192 Episodes Per Day?!?

Interesting article from JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) about the structure and trends of the anime industry, including an intersting statistic that in 2002, there were around 2700 time slots devoted to anime. I'm not sure whether the time slots are daily, weekly, perhaps weekly but with 2 seasons, or yearly?. If it's weekly, that'd mean 385 slots per day, if it's reduced by having 2 seasons, that's still 192 slots per day! If you can make any more sense of this statistic, please make a comment.

Some of the text describes 60 anime episodes per week in 2001 and 80 episodes per week in 2002. These jive with the ~100 new episodes per week number that I'd heard around 2002. However, there are so many reruns of often very old shows, that the actual number of total TV slots devoted to anime must be far greater than simply the number of new episodes per week.

Yeah, it's not really "news" since it's a few years old, but now that I have a blog, I can finally record these things.

Cost Per Episode

For a long time, I've been wanting to do a study of the cost structure for the production of Japanese animation and American cartoons. However, data is obviously hard to find, so I'll start with just trying to figure out what the total per-episode costs are. According to my memory, there are wilding varying accounts of the costs of American cartoons (which I will just call "cartoons" from now on) and Japanese animation (hereafter "anime"), with something like $150K to $1.5M per ep. for a cartoon and something like $15K to $30K per ep for anime. But I'm not sure that these numbers are accurate, nor do I remember where I've read them. Thus, I'll try to track and record numbers and references as blog entries whenever I find them.

Here are some I found after some cursory searching:

$1.5M per episode of "The Simpsons" according to an interview with David Mirkin
$400K per episode of "Ren & Stimpy" according to an interview with Billy West
$100K per episode of "Pokemon" according to a New York Times article (unclear if it's the cost to the American licensor or the production cost)
$500K per episode of an "average American cartoon" according to the same article
¥32.5M (~$300K) per episode of "Samurai 7" according to Anime News Network
$10-20K per episode for American licensing of anime according to BusinessWeek
¥400M (~$3.7M) for the whole series of "Eremantar Gerad" according to Anime News Network