Follow The Leader / Anime & Manga

• While there were waves of TV anime releases in the US in the 60s and 80s, anime was largely an underground movement in the States before the success of Power Rangers, which led companies to look for more Japanese material to localize in 1995, including Ronin Warriors, Sailor Moon, Eagle Riders, Teknoman, and Dragon Ball. The Pokémon phenomenon several years later advanced it further, resulting in the localization of not just more Mons-flavored shows, but also the Shōnen genre in general. American TV producers have tried to cash in on this as well, but, not wanting to pay for an existing series, create their own. For proof that this rarely ever works out, look no further than Dragon Booster. One "American anime" that did find success, however, was Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• The success of The Animatrix paved the way for direct-to-video anime anthologies of popular Western franchises, animated by different well-known studios. So far, Batman got in the act with Batman: Gotham Knight and Halo with Halo Legends. Dead Space and Dragon Age have also followed suit.
• Attack No. 1 was the first anime to feature a feminine sports team. Its follower Attacker You!, rehashed its formula, added a healthy dose of comedy and ecchi humor, and turned it into an 80's version which gained quite some popularity.
• The runaway international success of Attack on Titan led to the creation of other post-apocalyptic-world-overrun-by-hideous-monsters shows like Deca-Dence and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. Also, the PS4 / PC / Xbox One game Extinction's premise of playing as a warrior trained to defend what's left of humanity from giant creatures, leaping around to pull this off, is more than a little similar to Attack on Titan's.
• Beastars has a similar basic premise to Zootopia. A modern world filled with anthropomorphic animals where carnivores and herbivores live together in the same city and both works have a friendship/relationship between a rabbit and a canid (fox vs wolf) as well. Beyond that, the two works sharply diverge in story focus, theme and tone.
• Black Clover is a highly derivative work, noticeable by avid shounen readers very quickly that it takes chunks of the ideas behind Naruto, Fairy Tail and The Seven Deadly Sins to mix them together and come up with a plot of their own. It has an Expy plot of Naruto, dumb but determined and social pariah main character decides that he wants to get the highest rank in his country, another of the Fairy Tail guild, down to even similar HQs and settings similar to Deadly Sins.
• Cowboy Bebop has spawned several impersonators, notably Black Cat.
• Doctor Slump has a follower of sorts in "Cybot Robotchi" AKA "Robby The Rascal". Both feature a horny, awkward Bungling Inventor with a Punny Name living in a small town in the middle of nowhere populated by weird people and animals, who creates a robot with huge powers but the mindset of a kid (and a lot of other silly and bizarre inventions). Hilarity Ensues, etc.
• Dragon Ball's impact on Shonen manga is, well... impressive — to say the very least, its influence now impossible to not see in almost any work in the subgenre. Although not the first employ the vast number of the tropes its most associated with, it became the de facto face of them. To this day, Shonen, and various Anime in general that use elements from, pay homage, or parody, this series and continue its legacy. For proof, one need only look as far as these three anime — often considered the most current and direct of its spiritual successors: Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach.
• Ghost in the Shell was a massive influence on the later Cyberpunk genre, and inspired several futuristic action/sci-fi works such as The Matrix, Oni and Perfect Dark.
• Grenadier follows Trigun almost to the letter.
• The success of Dirty Pair and Bubblegum Crisis in the mid-late 1980's led to a wave of Girls with Guns anime, often episodic shows which involved teams of good-looking women, top-secret missions, intense fight scenes, and fast car chases. Examples include the You're Under Arrest! franchise, as well as Gunsmith Cats, Burn Up!, Michiko & Hatchin, and Gunslinger Girl. While it is not as common as back then, they are still being made into the 2020s, with Lycoris Recoil a recent example.
• The term "Moe" was coined in the mid-to-late '90s, and many other shows had moe elements, but K-On! was the first instance of an entire show being described as such, and was a big enough hit that it spawned a wave of other "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" shows.
• Manga duo Fujiko Fujio gained success with Little Ghost Q-Taro, which inspired a boatload of imitators following the formula, many of them from the Fujiko duo themselves. The best-known and the longest-running of that is Doraemon, which itself inspired imitators.
• The surprise success of Love Hina, a manga about a loser who, through hard work, learns martial arts, becomes successful, slowly wins the women in his life, and finally gets to marry his first love, gave rise to a ton of low-quality Harem Series where a loser meets several women who immediately fall in love with him for no clear reason.
  • Tenchi Muyo! preceded Love Hina, and Tenchi itself was preceded by Ranma ½, which was preceded by Urusei Yatsura, which can reasonably be called the originator of the Harem genre.
• If something in the Otokonoko Genre follows the premise of a "guy infiltrates an all girls school in drag, Harem disguised as Yuri ensues" there's a good chance it was inspired by, if not ripping off, Otoboku - Maidens Are Falling For Me.
• Pretty Cure, has done this three times:
  • To attract fans of Bandai's own Aikatsu! franchise, HappinessCharge Pretty Cure! not only used cards that contained clothing inside as the collectible item, but included two songs the Cures sing to purify their enemies^note  "Shiawase Gohan Ai No Uta" and "Innocent Purification".
  • Go! Princess Pretty Cure was made to cash in on the successes of Frozen and Sofia the First, which became more popular than Pretty Cure in 2014, by focusing on a princess theme. ^note Ironically, Bandai did release merchandise of both Frozen and Sofia the First in Japan.
  • KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode seems to be this to PriPara, which made more money than Pretty Cure in 2016. There are insert songs sung by the characters Once per Episode, segments at the end combining live action and animation ^note  PriPara's ending themes, except "Mune Kyun Love Song", "Rainbow Melody" and "Growin' Jewel", have live action clips in them, while Pretty Cure uses live action cooking segments that the characters commentate on., main characters with similar hairstyles ^note  with Cure Whip having similar hair to Laala, Cure Macaron having similar hair to Sophie and Aroma and Cure Chocolat having similar hair to Hibiki and a mascot who is not child age.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Originally, Double Team in the anime used the rapid afterimage trick, after Naruto became popular, now it works like Shadow Clone Jutsu. Note that Double Team is called "Kage Bunshin" (Shadow Clone) in Japan. If it wasn't more obvious, Ash's Froakie liked to smash Water Pulse balls (which were never balls but rather wave attacks) into foes just like Naruto uses his Rasengan.
  • The immense popularity of the anime series lead the creation of many other Mon series inspired by videogames or toys, such as Digimon Adventure, Monster Rancher, Medabots, Bakuten Shoot Beyblade, among others.
  • The anime's success also lead to a boom in anime adaptations of video games in the early 2000s, including Bomberman Jetters, Kirby: Right Back at Ya! and Sonic X.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica wasn't the first-ever Darker and Edgier Magical Girl series, but in its wake came a wave of darker MG shows, including Day Break Illusion, selector infected WIXOSS, and Yuki Yuna is a Hero. It's gotten to the point where some fans automatically assume that an upcoming darker Magical Girl anime is "a Madoka ripoff" (whereas a lighter MG show is "a Pretty Cure or Sailor Moon ripoff").
• Sailor Moon inspired a deluge of shows based on the Magical Girl Warrior model that it popularized, at the same time that it followed the trail blazed by the same animation studio's earlier Cutey Honey, which both preceded it by nearly two decades.
  • This then came full circle when the final TV series of the original Sailor Moon anime, Sailor Stars, was followed in its time slot by a reboot of Cutey Honey called Cutey Honey F (or Flash), which used many of the same staff and subsequently came to be regarded by many as a Sailor Moon knockoff.
  • In the same vein, Fushigi Yuugi practically set the trend for the genderflipped Harem Genre. It also brought Mikos into the mainstream.
• Saint Seiya kickstarted the "pretty boys in armor" subgenre, such as Ronin Warriors, which is pretty much Saint Seiya based on Feudal Japan, and Legend of Heavenly Sphere Shurato. The latter series was so much like its insperation that it had quite a tough time differentiating itself from its hugely popular predecessor and got Overshadowed by Awesome.
• Super Robot Genre shows like Tetsujin 28 already had their own success, but it was Mazinger Z that solidified the concept of piloting a robot (via a cockpit within its head, rather than remote control) and started a revolutionary trend that attracted toy makers and captivated children. Such influence would eventually lead to all sorts of landmark works that keep the said genre alive and relevant to this day. Pretty much every Humongous Mecha show created after 1972 owes something to Mazinger Z, either because they copied the tropes established by this series or because they tried averting them, subverting them or deconstructing them.
  • Getter Robo was the first Combining Mecha and Raideen almost was the first Transforming Mecha. Both concepts have been imitated, subverted, ripped off, deconstructed and reconstructed countless times since the seventies by countless mecha shows. Some examples are: the Robot Romance Trilogy (Combattler V, Voltes V, Daimos)^note Admittedly the Robot Romance Trilogy had the same director as Raideen, Tadao Nagahama, Zambot 3, Daitarn 3, UFO Warrior Dai Apolon, Space Runaway Ideon, Space Warrior Baldios, GoLion, Dangaioh, the Brave Series''...
  • One of the most shameless Mazinger rehashes was 1983's Psycho Armor Govarian, which was a case of Mazinger creator Go Nagai copying himself.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam started another trend in the Humongous Mecha shows, creating the so-called Real Robot Genre and being imitated by dozen of shows, mainly in The '80s. It set the stage for every Real Robot show to follow from Armored Trooper VOTOMS to Exo Squad to BattleTech. Examples include: Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Century Orguss, Heavy Metal L-Gaim, Panzer World Galient, Fang of the Sun Dougram, Patlabor...
    • Macross itself spawned a few imitatiors of the "Transforming mecha vs. Alien Invasion" concept. Two of them were so much like it that Harmony Gold was able to combine all three into Robotech.
  • The Estrogen Brigade created by Gundam Wing's Cast Full of Pretty Boys have lead many other mech shows to include Bishonen character designs. It's telling that Sunrise had the respective character designs of Code Geass and Mobile Suit Gundam 00 character be created by Clamp and Yun Kouga, who have previously worked on shojo romance works.
  • After the runaway success of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a lot of anime were released which revolved around a world where an apocalyptic event happened a few years ago, and now psychologically unbalanced kids are forced to pilot giant robots to defeat alien invaders. Often these will involve religious imagery and a conspiracy to cover up how dangerous piloting a mecha actually is. Examples include Gasaraki, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, Brain Powerd, Argento Soma, Betterman, Geneshaft, Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor ^note Fafner was produced by the same people so the leaders follow themselves with this one, RahXephon, Bokurano, and to a certain extent Martian Successor Nadesico. Tropes Are Not Bad however, as many of these shows are absolutely beloved by the mecha fandom and the Evangelion connections are much looser and more vague than a trend chaser wave might suggest.
  • An interesting subversion of this comes from King of Braves GaoGaiGar. While a lot of Super Robot series following Evangelion tried to copy its style, whether it be in character drama or enemy designs, GaoGaiGar was almost a violent throwback to the genre's roots drawing much from Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, Kotetsu Jeeg and the like. It has since left its mark on the genre, helping to keep the popularity of the Hot-Blooded hero type that such series became famous for.
  • Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru and SD Gundam's respective successes lead to a brief flood of shows with mecha that used super-deformed proportions throughout the nineties. Mado King Granzort, Lord of Lords: Ryu Knight, Whirlwind! Iron Leaguer, Karakuri Kengō Den Musashi Lord, the NG Knight Lamune & 40 franchise, RPG Densetsu Hepoi and Gulliver Boy were all examples of this.
• Neptunia was a video game^note it later received a short manga and anime that centered around Console Wars AS A VIDEO GAME!, with large amounts of Fanservice. A manga/anime series entitled Aoi Sekai no Chuusin De was created which has a similar premise, but with several differences. There's significantly less Moe, the characters are based on video game characters/franchises themselves instead of companies, and the console war is more specific, focusing on Sega vs. Nintendo.
• Although studios like Toei had been adapting classics of Western children's literature into anime feature films for decades, it was the success of Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater, known for its slow-paced but beautifully animated adaptations of Western literary classics and for early involvement by future giants of animation like Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, that created a vogue for other examples of the genre on TV through the '70s and '80s and into the '90s, including Belle and Sebastian, The Secret Garden and The Little Prince. Nippon Animation itself expanded on the niche they popularized through other series based on Western kid-lit such as Future Boy Conan and Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena has at least one imitator, Shitsurakuen. It's about a tomboyish young girl who gets accepted to an exclusive private school and wears shorts instead of a skirt with her uniform (although they came with the uniform, to her confusion). She sees herself as a knight defending the oppressed girls of the school, who are used as weapons/objects by the boys, especially the head of the student council. There is much Ho Yay and Les Yay to be had, too. At least here there's a sci-fi reason for the weapons coming out of the girls' chests: the whole campus is a 3-D stage for a video game.
• Urusei Yatsura, created a new vogue for romantic comedies rife with wackiness and huge casts of characters, including Tokimeki Tonight, High School! Kimengumi, and Sasuga no Sarutobi, not to mention "Magical Girlfriend" series like Video Girl Ai, Ah! My Goddess and Rizelmine. Creator Rumiko Takahashi herself later revisited the genre with Maison Ikkoku and Ranma ½.
• As the manga Komi Can't Communicate gained popularity, other Romantic Comedy manga based around the premise of a girl with a disability/disorder/problematic quirk being helped out by their male classmate who has feelings for them began popping up, some notable examples being The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses and Dignified Asleep Saeki.
• Monster Musume launched a whole series of popular 'monster girl' shows following a couple of years later (about the time it takes to get an anime up and running). One of the most blatant is the light novel and later manga Monster Musume no Oisha-san, or Monster Girl Doctor (even the title is similar), which spawned an anime adaptation in July 2020. It's about a doctor in a medieval fantasy world with a lamia assistant (voiced by Saori Onishi, Doppel's VA) who cures the ailments of several monster girls. Let's see: we have a tomboyish harpy with a short name and who wears minimal, a blonde centaur knight, a patched-up flesh golem, a shy-looking purple-eyed cyclops, a mermaid, a mature-looking voluptuous arachne (whose name even references arachnids thrice!) and a petite dragon girl (voiced by Atsumi Tanezaki, Lilith's VA, and they're both petite monster girls). The fact that the author outright used Daily Monster Girl as inspiration for their work, along with how Z-ton, who did some parts of the 4-koma anthology, is the novel art illustrator and manga artist for Monster Girl Doctor, likely is a large part of why there's so many similarities.

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