This week, Best Buy is having a 50% off sale on select anime box sets. (I was tipped onto this earlier in the week from this thread on Cheap Ass Gamer but waited until now to write about it so as not to get anyone in trouble.) The titles being discounted are:
Tokko: The Complete Series - $12.49
Elfen Lied: Diclonius Report Thinpak- $15.99
Noein Complete Series Box Set - $17.49
Dragon Ball Z Season 4 Uncut Box Set - $19.99
Mars Daybreak Anime Legends Set - $19.99
Fullmetal Alchemist Season 2 Part 2 (ep. 41-51) - $19.99
Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Thinpak - $28.99
Samurai Deeper Kyo Complete with GBA game - $29.99 [game trailer]
These prices are also now up online while some of them already backordered. I’ll going to get Noein and Tokko for sure, and perhaps Elfen Lied, and pump up my Reward Zone points in the process while also snagging R.E.M.’s new album this week. Maybe I’ll get xxxHolic #1 as well…
P.S. A warning: the Eva thinpak discs lack the extras from the singles, something I found out during my interview with Sean McCoy who had done a couple episode commentaries for #20 and #26. I believe the Elfen Lied thinpak also lacks its previous extras.
For months, various industry commentators have said Japanese publishers had to change their strategies to combat wide fansub profileration and GDH has stepped up to the plate by announcing that two GONZO titles, The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter, will be put on three different streaming video sites (Crunchyroll, YouTube, and BOST TV) at the same time as their premieres next month. In my 2008 predictions post, I posited that a Japanese studio would release English-subbed episodes near simultaneously with its original airing - a statement I qualified at the time as a possible “crazy failure” but I’ll take wins however I can get ‘em.
The question now is how this will be implemented on each service. The highest free quality out of the three websites would seem to come from BOST but YouTube has a boatload more traffic and reach than the other two, mainly due to its embedding option. Crunchyroll is buddy-buddy with select publishers but pretty much everyoneelse hates them. I’m pretty sure the subtitle text will be the same across the uploads and hopefully someone fluent in Japanese (i.e. not me) will critique its accuracy compared to fansubbed efforts. I will likely check out episodes on each service when this rolls out in a couple weeks but you can react to this right now in my first poll in a while. Anyway, this is a great step in trying to get more official eyeballs that will hopefully convert into sales and I hope that it succeeds so other studios will do something similar.
A few days ago I received the first of four expected issues of PiQ magazine (produced by PiQ, LLC) and after reading most of it, I have to say I am already beginning to prefer it to Newtype USA, its previous anime- and manga-focused iteration. Those two subjects are still covered but the focus of more on a greater variety of entertainment including comics, video games, sci-fi, and American cartoons. For instance, there are features on Appleseed Ex Machina; Avatar, which I still haven’t seen despite many recommendations; Invasion U.S.A., a Marvel comic beginning next month; Code Geass; and the currently on hiatus Sarah Connor Chronicles. Read the rest of this entry »
Last month at AOD, I interviewed Sean McCoy after his Animation Industry Insight panel after about 45 minutes and last night I got around to uploading the video to Vimeo. I would have added subtitles or at least composed a transcript because the convention space was a bit noisy for the first half, and I might append said transcript later when I get the time, but right now I’m pushing this out the door since I have wanted to refer to it for a while in relation to industry trends and fan habits.
I hope you excuse my lack of prepared questions and the trouble I had in formulating them into something I could ask. It’s always odd for me to hear my own voice on tape and the stumbling made it worse during editing. As I gain more experience doing things like this, my delivery should improve as well as the quality of the questions.
Lucky Star’s first US volume got dated about three weeks ago and now we find out about the extras that limited edition purchasers expect to find inside the pretty art box come May 6th. The $35 ”upgrade” will yield you pack-ins in the vein of the Haruhi LEs but tweaked a bit: the opening theme and Konata character single CDs, a T-shirt version of Ryou-ou Gakuen’s winter girl’s school uniform that frankly looks kinda lame, and a chocolate cornet screen wipe that actually might be useful. The regular edition will still feature liner notes so you can understand the more obscure references as well as “The Adventures of Minoru Shiraishi” which may or may involve footage from the fan events he hosted.
Considering the Haruhi CD singles are individually priced at $10 each and T-shirts sell for about, you’re getting a bit of a deal. One question: will all the tees be the same size, e.g. large? If so, that may cause trouble for some buyers. I remember the FLCL Ultimate Collection included a postcard to send in for your free shirt but it took over a year and a month to finally get it in the mail so there’s definitely a tradeoff between speed and getting the right size.
The Japanese Schoolgirl Watch section of Wired Magazine highlights cute and/or strange items that are popular among the young crowd and March’s issue puts its spotlight on Miku Hatsune, the aquamarine-haired singing software mascot.
Miku Hatsune is one of Japan’s hottest new pop sensations. Since last August, the 16-year-old’s cute soprano voice has been near the top of the charts — the software charts. Hatsune, whose full name means “first tone of the future,” is a vocal-synthesizer app created by Yamaha and based on audio data sampled from anime voice-actress Saki Fujita. The program lets aspiring music nerds create pitch-perfect vocal tracks by simply entering the lyrics (in Japanese or English) and musical notes. The AI superstar can be heard singing dozens of tunes on YouTube. Strangely, though, no sign yet of “Mr. Roboto.”
There have been tens of thousands of re-renditions of anime and Japanese hits as well as originally composed songs. There is also a weekly updated NicoNicoDouga countdown of the most 50 most popular Miku “song videos”, a number of CD compilations of users’ creations, a poorly produced porn knock-off entitled Hatsune Miko (NSFW), a serialized manga running in Monthly Comic RUSH involving Miku, too many doujin to count, and plush dolls designed by that Nyoro~n guy.
So why aren’t Ren and Len Kagamine getting as much as attention? Is it the moe idol factor or simply because Miku was the first big hit? All I know is that I tried the software once and gave up because of my lack of musical training or sense of tone.
The latest TV schedule posted on the Adult Swim website reveals that Code Geass will premiere on the late-night block April 27th at 1:30am. That happens to be a week after the dub’s debut at New York Comic Con (April 18-20); the English version of Lucky Star will also be screened sometime during the convention.
Announced last December, the localization cast for Geass features many “stars” including Johnny Yong Bosch (Renton, Eureka Seven; Ichigo, Bleach) as Lelouch, Kate Higgins (Talho, Eureka 7; Sakura, Naruto) as C.C., and Yuri Lowenthal (Sasuke, Naruto; Alviss, MÄR) as Suzaku along with some lesser-known voices like Karen Stressman (Soifon, Bleach) as Kallen and Rebecca Forstadt (Rika Furude, Higurashi; Suiseiseki, Rozen Maiden) as Nunnally. Having a lot of talent does not guarantee a great dub, however. The morning after the episode airs, I’ll probably download it from Cartoon Palace and write some impressions but until then, I will attempt to catch up on the first season before the second season premieres in Japan next month. Ah, spring break is only two long weeks away…
There still hasn’t been a date announced for the DVDs but I think the first volume will be released some time in early summer, June/July - leaving the possibility for a promotion timed just before Anime Expo as was done with Haruhi - but that’s just some speculation on my part.
I saw the first episode of Pumpkin Scissors when it premiered in fall 2006 and found it marginally interesting but not enough to continue to the second episode. Recently I got around to watching the Volume 1 DVD that I had bought during RightStuf’s Xmas sale and I now feel the same way about the second disc: I’m kind of interested in the story but not enough to buy the next volume to find out. Read the rest of this entry »
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