Pricing Provokes Me Out Of My Dry Spell

I can’t believe that it took reading about Bandai Visual’s rather high pricing of the Gunbuster and fans’ reaction to it at SakuraCon last weekend to get me to write a post after a ten-day absence. My explanation is that I was distracted by a bunch of things including classes, chores, laundry, compiling my radio playlist, spending Easter day with my family, anime club, and watching the first season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on DVD. In that span of time, I start writing a couple of entries but I wasn’t able to finish them to my liking so I just moved on. In case you want to know, the first one would have been posted on Easter about religion in anime and would have focused on Scrapped Princess, FMA, and Chrono Crusade while the second was an informational post about MyAnimeList. Anyway, I apologize in advance if this is a relatively long post but I have a lot of stuff I want to discuss.

Bandai’s Hasty Release Pricing
Where to begin…ah, yes. Bandai Visual, I understand that you plan to sell the first volume at $19.99 with one episode and the second, third, and fourth volumes of Galaxy Angel Rune for $49.99 each with 4 7-minute episodes per disc. (Big ups on ANN posting audio from the panel, by the way.) That might roll in Japan but not in the United States market where consumers really want the bang for their buck. Distributing simulatenously in Japan and the United States might be a strategy to offset whatever losses you may incur through fansub circulation but couldn’t you have packaged it in a box set for just a little more, maybe $55 or $60? Many people are willing to wait for a couple years for a cheaper release so the price doesn’t have to be so extravagant.
When I listened to Mr. Konno’s remarks in the Q&A part of his panel, he made a reference to some Japanese thinking that America is a secondard market, which is true. Not everything gets to the United States for some good and bad reasons and region 1 residents do not have an automatic right to see their favorite on DVD, although they certainly have the right to request that a particular series get licensed.

Funimation Picks Up One Piece With Some Caveats
The most recent news that will be covered in this post is that Funimation is taking over from 4Kids in the dubbing of One Piece and plans to release 13-episode uncut box sets at $49.98 each. According to an interview on AnimeOnline, the company will start their work on episode 144 (the beginning of the Jaya Arc) and go back to episode one if they have the time.

Good news: no more weird-ass accents.
Bad news: Sanji will still be toting a lollipop on the TV version.
Semi-good news: Smoker can still have his cigar thanks to an exception in FCC broadcast rules for cigars and pipes. (Those stodgy regulation makers…) However, the smoke and the burning embers at the end will have to be removed.

Monitor What I’m Watching
I mentioned MyAnimeList in the opening paragraph. I joined the site last Thursday and you can find my profile here. So far, I have found it to a good social complement to AnimeDB. They both have reviews but MyAnimeList is more focused on the people within the community. You can display your favorite characters and series on your profile. You can write reviews, join clubs, post in the forums, and make friends. You can see how far each member is in watching a particular show and individual people’s ratings on show pages. There are percentages of “anime compatability” you have in relation to other members based on you have put on your particular list. There is also a kind of wiki-esque aspect to it in that members can add or edit character information/pictures but only after a one week waiting period. I just updated the About page with a link to my list as well as other online presence systems I’m involved in.

Progress on Fanime
I’m still waiting for the schedule to come out for Fanime so I can plan my walking around schedule for panels and other events. Do anyone know when it usually get posted online? I’m slowly tweaking the main bulletpoints for my panel including something about the aniblogosphere being a counter to the “mainstream” anime media (e.g. Newtype USA, ANN, and Anime on DVD) loosely akin to how the general blogging environment keeps the CNNs and politicians in the world on their toes. I might only make that a part of the introduction, though.

I happily found out this week that Greg Dean of Real Life Comics is going to be a guest there. I plan to blog at least once for each day I’m there, take lots of pictures and maybe post nightly videocam (or audio) reports. I haven’t completely decided if I want to take my camcorder and record a walk around the convention center but if I do, there might be a delay of a day or two in terms of editing and posting whatever does get filmed. I’m also considering redesigning this blog around Fanime or perhaps around late June.

An Unofficial Wiki Launch
I have been working on-and-off for the past couple months on the idea of a seifuku wiki and decided last night to finally push it out into the public and tweak it on the fly. The Seifuku Wiki is a fledgling catalogue of the many variations of school uniforms in anime and manga. A link to the site has been in the sidebar for a little while but no one actually looks there so it’s better to write about it in order to publicize it. I’m working on a logo but whoever wants to go ahead and make one for me (125×125, .png format), feel free to do it and I’ll credit you. So, please contribute whatever information and images you can to the wiki – anything will be greatly appreciated.

Recent DVD Deals
In the past week, I preordered the first Haruhi DVD (standard edition, of course) for $17.99 during last week’s Bandai sale and also grabbed Le Chevalier from BestBuy.com for $10. Here’s the link for the D’eon deal (thanks, CAG forums!) and I believe you can also pick it up at a number of their brick-and-mortar outlets.

Wrapping Up

• I played the first Pretty Cure parody clip from moyism’s post about FLV streaming during last night’s club meeting and got some laughs.
• That post reminded me that earlier this week, I uploaded an old fansub of the first Digimon movie and converted it using Dreamhost’s service. You can watch it here. When I went home on Sunday, I found some old fansubs of the first seven Digimon movies as well as the first short Yu-Gi-Oh movie so I’ll try to upload those over the next couple of weeks.
• Have you ever noticed that many high school protagonists sit next to the classroom window so they can look outside at the clouds while they are thinking about something? It has to be more than a coincidence!
• I’m currently 8 episodes deep into RahXephon that I borrowed from a friend and only 4 episodes into Escaflowne. Still haven’t started on Giant Robo…and don’t even ask me about Monster…

Hopefully, I won’t be another week before I make another post because then I will feel really bad about my blogging future.

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