This week's interesting poll was suggested by 8-3. I like their examples, so I'm just gonna quote them here:

Hoshi no Samidare
The manga was released between 2005 and 2010, while the anime was released in 2022.
In the manga, people have flip-phones and even chunky CRT televisions, which is pretty normal for 2005.
In the anime adaptation, they have smartphones and flat-screen televisions.

Magic Kaito
This manga originally started in 1987. There is an anime adaptation that aired between 2014 and 2015.
Once again, consumer technology was updated to reflect what was considered the latest at the time.
However, they also updated the character profiles to reflect the newer time period. Many of the characters are high school students, so instead of being born in the 1970s, they were now born in the 1990s.

You can submit poll ideas here
http://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=3903

Previous Poll Results:
Question: Where are you from?
Choices:
North Africa - votes: 133 (4.1%)
South Africa - votes: 27 (0.8%)
East Asia - votes: 75 (2.3%)
South Asia - votes: 115 (3.5%)
Southeast Asia - votes: 271 (8.4%)
Central America - votes: 28 (0.9%)
North America - votes: 999 (30.8%)
South America - votes: 333 (10.3%)
Eastern Europe - votes: 342 (10.5%)
Western Europe - votes: 709 (21.8%)
Middle East - votes: 102 (3.1%)
Oceania - votes: 111 (3.4%)
There were 3245 total votes.
The poll ended: June 10th, 2023 8:11am PDT

English speaking countries, no surprise there

A just ruler amongst tyrants

I'm alright with an update for some, but...

I had reservations before I saw the Urusei Yatsura reboot; cellphones DO ruin scripting and the ability to suspend disbelief. But it's a silly comedy rather than some psychological or drama where your tension needs to be up & down like a regular heart beat.
People can get mad watching a horror movie where someone does something obviously stupid
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't an entire class you can take in college for writing around cellphones etc

"I thought I heard something" turns into
oh! my doorbell camera send me a feed and police picked up the guy an hour later

Same as the manga's original setting if this is an either-or as some stories full-on lose their cohesion if taken out of their original setting. Boogiepop and Others (Novel) and Banana Fish stopped making a lick of sense in their new (rush-job) anime due to "modernization". The former explored post-bubble-burst paranoia, this is why the teens are all so burned out as they are about to enter a raptured market, and the rise of tech. The secondary protagonist Nagi for example stood out as an internet/tech wizard in the 90s. Any kid with a smartphone can now do her function. That even lead to a lesser focus on her. Cool. The other features the actual mafia that simply doesn´t exist like that in the late 2010s and Vietnam is needed to be the MK Ultra-ish origin of the drugs.

The Punisher was successfully grafted onto the endless wars on terror and Parasyte´s anime didn´t need to be set in the 80s/90s so not all adaptations have to keep their modern period settings. The original Death Note plot has to though to name an example. Modernized surveillance starts to break down its logic somewhat fast and Light also got more tools to play with in the 2020s. Settings based on the Victorian era or WW 1&2 can be palpable to consumers of today but not the 70s to 00s. Give me a break. Even Japan has 80s nostagia! Yakuza Zero, etc.

So a case-by-case basis that starts with a setting analysis. Iron-man is a tech hero and needs to go with the times. Tokyo Babylon needs to stay in the 80s. That anime "adaptation" better stay dead.

I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

I am pretty surprised! I thought for sure it would be a landslide, but there are ~15% of people who would change it.

I voted to keep it the same. For me it comes down to the fact that a lot of things written back in the day reflect that time period. The sudden updates in time period would make things feel off in terms of cultural norms or even the events referenced. That, or they'd need to shoehorn and dance around things. I'm also a bit of a purist in the sense of if it's not broken, don't fix it.

I will say, in the examples given, the changes aren't too extreme. 2005 and 2022 could reasonably be swapped out without much notice and I think switching the tech in that case wouldn't be a big deal. 1987 and 2015 though is another story. A cell phone in a lot of old TV shows and movies would solve all the MCs problems, lol.

http://i.imgur.com/LxhWm.jpg (will reformat this some day…)

Ideally the same time period. There may be things in the story that would only make sense at the time like missing each other at the meeting place because they didn't have mobile phones.

Character settings might not make sense for the time, too, like maybe still dressing like it's the '80s-'90s (I know they're back, but trust me the clothes were much baggier back then). Although, changing what makes the character recognizable can be off-putting, too, like changing Vash's hairdo in the Trigun remake.

Even worse is if there is a character who has a parent/grandparent with well-defined settings like being a prominent figure somewhere between the early 20th century and WW2. If the story's set to the now, that would either mean their parent/grandparent had a kid either at a very old age or as a ghost. (Looking at you, Lupin III.)

If the story is future-proof, though, I wouldn't mind.

The early bird may have caught the early worm, but the late worm survived!!

I answered this poll by imagining if Glass Mask was made into anime, I think I would prefer to make it stay into the timeline. There's just this '70 or '80s vibes on that manga that resonate very well with the story. It's a world without social media, when TV shows or series weren't as developed as now.. The MCs were all started as an actor in theatre industry. The story focused on conflicts within the theatre/performance industry. If they adapted it into the current modern world, it won't fit in, I think.

However, there are some titles that I wouldn't really mind if adapted to our current modern settings. HunterxHunter, Sailor Moon Crystal, and even Detective Conan are some of them.

Literally why would you update the techology in an adaptation? Not only that may ruin the setting, plot and cohesion of the whole story, it could also be tricky to impliment correctly. Like, if you update the techonology but the social aspect is still the same, therefore outdated, it could create a huge problem. It just seems stupid to me.

-Sincerely, six angry cats in a trench coat

I'd say it depends.

Some stories need a sense of familiarity and lose nothing from a facewash, so those may be updated, and I'd dare say must.

Other stories, however, depend heavily on their own time period and don't work in more modern times unless the argument is heavily edited, which is not easy to pull off well.

For any story that doesn't fall in those categories, you should check the pros and cons in a case-by-case basis.

I'd oppose it in all cases, even when the setting is inconsequential. I haven't read the example series, but I think if I had read them I might be rather disappointed to see the anime do away with older technology - I'm quite nostalgic and value appearances (good-looking, atmospheric settings, furniture, clothing and sundries) almost as much as plot so I wouldn't be able to overlook a complete change in time period. Older series are attractive partly for the now obsolete gadgets - I live with mobile phones and flat-screen TVs, so they're somewhat less interesting.

There are several series which wouldn't work with more technology - e.g. Detective Conan. How many cases involve landlines, answering machines, faxes or payphones? Those just aren't as common now. Not to mention the seemingly universal lack of CCTV or building alarms and rarity of mobile phones (which, when they appear, are always flip versions), and no modern methods of tracking criminals by triangulation or finding their IP address. Mouri (and Conan) might not have much work in a digital age.

...Hop!

I'm not opposed to updates. I've actually seen a couple western TV series set in the 90s, when the source material was set in the 80s. Made sense. It made it more relatable for the next generation, didn't change the technology too much / break the plots / change the culture too drastically, and hey – the 90s was trending when these were being produced & aired.

I do think that keeping it the same (or shifting it only a few years further, i.e. to include authentic cultural milestones or technology that hadn't quite happened yet in the original) is usually the right choice.

Trying to give harsher ratings to series on my lists.

I don't mind updating their technology to modern items. For example, in Return of the King, instead of Gondor using mountaintop fires to relay a message to Rohan, it would have been better for the story to have Gandalf use a smartphone instead.

Actually, the question has situational answers. For example, some stories cannot have a smartphone. Such a device with its camera and ability to secretly record audio and transmit/receive photos of far away destinations would alter the plot, thus the story must not be modernized to have smartphones. Regardless, the use of smartphones in the anime might be done (and logic ignored) because of sponsorship and advertisers. The main TV station partner along with the print publisher may have negotiated advertising tie-in products in advance of the anime publication date. In return, the advertiser may have fronted part of the advertising fee to go towards production of the anime. In such cases, a smartphone must appear in the anime and be used in a positive way. Thus, product advertising standees or anime advertising posters can be published of a major character holding the smartphone.

I'm fine with it as long as the time period has nothing to do with the story itself. So, say, Parasyte's "modern" update wasn't bad, though the entire adaptation was so underwhelming that I was left wondering if there was any point in switching out the newspapers for iPads and the gakurans for blazers.

However, stories that are explicitly set in their time periods where the time period is a crucial part of the story (Tokyo Babylon and its sequel X/1999 for instance) shouldn't be updated because you'd be detracting from the actual story that the original manga wanted to tell.

But, yeah, if you're going to update something, at least put some effort into making the adaptation, well, good. Though I guess this goes for any adaptation.

Sometimes a technology update can work, sometimes it can't. And even when it can, it's supposed to be an adaptation to another medium, not another time. I think there are some things lost in translation when the time period changes.

I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

If it doesn't drastically alter the plot, then modernization shouldn't be much of an issue surely. It's sometimes annoying to already existing fans of the work, but newcomers to the more recent adaptation won't really mind, and sometimes attracting new members to the fan base should be prioritized.

Urusei Yatsura (2022) did this really well in my opinion.

Hmm, to me it’s kinda difficult.

For example, I’ve never read the original Banana Fish manga, so the time period update didn’t really bother me, but I have seen the artwork and I do like the fact that they updated the look of the characters. Art is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eyes, I much prefer the updated art of the anime.
Same goes for the Dororo adaptation, but that story only upgraded the art, not the setting.

So I guess I don’t mind so much the art update and the time period update only if it’ll be inconsequential.