Nigorimasen! Blog

On Friday I attended a Naruto fan event with some members of my anime club that was held at Ubisoft’s San Francisco office to celebrate the upcoming release of “Naruto: Rise of a Ninja” for Xbox 360. It’s the first game in the franchise to be developed by a non-Japanese studio and we got to play the game with other fans, eat some snacks, and later go out to dinner with some of the employees. After playing a couple hours of it, I think it’s a pretty solid game.
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So I bought the newest issue of Anime Insider (November 2007 aka #50) today and was looking through it while recording another episode of my Talkshoe show when I came upon an ad for Pumpkin Scissors that had a $5 off coupon in it. ”Hmm,” I thought, “didn’t that come out this past Tuesday? Maybe I could use that…” But that plan was derailed when I started to read the fine print only to find this:

Wait, WHAT?!? “Coupon valid 6/29/07 - 8/31/07″? This is some pretty fucked up timing. The DVD the coupon is for and the magazine issue the coupon ran in both came out THIS WEEK and the coupon itself is already nearly two months expired!!! It’s almost like they challenging me to use it and see if it’ll still work!

This is adding insult to injury but I feel like I must point out the two typos that are also on the coupon. I’m placing the blame for these solely on ADV’s advertising division. I guess they can’t really go after me for scanning this because I’m technically not creating any “cpoies”…

I mean, really how rushed were they to get this particular ad out? ADV announced the license for this title in May so they must have had a good amount of time to prepare advertising for the series’ upcoming release and Best Buy is one of the few places where you can get the quarterly digest-sized issues of Animerica so the retailer is not inexperienced in dealing with anime promotions. Did the copy proofers just forget the change the dates and also miss the misspellings? I don’t have a clue…

I was walking around with my parents at Apple Hill today, looking at bunches of apples, pumpkins, and various crafts when I saw the headline “Manga comics losing longtime hold on Japan” in a copy of yesterday’s USA Today that was in a trash bin. So I made a mental note of it, checked out the article when I got home, and apparently there is a big problem of sorts. Sales fell the fifth consecutive year in 2006 and manga magazine sales are far from their 1995 peak of 1.34 billion with a figure of 745 million last year, about a 44% drop. The reporter noted that that high year was when Weekly Shonen Jump stopped carrying Dragon Ball. There were four likely causes given that primarily involve the habits of young Japanese people.
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AnimeOnDVD chief Chris Beveridge has previously let his opinions be known about things within the anime industry that annoy him such as trailers and locked down anti-piracy warnings but yesterday, he posted a more personal piece about English dubs. See, he’s been trying to introduce his kids to more challenging anime than Naruto and is having trouble finding many family-friendly English dubs. He profiles his experiences with Adult Swim’s redone dub of Lupin the 3rd, Phoenix and Castle of Cagliostro, each of which has “hell”’s and “damn”’s thrown into them (as well as a few “shit”’s in the case of Cagliostro). Chris thinks that the primary cause is an appeal to the teenage audience by the studios; he even posed the question of “Is the dub industry sacrificing the next generation of fans for the current ones?” as the sub-headline of his article.
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When I first saw the trailer for Red Garden, I said that I would be interested in watching it and now that I’ve seen some of it, I see that there is more drama and downer moments than the horror-action-oriented trailer conveyed. I got the first DVD in the mail last week after ordering it from ADV as a part of their 15th Anniversary Sale and also received Wild Arms v.1 as a free gift. The first thing I noticed when I popped in the disc was the larger-than-usual font size on the menus. The video itself has some grain on it when watching on an LCD monitor (similar to what I experienced with Tsubasa v.1) which is kind of sad considering this is a Gonzo title, but it doesn’t show up for the most part on a CRT television.
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The word ‘cabbit’ topped the list of Google’s “Hot Trends” list of search terms yesterday, October 1st. Apparently late-night host Jay Leno showed a classified ad for cabbits in his Headlines segment, where he highlights strange typos and other things viewers clip from newspapers and send into the show. The accompanying graph shows that it shot up at 7PM PDT and reached its peak at 8pm and fell by 9pm. Google Trends updates hourly so that spike likely includes the later part of the hour since Leno’s show doesn’t start airing on the East Coast until 11:34 PM [8:34 PM PDT]. I haven’t been able to find any video of it yet (the episode might show up in the iTunes Store in a week or so) but I thought it was kind of interesting that such a typo could spark an anime-related rise in search volume.