That Time Jessica Soho Talked About “Off-Brand Anime”.

You heard me right, there is an episode of the famous magazine show Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho wherein she tackled about off-brand anime.

Before we even go into the whole subject matter, let me give you an introduction on what even Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho (KMJS for short) for that matter and why they even had to cover such a topic like off-brand anime.

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KMJS, as we will call it from now on, is a television news magazine show hosted by Jessica Soho, a veteran newscaster from GMA Network. The show started airing on November 7, 2004 as a replacement/title change for her then ongoing show Jessica Soho Reports.

The show features various topics from the mundane (like food and whatever is trending in Philippine pop culture) to the insane (such as this one).

The show has been nominated for multiple awards from both local and international organizations like the New York Festivals in 2008.

The opening intro for the show in 2004

Ed Caluag, one of the greatest examples of “the insane” in KMJS.

This episode on off-brand anime aired on January 13, 2007. I would know that because my grade school and friends and I remembered the ad promoting the show, and would you know that the ad showed a glimpse of boob groping the first five seconds.

It’s not like they showed it in the morning where kids would be watching reruns of Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z, this was shown in the afternoons when kids would either play outside or mow down pedestrians on a pirated copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

You might be asking; why would a magazine show cover such a topic as off-brand anime? The answer is that the Philippine news cycle at the time, for some reason, covered off-brand anime being this “newfangled craze Pinoy kids are into” like how gaga people are over any K-drama in 2018.

This was also at a time when bootleg DVDs and VCDs are on the rise because official DVDs are just that expensive for the masses and since it’s bootleg, they’re not bound by MTRCB (the Philippine FCC)’s rules so anything goes in terms of content.

KMJS isn’t the first one to tackle this as TV Patrol dealt with this in one of the segments. I believe it was Noli De Castro himself, another veteran newscaster, who opened the eyes of boomer parents about this “phenomenon”, lumping it with “Gloria Arroyo hit piece number 423542535” and “victim number 275634785698 got stabbed/shot/whatever by x number of suspects”.

Think about it, people will now hate you even more now that they would think all or 90% of anime not shown on local TV is now considered “off-brand anime” or porn.

As a weeaboo, or a reader of my site’s content, you already know what off-brand anime is and I shouldn’t even expound on that. For the uninitiated, off-brand anime are shows that you don’t normally see in sites like Crunchyroll or on TV stations. You can see examples here on this top 10 video.

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The episode delves on the industry and how these DVDs get into Philippine shores. It also explains how watching off-brand anime as a youngster can give you psychological problems and can lead to being “sick in the head” aka “being a coomer”. The episode also involves two Filipinos who are involved in the industry in one way or another. Meet “Andro” and “Andrea”.

Andro is a veteran animator who has been in the industry for two decades as of the episode’s airing when back in 2005, he was given his first project into animating copulation, and he was getting paid for every second of intercourse he gets to animate.

His co-workers at the same production house also tend to be the scriptwriters and/or fellow illustrators. Andrea was also given an opportunity by some Japanese production company to deal with off-brand anime projects but unlike Andro, she gets to dub the “ah”s and the “ugh”s that you get to hear and get memed into oblivion.

As of 2007, she is currently dubbing Korean dramas and compared to those dramas, it was obviously easier to moan on the mic for a few seconds than to sync your lips to the video to match whatever the heck they were saying.

The main point this episode of KMJS hammers in is this, according to the write-up that was made back a month after the episode was aired: other nationalities will always use the Filipino’s skill and talent, even in degeneracy, to earn a quick buck.

The other point they hammer in, if you saw the episode, is this: off-brand anime is bad and cartoons are made for kids only, so if you participate in the production of these off-brand cartoons, you should feel bad and kill yourself for the greater good of mankind.

I’ve never seen the episode when it got aired but it became a topic between boys my age the day after it got aired, so much so that uttering the words “nice boyfriend” will earn you a slap in the face.

I finally got to view the episode eight years after it was aired, on YouTube, in glorious 240p.  Alas, that episode was taken down by GMA due to copyright issues, so unless GMA News and Public Affairs uploads KMJS featurettes from 2010 and below, you are out of luck.

The only remaining evidence of this episode.

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Now onto the reactions and complaints, as this is where the Pinoy weeaboo shines *ahem*MAPPA*ahem*. 

7monstrance from the Otaku Geirin forums reposted a blog post from someone who ironically named himself “Cloud Strife” about the episode.

Upon reading it, it’s obvious that whoever Cloud Strife is, he’s taking the “not all anime is for kids” and “not all off-brand anime is all about sex” stance and that it’s the pirates who are solely responsible for bringing filth to this land and Jessica’s piece about off-brand anime is tantamount to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Prncip and declared war onto the anime fandom at the time.

Seriously, that blog post gives off this big, dumb weeaboo vibe.

Quite an unhinged way to prove your point, Cloud. I do agree with some of the points you present but you can’t just say someone hates your fandom because they only covered the bad side of it.Think about the main audience of the show and do you really think they care about the sentiments of the minority? Short answer, they don’t.

I won’t even get into the issue of morals because that would just be going deeper into the rabbit hole but Filipinos are considered to be a “conservative” race so expect “outrage” if they see any form of degeneracy, be it 2D or 3D.

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Aside from this blogpost on a weeaboo forum, not much has been said about this episode years after that. I’m still dumbfounded why this episode isn’t one of the most remembered episodes of KMJS in its 16 year run.

Probably because the topic is either a) taboo or b) not that really interesting for the much wider audience as there are much more sensationalist crap on the way.

Overall, this is a great piece of Philippine “lost” media and a peek of what the rest of the country thought about the weeb community and anime in general outside of whatever the top two channels regurgitate.

I’m not sure if GMA will ever reupload that episode or keep it on the archives forever.