Kadokawa uploaded the above CM to its YouTube channel Friday to advertise Vol. 1 of Haruhi-chan/Churuya-san will come out on DVD May 29th for 5040 yen (about US$50). According to Animate, volume 2 and volume 3 have dates of June 25th and July 30th, respectively.
CDJapan lists the runtime for each of the three volumes (vol. 1 page) as 40 minutes, meaning one volume should contain about eight episodes of each series, assuming an average time of 3-3:30 minutes per Haruhi-chan episode and 1:30-2 min. for Churuya-san episodes. The CM also mentions first pressing extras of a soundtrack CD for volume 1 and four commentary cards & one of five bromide character cards for each subsequent volume.
I’d never heard of this eight 12-minute-episode OVA series (originally named Dai Mahou Touge) prior seeing it on October’s release schedule from Media Blasters so I lacked any assumptions going into it. I put it in my rental queue and it came a few months later. Read the rest of this entry »
Clockwise from top left: Ami, Junta, Tomoko, Karin.
How It Got There:
I acquired the 1994 anime series DNA^2 (pronounced “DNA two” in Japanese dub, “DNA Squared” in English dub) during TRSI’s 2007 holiday clearance sale because 15 episodes for 20 bucks was apparently too good to pass up at the time. The main review I read before purchase said it was a pretty good shonen comedy so I bit on the deal and didn’t begin watching until last month. Read the rest of this entry »
There was an article in my local newspaper — The Sacramento Bee — today about rental kiosks as a part of the overall market of DVD rentals and sales and while it reminded readers that kiosks are a small part of the market due to poor selection (surprise!), I wanted to pass along the final few lines from the piece:
“Video on demand has always been the business that is going to be worth $10 billion in 10 years and always will be,” he [Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research] says. Pay-per-view on cable and Internet downloads to home computers are two methods that thus far have failed to catch on with consumers.
Still, Adams believes new technologies such as Apple TV, which connects TVs to the Internet, is a “market that will eventually develop.”
But, he adds, DVD sales and rentals will remain vital, because “humans like to finger the merchandise, even if they’re just renting.”
I’ve heard this tendency to want a tangible copy of consumable media from music buyers (higher fidelity and DRM-less), video game players (resale value and portability), and movie buffs (extra features) and I guess I consider myself a part of that group in some cases. However, the majority of people will want to just consume the main content and I think more of them will shift toward renting movies through digital devices like Apple TV or a Netflix-enabled box as their primary method of seeing films after their theatrical release as bandwidth and HDTV penetration increase, digital catalogs expand, and certain video stores eventually fold.
Finally, I found it a bit odd that Mr. Adams chose to use the word ‘humans’ instead of ‘people’, as if he were anticipating robots or animals thinking of watching movies and TV shows with similar critical discretion that people engage in when deciding what to watch. It may not sound as strange in the future, though, when we have sentient artificial beings that would have no use for disc media.
I mentioned in one of my AX posts that I bought Rescue Me Mave-chan from Bandai’s booth for $8 (MSRP $10), a cheap price compared to the full pricing of another OVA from a different publisher, Voices of a Distant Star. It’s a spinoff from the Yukikaze series of OVAs. Does it entertain within its 25 minute runtime, especially to someone who hasn’t seen the originating work? Read the rest of this entry »
The moment I read the news that Viz would be releasing the Shonen Jump-based series Hunter X Hunter in season box sets beginning in Q4 2008, a huge grin appeared on my face. At last, this awesomeness will be brought to America! The manga by Yoshihiro Togashi is already on volume 19 (Vol. 20 comes out May 6th) and for those of you who have never heard of HxH, shame on you! (For a good introduction to the plot, read this Animefringe feature from September 2005.)
To get some perspective of how long it has taken for this anime to hit US shores, the anime was created in 2000 and it has since been dubbed into French, Spanish, Italian, Portugeuse, Tagalog, and even Arabic. Viz pitchedHxH and Monster to television broadcasters at this year’s NATPE and they have DVD rights for both so the next logical step would be to get Monster on DVD and perhaps TV. (Adult Swim, you know you want a psychological thriller/drama to replace InuYasha…) Failing that, just Hunter x Hunter getting onto Toonami would be fantastic.
This week, Best Buy is having a 50% off sale on select anime box sets. (I was tipped onto this earlier in the week from this thread on Cheap Ass Gamer but waited until now to write about it so as not to get anyone in trouble.) The titles being discounted are:
Tokko: The Complete Series – $12.49
Elfen Lied: Diclonius Report Thinpak- $15.99
Noein Complete Series Box Set – $17.49
Dragon Ball Z Season 4 Uncut Box Set – $19.99
Mars Daybreak Anime Legends Set – $19.99
Fullmetal Alchemist Season 2 Part 2 (ep. 41-51) – $19.99
Neon Genesis Evangelion Platinum Thinpak – $28.99
Samurai Deeper Kyo Complete with GBA game – $29.99 [game trailer]
These prices are also now up online while some of them already backordered. I’ll going to get Noein and Tokko for sure, and perhaps Elfen Lied, and pump up my Reward Zone points in the process while also snagging R.E.M.’s new album this week. Maybe I’ll get xxxHolic #1 as well…
P.S. A warning: the Eva thinpak discs lack the extras from the singles, something I found out during my interview with Sean McCoy who had done a couple episode commentaries for #20 and #26. I believe the Elfen Lied thinpak also lacks its previous extras.
Lucky Star’s first US volume got dated about three weeks ago and now we find out about the extras that limited edition purchasers expect to find inside the pretty art box come May 6th. The $35 “upgrade” will yield you pack-ins in the vein of the Haruhi LEs but tweaked a bit: the opening theme and Konata character single CDs, a T-shirt version of Ryou-ou Gakuen’s winter girl’s school uniform that frankly looks kinda lame, and a chocolate cornet screen wipe that actually might be useful. The regular edition will still feature liner notes so you can understand the more obscure references as well as “The Adventures of Minoru Shiraishi” which may or may involve footage from the fan events he hosted.
Considering the Haruhi CD singles are individually priced at $10 each and T-shirts sell for about, you’re getting a bit of a deal. One question: will all the tees be the same size, e.g. large? If so, that may cause trouble for some buyers. I remember the FLCL Ultimate Collection included a postcard to send in for your free shirt but it took over a year and a month to finally get it in the mail so there’s definitely a tradeoff between speed and getting the right size.
I saw the first episode of Pumpkin Scissors when it premiered in fall 2006 and found it marginally interesting but not enough to continue to the second episode. Recently I got around to watching the Volume 1 DVD that I had bought during RightStuf’s Xmas sale and I now feel the same way about the second disc: I’m kind of interested in the story but not enough to buy the next volume to find out. Read the rest of this entry »
I read about the release date for the Evangelion 1.0: You Are [Not] Alone special edition DVD announced as April 25th on Furu Anime Panikku and thought that finally, around late April or early May, the rest of the world can see this first in the series of four films that reimagine the Evangelion plotline (through fansubs). But then, I wondered what the packaged extras would be and found this story on ANN wherein this sentence caught my eye:
The extras disc will include the Explanation of Evangelion:1.01 — an exclusive edit which superimposes Japanese commentary text over the actual film to explain each scene to fans.
Wow. I can’t believe that there will actually be an extra that will tell viewers WHAT THEY ARE WATCHING. I’m not sure whether to interpret this as the producers thinking the film is too complicated (not very likely) or as them thinking the fans are too dense to figure it out for themselves using their own eyes, ears and brains! Perhaps they believe there are a lot of first-timers who saw this film in the theater and don’t know the intricacies that a long-time fan would and I suppose I could conceive a certain portion of the audience being that way. But still, the extra comes off as patronizing to me and likely many other fans.
Oh, and there will also be a standard edition release on May 21st for 1000 yen less than the special edition mentioned above as well as a 400-page Complete Records Collection (release date unknown) and a 330-page animators’ drawing collection in April.
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