Service A pug-nosed thug kicks in an elderly storekeeper's face. Then he punches a young heroine in the eye and cracks her in the small of the back with a heavy bar stool. Her limp frame collapses to the ground as he stands over her with his gun drawn and pointed at her head. The shows fulfill the need for inexpensive programming and address a growing interest in marketing shows and products more narrowly to American boys, who have grown up with video games and remote controls. Many of the shows are imported directly from Japan, where the public tolerance for blood and guts on TV has traditionally been much higher than it is in the United States.
Fighting can be constant.
He knocks the correspondent onto his back and then kicks him so hard that the man flies across a field head first into rocks, presumably dead. At one point, he uses a blast of energy to make their bodies disintegrate. The anime programs' success with boys is attributed by many to their mirroring of Japanese video games, in which enemies are vanquished one after another in sometimes graphic detail. Jon Mandel, the co-managing director at MediaCom, a media services agency, said he thought the anime trend was about midway through its life cycle. It's one of those classic things where the coolest kid in a schoolyard likes something and other kids follow and eventually the programmers follow,'' he said.