Before Media Mix

This chapter traces the necessary conditions for emergent media mix systems, reaching back to the 1920s and leading up to the media mix that arguably emerged in full force with Astro Boy . The media model Kadokawa Haruki used is basically a transmission‐based, traditional mass‐media model: An array of connected commodities is centrally produced or coordinated by one corporation and then marketed and sent out to the largest possible audience. In many ways, Hankyu designed modern life in Japan. Yomiuri represents the national media‐industrial complex perhaps more than any other company in Japan in the twentieth century. The masked hero Gekko Kamen ( Moonlight Mask ) bridged the neon light of advertising, the moonlight illuminating his exploits, and the cathode ray light of the TV. The nuclear‐powered Astro Boy in his narrative and aesthetic design is eminently wellsuited to a media mix system that is founded in a system structured by an electric ecology model.