Bleach
From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.
Contents |
Original Concept
In 1952 the DuMont Network along with PGP (Proctor & Gamble Productions) co-produced a soap opera that was designed to highlight the trials and tribulations of the many stay-at-home mothers or that time. As was the case for many shows of the era, this show was to have been sponsored directly by Proctor & Gamble. However, the pilot episode, titled The New Oxydol Bleach Presents: The Our Home Sweet Home Hour Sponsored By Proctor & Gamble, was deemed unsuitable by company executives due to its unwieldy title and weakly drawn characters. Hoping to regain some of their losses, the program was quickly retitled Bleach and sold into syndication. About 150 episodes of this version of Bleach were produced during the 1950s; while the original master tapes have long since vanished, Proctor & Gamble executives sent kinescopes of the show to Japan around 1960 in exchange for several Honda 50 motorcycles.
Japanese Broadcast And Manga
After the sudden cancellation of Pokemon in 1997, TV Tokyo was forced to scramble to find a replacement show. According to company documents, a line producer remembered the old Bleach kinescopes, which were in cold storage at the time. After quickly transferring the program onto modern recording equipment and translating the original English dialog into rudimentary Japanese, the show was broadcast as P&G Burīchi. Despite (or perhaps because of) the poor video quality of the show and the almost hilarious mistranslation of the original scripts, the show became a cult phenomenon in Japan. Although P&G Burīchi was replaced by Yu-Gi-Oh in 1999, it had found a permanent niche in the Japanese market.
In 2001 Japanese manga publisher Shueisha began featuring a reimagined form of Bleach in their publication "Shonen Jump". In addition to the original characters, the writers added a young high school student who commented on the ghostly images filling his TV screen. This was considered a risky move at the time but it paid off, as sales of "Shonen Jump" rose to over 3 million in Japan and over 3 in the United States.
Bleach, The Anime
One of the few US copies of "Shonen Jump" somehow ended up in the office of an Adult Swim producer. Encouraged, he wrote about Bleach in his blog and talked about possible plans to turn Bleach into an anime. While there was almost no call for a Bleach anime in Japan (since they still had the original programs and the manga), the small but loyal Adult Swim audience agreed. As a result, animators in Korea were told to copy the manga frame-by-frame until it reached some sort of intelligible form. Actors were hired to voice the various characters, and the band Nirvana was hired to perform background music for the show. Although there were many production delays, Bleach finally debuted on both Adult Swim and Canada's CBC in 2006. Shockingly, the series did well enough that new episodes were ordered in 2007.
OH NO!!!
I got my new ninja outfit all dirty...how on Earth am I gonna get these stains out?
