Anime's Media Mix
2012 book by Marc Steinberg
Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan is a 2012 book by Marc Steinberg, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book describes the media mix and media convergence around anime.
Contents
Part I describes media convergence around Astro Boy, which the author referred to as the "tipping point" of media convergence in Japan.
"Limiting Movement, Inventing Anime" is the initial chapter and describes the development of anime, and how pre-anime forms of entertainment like kamishibai helped media mix strategies develop. The marketing around the Astro Boy episode "The Time Machine" is the subject of "Candies, Premiums, and Character Merchandising: The Meiji-Atomu Marketing Campaign," the subsequent chapter. The book describes the chocolate products made by Meiji Co. Using imagery in commercial products is the subject of "Material Communication and the Mass Media Toy," the third chapter.
Part II describes media convergence around Kadokawa Shoten. The fourth chapter, "Media Mixes, Media Transformation," describes how the company used the same marketing strategies in anime with books. The way the fanbase of media alter the dynamic around a media series is explored in "Character, World, Consumption," the fifth chapter.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2012 book by Marc Steinberg. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q124650824. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anime's Media Mix” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.