The Staggering Agreement
Apr. 9th, 2021 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe evening was wearing on yesterday when I clicked a link kept ready at hand to take one more look at the Anime News Network web site. It might even have been a little unusual for me to head to that site then; I can’t recall any particular motivation for it beyond, perhaps, wondering if anything else had been added to the start-of-the-season previews (although it’ll be another three months before I get around to any of those new shows myself).
For the very first item in sight, it took an instant or two to make sense of all the names in the headline together. That’s not to say I couldn’t see what connected them, but “Big West” and “Harmony Gold” hadn’t been associated with “agree” before. Pushing into the article, though, I read the explanation “the distribution of Macross and Robotech” had been worked out, read it again, and reminded myself we’re more than a week past April Fool’s Day. It took some time to gather my own thoughts.
For a long time I’ve nodded a bit at every occasional explanation I’ve seen that attempts to argue “things are a bit more complicated than ‘all that’s needed for those fabled Macross instalments to be released on DVD (and then Blu-Ray) over here is to contact Big West in Japan, but Harmony Gold is at once diabolical enough to wave paperwork and block those efforts yet in a shaky enough position anyone other than strapped-for-cash anime companies could win the day in court.’” (I have seen a caution or two in other contexts to “take warning when you’re told about invented enemies at once threateningly strong and contemptibly weak.”) At the same time, I could caution myself “that’s just your own worldview; be sure you know where it came from.” If, though, there really had been a first tangle in Japan where Tatsunoko could sell overseas rights to Macross but Big West had the original domestic rights (which, I’ve heard, had to do with Studio Nue needing help to create the original anime, regardless of how off-model all that help turned out to be) and that tangle had been worked though to the point where everyone makes a gritted-teeth grimace that might be taken for a smile and accepts a piece of the pie where they might have hoped to get some hypothetical whole, that’s a step forward.
I started looking for other reactions to this considerable piece of news, which included cautions we might be a long way yet from being able to order Macross Blu-Rays with subtitles that aren’t imported from Japan. There’s the unfortunate added wrinkle that my doing this would only make up for much shadier ways of seeing most of that anime, and I suppose people will just keep bringing up how Harmony Gold’s Frank Agrama is entangled with the infamous Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. To say “Voltron was foundational” or even “Battle of the Planets was foundational” was one thing; to have found Robotech interesting in itself from elementary school all the way to the end of high school (even if eight of those ten years had just about no access to its animation and however-cheesy dubbing, depending instead on spinoffs that didn’t touch on the character designs) has wound up with a weight on it no other bit of “localized anime” seems to suffer. Still, I’m aware of the comments it’s only been a month since another “fixed dilemma” of anime shifted and film of Project A-ko turned up.
For the very first item in sight, it took an instant or two to make sense of all the names in the headline together. That’s not to say I couldn’t see what connected them, but “Big West” and “Harmony Gold” hadn’t been associated with “agree” before. Pushing into the article, though, I read the explanation “the distribution of Macross and Robotech” had been worked out, read it again, and reminded myself we’re more than a week past April Fool’s Day. It took some time to gather my own thoughts.
For a long time I’ve nodded a bit at every occasional explanation I’ve seen that attempts to argue “things are a bit more complicated than ‘all that’s needed for those fabled Macross instalments to be released on DVD (and then Blu-Ray) over here is to contact Big West in Japan, but Harmony Gold is at once diabolical enough to wave paperwork and block those efforts yet in a shaky enough position anyone other than strapped-for-cash anime companies could win the day in court.’” (I have seen a caution or two in other contexts to “take warning when you’re told about invented enemies at once threateningly strong and contemptibly weak.”) At the same time, I could caution myself “that’s just your own worldview; be sure you know where it came from.” If, though, there really had been a first tangle in Japan where Tatsunoko could sell overseas rights to Macross but Big West had the original domestic rights (which, I’ve heard, had to do with Studio Nue needing help to create the original anime, regardless of how off-model all that help turned out to be) and that tangle had been worked though to the point where everyone makes a gritted-teeth grimace that might be taken for a smile and accepts a piece of the pie where they might have hoped to get some hypothetical whole, that’s a step forward.
I started looking for other reactions to this considerable piece of news, which included cautions we might be a long way yet from being able to order Macross Blu-Rays with subtitles that aren’t imported from Japan. There’s the unfortunate added wrinkle that my doing this would only make up for much shadier ways of seeing most of that anime, and I suppose people will just keep bringing up how Harmony Gold’s Frank Agrama is entangled with the infamous Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. To say “Voltron was foundational” or even “Battle of the Planets was foundational” was one thing; to have found Robotech interesting in itself from elementary school all the way to the end of high school (even if eight of those ten years had just about no access to its animation and however-cheesy dubbing, depending instead on spinoffs that didn’t touch on the character designs) has wound up with a weight on it no other bit of “localized anime” seems to suffer. Still, I’m aware of the comments it’s only been a month since another “fixed dilemma” of anime shifted and film of Project A-ko turned up.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-10 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-10 08:23 pm (UTC)I suppose one other thing I've started considering was one comment noticed that "if things really have been sorted out, maybe someone should look into releasing an official translation of a recent Macross manga." It might be contrasted to a Robotech comic decried as "trying to keep the trademarks exercised" but which I could read through an ebook lending service offered by my local library; that comic did run for two years and move from "possibly aimed at grizzled comic readers with vague memories of Saturday morning cartoons" to "diving into the strange lore of the Robotech spinoffs." It then changed creative teams (and its art started looking much more "anime-esque"), only to just sort of stop around last years' first lockdowns...