Mitsuo Hashimoto may be an auteur of crappy tie-in anime based on updates of traditional games, being responsible for this, Beyblade and Bakugan Battle Brawlers. Whereas Beyblade was about spinning tops, B-Daman is about marbles. As was Bakugan. Yes, there were TWO marble based franchises this decade.

Unsurprisingly, the sequel to Crush Gear Turbo! If you’ve not read that post, go ahead, it’s one of the meatier of these Hate Fun posts, in that I go on a big tangent about what makes a good toy/videogame adaptation.

Transformers franchise rolls on. I’m sure I’ve seen some of this. I recall none of it.

I’ve some fond memories of the old Robo Machine toys and the strip that ran in UK comic the Eagle as a kid. This revival of appears to be some kind of combination of Thunderbirds and Robot show, with kids as the leads. Which I’m sure must have been done before, as that seems like such an obvious good idea for a kids show.

And now to make you (and me) feel old, I bring you the following comment from youtube courtesy of Paperyoshi65

This Show is So OLD SCHOOL
i watch this SINCE I WAS 5

Yes, 2003 is now “old school” to 12/13 year olds. Though should you be allowed to use the phrase “old school” while still at school?

Yet again, embedding is disabled on the OP clip.

Digimon returns to being mainly set in the “digi-world” with this instalment. Nothing really to note here apart from that this was the last Digimon TV outing until 2006′s Digimon Data Squad.

While I knew this show existed, I had no idea it had actually been released in English, along with the toys. Possibly because I’m not Australian. Or a child.

Like Yu-Gi-Oh or Beyblade, it essentially takes the target audience’s own experience with the toys and adds a layer of fantasy on the top of it. It’s a different relationship of the audience to both the toy and the cartoon compared to the toy based cartoons around when I was growing up. With Thundercats, He-Man, Transformers and the like there wasn’t a real viewer substitute in the cartoons (if there was, they weren’t the main hero), nor did the actual toys show up in the cartoons themselves. Instead the toys were representations of things in the cartoons and your relationship to them when playing was more director than actor. With a show like Crush Gear Turbo, you’re basically watching a kid, presumably your own age, play with same toys you’ve got (or will have if the advertising works!). You’re almost part of the show, part of the world of the show.

I think that’s where a lot of videogame adaptations come undone. You’ve got these toy shows adding a level of identification and immersion to the cartoons and toys, but in most cases a videogame adaptation is removing that. Pokemon gets it right by applying many of the “rules” of the game to the world of the cartoon, so you can identify with Ash and chums if you’ve played the game. Too often videogame adaptations are obsessed with the characters and game world, rather than the rules, despite the fact that whether or not they are conscious of it, the rules and mechanics of the game are what are most impressed on the player’s memories. That’s why Dave Chappelle’s Grand Theft Auto skit is better than 99% of videogame adaptations.

A futuristic online environment is corrupted by a mysterious virus. No it’s not .hack//sign, it’s Web Diver doing it a year earlier and with giant robots to boot.

I’m sure Takara fans could cast some light on this, but this strikes me as Takara taking their Brave series, adding a few innovations to the toys and giving the cartoon to a different studio.

The zippy, colourful animation is directed by the man men call Hiroshi Negishi, bringing to mind his earlier work on NG Knight Lamune & 40.

Again no embedding available for a Digimon Opening.

Chiaki J. Konaka (Lain) takes the reins of the Digimon franchise and following the lead started in Yuasa’s films brings the series firmly into the real world. I missed seeing any of this at the time and am definitely curious as to what it was like. May check it out and return to this post later.

There’s something to be said that the late, un-lamented Woolworths was the main place I saw Beyblade toys and DVDs. And that it aired on FIVE, the fifth and least popular terrestrial UK TV channel. It felt a little like an also-ran, but there were a lot of them in this period, and Beyblade may have been best at coming last.

Part of cross-media blitz to make spinning tops popular again for the first time in 100 years, the Beyblade anime is cheap and stupid. The highlight of which would be the episode I saw where there was a villain who had been genetically engineered to maximise his ability to spin a top. Despite this, this is not the stupidest show designed to sell toys this decade…

With the seven year fad lifespan expired, they started a new Beyblade series this year, ready to lure a new generation into the exciting world of things that spin in one direction. More on that later. Or possibly less on that.

Here in the UK we had an odd introduction to Zoids. As well as the classic TOMY toys, in the 80s we also had specific mythos created for us in the pages of the “Spider-Man and Zoids” comic. It was also the first time I encountered Grant Morrison’s writing, as he wrote some of the Zoids strip.

TOMY made a concerted effort to relaunch the line in the late nineties, and this is the second anime series in support of that (99′s Chaotic Century being the first). However New Century Zero was the first to be dubbed into English and show in the West as Zoids/ZERO.

As they later dubbed other Zoids series, presumably they had some success, but like the 80s launch I don’t think it exactly set the world on fire the way Transformers did.