A More Pleasant Combination

Bumping into announcements that AnimEigo, the long-enduring anime-releasing company, had been sold to MediaOCD, which until now I’d thought of as just “the production house of Discotek,” was indeed something. Recent consolidation in the anime industry over here pretty much just provoked indignation and lamentations from fans, but I’m quite ready to suppose that the two companies just mentioned, in both still being small enough to present themselves as “made up of people” rather than consisting of “anonymous corporate minions,” would be much more acceptable to contemplate combining.

Thinking about AnimEigo does have me face once more the feeling that, even for the years I’ve stuck with watching anime, I missed out on the really formative years. Back at university I did go the point of going to a little room with a laserdisc player in it and watching AnimEigo’s discs of Bubblegum Crisis to get a sense of a title “everyone else” seemed to have as a common point of reference (and an inspiration for fanfiction). As I was just starting out buying DVDs a few years later, I went to the point of putting what then seemed like a good bit of money into AnimEigo’s box set of the original Macross. That, though, had seemed one of the last real moments of relevance for the company for a number of years. (These days, having joined in the Macross II Kickstarter, things are a bit different...) In also confronting the thought that maybe Discotek and MediaOCD aren’t quite as inseparable as I’d supposed, I did manage to recall being a little surprised at rewatching the Love Live Blu-Rays from NIS America and seeing a MediaOCD credit there too.