shadzar wrote: they think everything must fit with the attention span of children, like your goldfish example, and most children these days are ALLOWED to have that kind of attention span because all the tech they are flooded with and playing Ash Ketchum and having to catch each new device when it comes out.
That actually runs counter to both what studies have turned up and the hard won experience of the poor, intrepid bastards out there who set out to make kid's entertainment. Within the industry it's a mode of thinking that was forced into extinction, buried under the corpses of a thousand long dead failures of the form. People tried flash and sizzle back in the '70s with Sesame Street and while that show became something of a cultural institution, it also didn't succeed at the level its creators hoped it would, in large part because their experience was in work for advertisements and as it turns out, Mr. Rogers was right all along: assuming kids have short attention spans and throwing too many elements into the mix "just to keep things moving" is one of the most damaging things you can do to your show. If you run things shorter than 10 minutes or so and never give kids a chance to properly integrate new information, you can totally lose them and never, ever get them back, because they'll just go back to thinking about whatever it was that last made sense before you tried distracting them with your anarchic bullshit. The younger the kid, the more conservative you actually have to get with the novel elements, which is why Blue's Clues is about a blue dog in a blue house who hangs out with one person at a time and also pretty much the most wildly successful kiddie show ever.
So, yeah, I know it's fun to blame the industry and not the audiences, but here's the grim truth of the matter: people like things to make sense and they are actually conservative with their attention. When your hot new crazy show fails to hold onto viewers, it is not just because they decided they didn't like your show and deactivated like robots until the next new show they can reject comes on. It's because they had a choice: Watch your shit that they aren't sure they'll want to really invest in, or go back to watching CSI. In other words, the problem isn't that people have short attention spans, it's that in a very real way they have very long attention spans and will fuck around on Facebook or watch Seinfeld until either the heat death of the universe or until you finally come up with a show that they can't ignore.
So why is anime so short then if people like familiarity? Because people already get their does of familiarity from Naruto, One Piece, and DBZ, the shows that were lucky/good enough to break through and grab their spot in the mental queue. The short shows survive by scooping up what little money there is to be made by keeping production costs reasonable and being part of the product churn that naturally surrounds a hit driven industry.
