The “Animated Empire” of Post-modern Heroes: Japanese Anime on Italian TV in the Late 70s

From Pacific regions to European countries, mass communication’s history had been exposed to numerous revolutions in the late 70s and early 80s: new TV shows, networks, technologies, audio-visual products, and disciplines examining the relationship between culture and media appeared. In those years, the Japanese media industry exported a huge amount of animated series in European countries and, especially in Italy, Pacific heroes became dominators of private and public networks that broadcasted their stories daily with great success. This article aims at tracing factors that opened Italian purchasers and spectators to the new Pacific heroes and at defining this cultural and economic phenomenon as an “animated empire” built for the last forty years. These phenomena can be explained by summarizing political, economic, social, and technological events that occurred in both Japan and Italy in the 1970s, such as the energy crisis of 1973, the economic dynamism of Japanese animation studios and Italian TV networks in the late 1970s, and the post-modern revolution of Italian society. The article examines these converging factors and relies upon a research path that is not new to the Italian scene, with Marco Pellittieri, Saburo Murakami, Guido Travassi, Franco Colombo, Luca Raffaelli, and Roberta Ponticello among the leading exponents, some of whom are mentioned in the article. These researchers in the last two decades have associated the study of television as a cultural medium, made up of genres, formats and contents, with the historical and social analysis of the arrival and distribution patterns of anime in the Italian TV programming.