p2pnet - rss feed: FCC cats rips off Doraemon
p2p news / p2pnet: What’s the difference between the blue and green cats on the right?
Not a lot. Except the green cat is supposed to be a US Federal Communications Commission creation and should have ears (as below) and the blue feline is Doraemon (ドラえもん) Hiroshi Fujimoto’s famous robo-cat which appeared in January 1970, says Wikipedia.
In the pic below, Doraemon is warning kids to look both ways before crossing street. Note the way Grimace’s badly superimposed ‘Go’ obscures the bell that’s on Doraemon’s collar.
Meanwhile, 
Grimace, as we’ve called the FCC’s cat (go to Kidszone and check the animation at the top of the page on the left to see why) is telling kids all about FCC-related stuff. Note the near mirror imaging of the arms and legs.
Grimace, or Broadband, as the FCC calls it, is such an obvious rip-off of Doraemon, a Reader’s Write points out, that it’s embarrassing.
Blatantly used a bastardization of some one’s work
It may be interesting to note, that the character used by the FCC is a blatant (and low quality at that) copy of a very famous Japanese Manga/ Anime charactor “Doraemon”. As a reporter and writer for a Japanese PC magazine, I have been surprised at how little press it has received overseas.
While I know that this character is not well known in the North America and the UK, it is a VERY well known across ASIA, Spain and Italy, as well as Central and South America.
Interestingly enough, the artist, as well as the rights owners (Shoggakan and TV Asahi) have lodged a complain in the Winter of ‘04, to the FCC, only to be told:
“We’ve never heard of your character, and our character is unique”
Now, let be diverge a moment, to take a look at the character:
http://skygarden.shogakukan.co.jp/skygarden/owa/solrenew_detail?isbn=4092270119&jcode=91107
OK, the FCC version orange and striped (original is blue), and has ears (the original used to have ears, until it was eaten off by Rats), and the instead of a pocket, it has a really dumb looking FCC logo on it’s stomach. To put it simple, it looks like a child’s rendition of the image.
Theft of story ideas and characters have been rampant across the world for a long time, as can be seen in the Disney movies like Lion King (extremely similar to “Leo the Lion King”:Disney contacted the wife of Osamu Tezuka late in the production to get the ok and not get sued)and Atlantis (very similar to “Nadia of the South Sea”) etc… And of course the same can be said in Asia, including Japan (A famous Marvel comic character was made into a Japanese comic book without the proper ok, and was later OK-ed so a TV series based on the character could be made), too.
The problem comes, when an organization like the FCC blatantly used a bastardization of some one’s work, and when asked not to, tells the people to “sod off”. And to add insult to injury, it’s used as a character to “educate children”.
Interestingly enough, all requests by me for an interview, as well as an explanation have been ignored, and international calls made to the FCC, have fallen on deaf ears.
So does it mean that if you are part of the government, or have the cash to buy out the government, you don’t have to go by your own rules (Well seeing with what the government’s policy has been lately I guess you don’t)?
So I guess now the government is using thieves to say what we can and can not do, as well as to teach morals. Nice show guys!
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July 4th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Sorry, but to me the two characters don’t look that all that similar, other than they’re both cartoon cats. The body shapes are very dissimilar and I can easily see how the two designs could have been arrived at independently of each other.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
I agreed with you at first. But the collar and the outline of the hood are too much alike to dismiss. I smell a rat.
July 5th, 2006 at 3:55 am
I’m not sure we should be so quick to criticize. For a start, the overall body shape, and the gesture, and the bell around the neck are quite clearly a traditional characterization of a cat from China; check a google image search for “chinese lucky cat”:
http://tinyurl.com/s8m3c
however, the circle-in-a-circle face and the eyes as dots in circles, do seem to be unique, and therefore likely copied.
But art has through the ages been a matter of learning from others, whether it’s the renaissance “style” or rock’n'roll music. Are we to berate all but the first rap musicians for doing something that’s tangibly similar to another’s work? The fact is, that the alleged “copy” cat contains enough elements that are different, to make it clearly not the same as the other.
You could probably find a cartoon character with the same hands and feet, if you tried.
Oh, and Happy Independence Day to our American Friends, by the way.