible in their ravenous quest for intellectual property, with Joel Andryc, SGC's chief creative officer saying that he and Saban will look to develop a mix of their own ideas, which they can then feed to creatives in certain fields, and properties discovered by them or brought to them from the outside. "Among other things, we will be very aggressively scouring user-generated (content) sites for something that's percolating."
So that funny YouTube video you made of your buddy swallowing Mentos and Diet Coke in the same gulp and then having the foam shoot out of his nose?
In the immortal words of George on Seinfeld... "THAT could be a show!"
