Here’s a list I spent some time with recently: Wiki’s List of highest-grossing media franchises. Being Wiki, there’s no telling how accurate it is, but I will note that there are an enormous number of notes and references. So I’ll take it as accurate enough.

The list is interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly for information on the high-grossing franchises I’ve never heard of, which are quite a few.

Most of them are Japanese: anime, manga, even franchises whose most profitable expression is pachinko machines. As far as I could tell from my years in Japan, pachinko parlors were insanely bright, intensely noisy places to throw away money. But I was just a barbarian outsider. Apparently the machines are branded, and the branding is big business.

Take Fist of the North Star which, originating way back in 1983, would have been around when I was in Japan. I’d never heard of it until today. Though starting as manga, the franchise has enjoyed nearly $16.8 billion in pachinko machine sales, plus a few billion more in manga and other games.

Pachinko, incidentally, comes up 13 times on the list. Most of those are Japanese franchises, but not all. There have been $2.85 billion in Disney Aladdin pachinko (and arcade) machines sold. Spider-Man pachinko machines are popular to the tune of $308 million in sales, and Tomb Raider has sold $300 million.

I was curious how many of the franchises I’ve supported, either for myself or my children, so I counted: more than I would have thought, about 50. That includes mostly through ticket sales, as well as small-screen viewing (at least occasionally), but also the quarters I spent on Pac-Man and Space Invaders, and things my daughters watched that I never would, such as Sailor Moon and Dora the Explorer.

Mass-market entertainment’s pervasive. Even when your tastes tend to run to less successful shows.