Pork Cutlets rues the victory of fanservice:

I’m here to ask, why are the good mindless action shows so underappreciated? Why don’t they dominate the damn market? Why aren’t new ones being produced every season? Why isn’t Golgo getting subbed for the love of god? These questions are the result of two episodes of the new Cobra OVA, which is all it took to make me wonder what the hell happened that the only good mindless entertainment anymore is based off original material that was written decades ago. I guess that leads me to the bigger question: why isn’t there an audience for series about badass men with ridiculous gadgets chasing after beautiful women with ridiculous hair? Is that not the pinnacle of entertainment? The man has a laser gun for an arm! Half of his tools are disguised as cigars!

Part of the problem is, Cobra OAV sucked (at least initially), and so did Golgo (in both incarnations). Its remake brought up blog entries which asked sacastically, "Can you see how much he enjoys it?". Very few liked the idea of a nastier Bond with less emotions.

But a bigger issue is, I suspect, the competitive pressure from live-action TV and cinema. Look at Black Lagoon, for example. Great series, but why is it an anime? What is anime about it? If I like anime, why would I want to watch that?

The above is easier to understand if I make explicit that I split anime and animation. Animated medium allows for awesome things like GiTS, and we're going to see more of that down the road of convergence with 3D. Thematically, however, it's a different animal yet again.

Obviously I look at the problem from outside of Japan, where they have a sprawling manga culture to underpin anime, and where anime and animation are one and the same. So for them it may make sense to have an animated action genre. Maybe. I really cannot second guess them. But for an anglospehric blogger and a statistically average consumer of English fansubs, it makes a lot of sense to pass upon Golgo. And the fansubbers react to that.

UPDATE in reply:

I really do understand why these shows don’t see the kind of success they ought to (in my mind), and why they aren’t being created in such quantities anymore, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Fair enough.