What About The Geneon Remainders?

July 14, 2008 in Commentary by Tom Langston (calaggie) | No comments

I promise this will be the last notebook photo for a long while.

Amidst the flurry of distribution acquisitions by Funimation a weekend ago, there were a number of series that did not show up on those lengthy lists. The focus of the partnership with Geneon was to continue releases that were halted during initial single-by-single release (e.g. The Story of Saiunkoku, When They Cry); begin putting out series that were licensed but had yet to be released (The Familiar of Zero, Lyrical Nanoha); and furnish complete collection releases for series that had finished their singles run but lacked an all-in-one box set (Ergo Proxy, Fate stay night, Shana season 1). The same seemed to be the case with most of the Sojitz-managed titles with the exception of Comic Party Revolution and possibly Nerima Daikon Brothers.

One of the questions at the Funimation panel last weekend that stuck in my mind was about the Geneon deal and an interesting part of Gen Fukunaga’s response that didn’t show up in either ANN’s or AOD’s reports was that the older Geneon titles reverted back to their Japanese owners. (Thank goodness I took written notes, right?)

That means relatively recent headliners from around 2004-2005 like Samurai Champloo, Gankutsuou – The Count of Monte Cristo, Tenjho Tenge, Tsukihime and Paranoia Agent as well as other notables like Doki Doki School Hours, DearS, Fighting Spirit (Hajime no Ippo), Kannazuki no Miko, Strawberry Marshmellow and Stellvia will slowly vanish from shelves as their respective stocks deplete. And I do mean slowly considering how the DVD market going these days…

There are also Pioneer-era fan favorites like Trigun, Lain, Haibane Renmei, Chobits, Akira (didn’t know ’til I looked it up), Master Keaton, Mahoromatic, and Black Heaven that I assume would also fall under this. They should still be available to rent from Netflix in the near future assuming that their discs don’t begin to scratch beyond repair.

The thing that interests me about this situation is not whether any of these remainders will be picked up by one or more US publishers after they have really gone out of print nor whether a future generation of fans will barely know about these series, but rather how the fansubbing community will handle them (if at all) and how strongly the Japanese intellectual property owners will try to enforce their international copyrights.

It would be unlikely that very many groups will pick up these older series but if they do, will there as much of a backlash by anti-fansub advocates as there exists for newly airing series being subbed by groups? Will some groups be lazy and just re-type the official subtitles like some did when The Tower of Druaga debuted digitally or will they attempt their own translations based on listening to the Japanese audio track?

One cool idea would be to have the various Japanese copyright holders form a consortium (most likely a different one from my proposed TLD domain name consortium) to set up a digital download store/channel/website to purchase them legally and generate some long-tail income for the firms. Unfortunately, this would take a massive amount of negotiating but it’s not like they will be as picky with DRM as they would be with titles that debuted over the past year.

By comparison, ADV Films is in MUCH better condition in terms of their back catalog — that is, they seem to still have rights to all their pre-2005 stuff except for the already OOP series like Princess Nine and Gunsmith Cats and the discontinued titles revealed (Best Student Council, Five Centimeters Per Second, Innocent Venus, and Robotech) on Friday. Practically all their stuff has finished production and are in complete collections so I wonder what they will announce as new acquisitions at Otakon next month.