(Source: www.icv2.com)
On the heels of Crayon Shin-Chan's triumphant return to Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network has released the time slot that the popular anime will occupy as it tries to achieve world domination.
Fans will have to set their VCR's or drink lots of coffee: Crayon Shin-Chan will air Monday through Thursday at 12:30 AM (E.T.,P.T.) for half-an-hour, starting Easter Monday, April 9th.
FUNimation, which distributes Crayon Shin-Chan in North America, has also announced that they are looking for promotional and merchandising opportunities for the little boy. FUNimation is taking the anime to the New York Licensing Expo in June to try and get some toy, plush and interactive games licensees.
FUNimation has also courted controversy with its English dub of the series. In its translation, FUNimation updated the humour and made it raunchier, to make the show more appealing to North American adults. This also necessitated diverging the English dub from the original scripts.
In all fairness to FUNimation, Crayon Shin-Chan was considered off-limits for foreign markets for many years, simply because a lot of the show's humour comes from the main character's mangling of Japanese grammar and usage, a type of humour that is very difficult to convey when changed to other languages.
Although fans of the original show harshly criticized the new English language version of Crayon Shin-Chan, FUNimation's tactic seems to have worked. Audience reaction to Shin-Chan's limited run on Adult Swim was overwhelmingly positive. It's not known whether the FUNimation dub will make it onto subsequent DVD releases.
Crayon Shin-Chan has been running almost continuously on Japanese television since April 13th, 1992. It was originally created as a manga by Yoshito Usui in 1990, and adapted for TV two years later. The main character, officially called Shinnosuke Nohara in the script, has been called "Bart Simpson on steroids." The show, and the anime, regularly depicts the five-year-old boy dropping his pants, sampling his father's beer and ogling the centerfolds in his father's adult magazines.
As website JapanZone observes about the anime, "His long-suffering parents are not much better and are usually shown indulging in vices of their own. It is often pointed out that the materialism and aimlessness of young Japanese today stems from the attitudes of their parents. Shin-Chan seems to embody that kind of theory."
Fun Fact: North America isn't the only place that thinks Crayon Shin-Chan isn't necessarily for kids. The anime has also aroused the ire of parents' groups in Japan, which claims the main character sets a bad example for children.