New Year, New Anime Industry Crisis
Jan. 2nd, 2012 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerJust like the last time it happened, I first saw the news another anime (and manga) distribution company in North America was closing up shop signing on to a particular message board. I charged into the thread with part of me sort of hoping I hadn't seen what I'd seen in the title, but another part of me did have the feeling that this time, it made too much sense...
Even if Bandai Entertainment didn't have the absolute highest profile or the best reputation (leaving the original opening and closing songs out of their release of Zeta Gundam seemed to hobble them that way for years) among the North American anime companies (although they did seem good at getting their titles on TV), I always seemed able to find things in their catalogue that looked interesting. For a while, after the really sudden and shocking shutdown of Geneon (although I suppose there were some signs of cost-cutting there before the end that might have drawn more attention than they did) and the crumbling of ADV Films (one of their titles handed over to Bandai, although ADV did wind up reshaped under a new name), I had the somehow amused feeling they had managed to navigate through the crisis in the anime industry in standout shape... but then something like the problem that had hit them with Zeta Gundam seemed to bite hard, and all of a sudden they were always finding a new way for things to go wrong in the eyes of too many, whether it was just releasing DVDs that would freeze up in the players, having to mail out replacement discs after a release got encoded with monophonic audio, or leaving out some vital component of the more expensive original Japanese releases. Still, even that unfortunate and somehow sad slide into shabbiness, it doesn't quite seem to have been a "we're taking our ball and going home" shutdown; at least some of the handful of titles they still had plans to release might yet see official releases over here.
Even if Bandai Entertainment didn't have the absolute highest profile or the best reputation (leaving the original opening and closing songs out of their release of Zeta Gundam seemed to hobble them that way for years) among the North American anime companies (although they did seem good at getting their titles on TV), I always seemed able to find things in their catalogue that looked interesting. For a while, after the really sudden and shocking shutdown of Geneon (although I suppose there were some signs of cost-cutting there before the end that might have drawn more attention than they did) and the crumbling of ADV Films (one of their titles handed over to Bandai, although ADV did wind up reshaped under a new name), I had the somehow amused feeling they had managed to navigate through the crisis in the anime industry in standout shape... but then something like the problem that had hit them with Zeta Gundam seemed to bite hard, and all of a sudden they were always finding a new way for things to go wrong in the eyes of too many, whether it was just releasing DVDs that would freeze up in the players, having to mail out replacement discs after a release got encoded with monophonic audio, or leaving out some vital component of the more expensive original Japanese releases. Still, even that unfortunate and somehow sad slide into shabbiness, it doesn't quite seem to have been a "we're taking our ball and going home" shutdown; at least some of the handful of titles they still had plans to release might yet see official releases over here.