I recently reviewed the manga series “Girl Friends” and, during my research of it, I noticed that the characters had voice actresses associated with them. I knew that Girl Friends had never had an anime adaptation so I was curious why this was the case. It didn’t take me long to discover that an audio drama of Girl Friends had been released in 2011. Being quite an obscure topic for Western manga fans, I decided to investigate.
To begin with, it is important to know the history of “Radio Drama” in order to understand modern audio dramas. The advent of radios allowed for the widespread broadcast of audio for the first time in history. In the early 1900s, radio dramas began to explode in popularity and many people such as Orson Welles, Rod Serling and more had prominent careers in the field. By the 1960s, radio dramas began to decline due to television. Radio dramas practically went extinct in the US and, while radio dramas have fared better in other countries, they have never recovered their former popularity.
Radio dramas are still produced in Japan today, albeit not as frequently as other media, and we have also seen audio dramas produced for CD (referred to as Drama CDs) although they have also been released historically on cassettes and vinyl. Many of these are based on manga and light novels and act as a cheap way to tell additional stories. They can also act as a way to gauge interest in an anime adaptation of a manga or light novel.
The quality of many of these releases is also up to debate. Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network spoke about how “the vast majority are fanservicey nonsense that don’t really add much to the stories“. He did point out a few examples of good or at least interesting Drama CDs but it appears that the old truth that the vast majority of any media is junk holds true with audio dramas.
The idea of releasing them in the West creates a baffling number of questions. How would you sell them and in what format? Would you rerecord the audio drama in English or would you keep the original Japanese audio? In the case of keeping the Japanese audio, would you also provide a booklet or a PDF file for the listener to read so they could understand the audio drama? Perhaps the most important question though, would enough people buy them to justify the cost of translating and releasing?
Audio dramas based on manga and light novels seem interesting but it seems unlikely that we will see many or even any released in the West in the future. Nonetheless, I would love to learn more about them and what impact they might have. Let me know any additional information you have on Drama CDs, if you have listened to any and what your thoughts are on the format.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!