ANNCast Classic: The Life and Kime of Geneon, USA

ANNCast is on hiatus this week! But in the interest of letting people know about some of the episodes we're proudest of, during hiatus weeks we'll be posting our favorites. Here's one of them!

ANNCast Episode 017 - The Life and Kime of Geneon, USA

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Justin's back this week and we both really like Baccano!, which makes us the last people to that particular party. Also: the strange landscape that is the DVD market, and a rare Fry's Electronics that seems to be pulling double-duty as a museum of the anime bubble of the early 2000s.

Then we bring in Chad Kime and things get real. Chad's history is a thick one, but all you really need to know is that the man worked at Pioneer -which later became Geneon - for more than 10 years and has some amazing insight as to what really went down there. There's some tough accounting, some crazy numbers, some lightning-round fun, and Heat Guy J comes up for what feels like the 10th ANNCast episode in a row, but this time it means something. Also if you ever wanted to know how many units Card Captor Sakura sold, now's your chance!

Then it's Twitter time! And we take some emails.

You can listen to the show on our player here, direct-download the MP3 version here, or you can just use these handy links:

Subscribe in iTunes	RSS feed (for other software)

Also: if you like the show (or don't like the show, I guess) be sure to write us up a review over on iTunes! It'd be a big help!

NSFW Language Warning: There's really not much swearing here. We really need to step it up.

ANNCast Episode 017 Breakdown

00:20 Host introductions, Baccano! discussion

08:15 Fry's offers up a DVD museum, and why the DVD market seems slow now

14:03 Justin finds the Venice Archive, which is basically a bunch of gifs and midis

17:35 BREAK: Old school crappy anime MIDI time!

18:08 Chad Kime introduction and personal history in the anime industry, beginning in 1991

23:20 The Good Years at Geneon

25:00 Pushing Geneon product into brick 'n mortar video stores

26:37 What went wrong at Geneon?

30:20 More about what went wrong at Geneon

33:14 What Geneon's biggest surprises and upsets were

36:00 Big Ugly Robot Face, plus Demon Lord Dante needed to sell 30,000 units to break even.

39:00 Zac must know if the cutsey stuff sold.

41:00 Was Dentsu forcing Geneon's hand when it came to licensing?

43:40 A Gold Rush that became a Black Hole

44:30 Did they ever consider switching to Thinpak box sets?

46:31 Samurai Champloo outsold Naruto in its' first year. Huh.

48:00 Geneon's ridiculous boxset prices

50:00 Justin has some questions: the Toei deal and Bandai Visual USA

52:25 Twitter: How long Geneon will continue to exist, how they factored audience into their license decisions, Viewtiful Joe, Lupin III, Hajime no Ippo, and more.

PLUS: A super-fun lightning round in which Chad lets us know how a litany of Geneon properties performed back in the day.

Have questions for the ANNCast crew? Tweet 'em to @ANNZac! Or check out the community forums thread about the show, or send email questions to zac@animenewsnetwork dot com!

Special thanks to Phillip Harrington for designing and creating the ANNCast logo.