An Intriguing Merger
May. 24th, 2008 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLong months of angst have passed among those North American anime fans who would prefer to be able to support the actual production of the stuff by buying DVDs (even if they do often "preview" the shows they buy by watching speedy but less than legal "fansubs" others just use as a substitute for actually spending money), sparked off by the sudden collapse of the anime translator-and-producer Geneon and fuelled by the continued uncertainty around another translator-and-producer ADV, who seemed to lose all of their recent licenses a while back, got nearly all of them back except for the one that seemed to have the most "buzz" about it, and doesn't seem to have been able to generate much good news about itself since then. Some of the other anime companies still seem to be able to do that, though, beginning to shift towards a sales model that offers larger chunks of a series at once for still-reasonable prices to make those releases more reminiscent of how North American TV shows are released on DVD, and just perhaps more appealing to more people...
One of those companies trying new experiments is Bandai Entertainment, and in a way that actually amuses me a little. A few years back, after the imprecise subtitles and missing opening and closing themes on their initial release of Zeta Gundam seemed to upset a lot of people, Bandai Entertainment seemed to me to have become the (necessary?) translator-and-producer company that was always messing up in the eyes of fandom, no matter how hard they tried. Their first real sign of resurgence seemed to be when they became involved in the North American release of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya," and after that (surviving even a round of glitchy DVDs that wouldn't play for people) they started soliciting "larger chunk" releases. Then, they managed to become involved in the North American release of "Gurren Lagann," the title that ADV lost; for me, that seemed bad for ADV but good for me, who hadn't seen the title "fansubbed" before becoming interested in the interest of other people in it.
One of the small yet intriguing ways Bandai Entertainment seems to have found to get people interested is to put "hidden messages" in the source code of its company site. Discussing these messages and how they seemed to be building up to something led to a monster of a thread on the anime message board I follow, and a consensus seemed to be developing that the company was about to license something big... although I did find myself worrying just a little that everyone was setting themselves up for a fall by getting their hopes up too high. Then, the waited-for announcement arrived... and Bandai Visual USA was being taken over by Bandai Entertainment.
With a confusingly similar name, and in the end another subsidiary of the same large Japanese company, Bandai Visual had started out promising super-deluxe releases and more affordable ordinary editions of some well-regarded works of anime. When their initial super-deluxe release apparently didn't sell as well as they had hoped, though, Bandai Visual quickly retooled... and with a new strategy that involved selling very plain DVDs (save for booklets tucked into the cases, to be fair) of seemingly ordinary TV series with fewer episodes per disc yet higher suggested retail prices than the releases all the other companies putting out anime in North America. The traditional explanation advanced by those willing, however happily or not, to pay the high prices (comparable to those in Japan, prompting suggestions that the whole matter was an effort to cut down on "reverse importation") was that the video and audio quality of Bandai Visual's DVDs was absolutely top-notch... the only problem for me was that I could never quite believe that it cost that much to squeeze that much more quality out of the DVD format. In the end, though, it seems that Bandai Visual's new strategy lasted for a while longer than their first, but didn't seem quite successful either...
I've seen a certain amount of glee over this news (along with, alas, some complaints that no new title has been licensed)... although I suppose that, along with the hope that some of Bandai Visual's more interesting-looking titles might be re-released in cheaper sets eventually, there's at least a continued touch of uncertainty for me as to what else might result, whether this "takeover" just might affect Bandai Entertainment as if taking in some sort of "bacillus"... Still, not all the news about anime these days is depressing right off the bat to me.
One of those companies trying new experiments is Bandai Entertainment, and in a way that actually amuses me a little. A few years back, after the imprecise subtitles and missing opening and closing themes on their initial release of Zeta Gundam seemed to upset a lot of people, Bandai Entertainment seemed to me to have become the (necessary?) translator-and-producer company that was always messing up in the eyes of fandom, no matter how hard they tried. Their first real sign of resurgence seemed to be when they became involved in the North American release of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya," and after that (surviving even a round of glitchy DVDs that wouldn't play for people) they started soliciting "larger chunk" releases. Then, they managed to become involved in the North American release of "Gurren Lagann," the title that ADV lost; for me, that seemed bad for ADV but good for me, who hadn't seen the title "fansubbed" before becoming interested in the interest of other people in it.
One of the small yet intriguing ways Bandai Entertainment seems to have found to get people interested is to put "hidden messages" in the source code of its company site. Discussing these messages and how they seemed to be building up to something led to a monster of a thread on the anime message board I follow, and a consensus seemed to be developing that the company was about to license something big... although I did find myself worrying just a little that everyone was setting themselves up for a fall by getting their hopes up too high. Then, the waited-for announcement arrived... and Bandai Visual USA was being taken over by Bandai Entertainment.
With a confusingly similar name, and in the end another subsidiary of the same large Japanese company, Bandai Visual had started out promising super-deluxe releases and more affordable ordinary editions of some well-regarded works of anime. When their initial super-deluxe release apparently didn't sell as well as they had hoped, though, Bandai Visual quickly retooled... and with a new strategy that involved selling very plain DVDs (save for booklets tucked into the cases, to be fair) of seemingly ordinary TV series with fewer episodes per disc yet higher suggested retail prices than the releases all the other companies putting out anime in North America. The traditional explanation advanced by those willing, however happily or not, to pay the high prices (comparable to those in Japan, prompting suggestions that the whole matter was an effort to cut down on "reverse importation") was that the video and audio quality of Bandai Visual's DVDs was absolutely top-notch... the only problem for me was that I could never quite believe that it cost that much to squeeze that much more quality out of the DVD format. In the end, though, it seems that Bandai Visual's new strategy lasted for a while longer than their first, but didn't seem quite successful either...
I've seen a certain amount of glee over this news (along with, alas, some complaints that no new title has been licensed)... although I suppose that, along with the hope that some of Bandai Visual's more interesting-looking titles might be re-released in cheaper sets eventually, there's at least a continued touch of uncertainty for me as to what else might result, whether this "takeover" just might affect Bandai Entertainment as if taking in some sort of "bacillus"... Still, not all the news about anime these days is depressing right off the bat to me.