Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Ever Happened To Manga Entertainment?
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DangerMouse
Posts: 3993 |
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Yes! I loved Karas too. I'd love a blu-ray for it. I'll be picking up Funi's Noein blu-ray too. |
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lilbuta
 Posts: 3 |
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Good article! It was an interesting read.
 I will be keeping an eye on Animatsu.
Agreed. Even fans younger than me trying to run their own fan group in the last 5 years (I'm of the Akira Fandom Generation) still struggle to know the difference. I find it quite saddening. These kids have the internet to educate them; I didn't! 
I think this difference issue maybe why there isn't as much love for manga books themselves compared to anime... Hard to find anyone talking about manga properly on UK forums and there's the whole stigma attached to comics in general anyway... Depressing... I forget how long it took me to learn the difference, but I think picking up the book "Anime Essentials: Every Thing a Fan Needs to Know" by Gilles Poitras in a comic store helped considering it clarifies what manga is on page 17. 
Using "Manga" in the company name was a stupid idea overall, but I guess they didn't understand the difference either? ;
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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And both '00 dubs for Castle of Cagliostro. Which, after a while was the only biggest house title Manga had going for it. |
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Ushio
Posts: 635 |
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Ha when I got into anime back in the early 90's I thought Manga Entertainment was the real Japanese animation and all the competitors stuff was 'fake' cash grab's that I avoided like the plague (I was 10-12). Then I moved to an actual town and saw for the first time anime magazines! and learned about what it was I was actually into lol ah the pre-internet days (for me anyway) good times. Oh fun fact when I was 12 I got my parents to buy me the double VHS set of Urotsukidoji: legend of the overfiend and legend of the Demon womb for Christmas that was a good year lol. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 384 Location: Manchester, UK |
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In addition to Jerome Mazandarani and Andrew Hewson leaving to form Animatsu, Jeremy Graves also jumped ship to Anime Limited, who are pretty much the only company in the UK trying to make high quality releases (aside from the odd few deluxe NIS sets like Lull in the Sea & Eccentric Family released through MVM over here).
Honestly I'm still not entirely sure what Animatsu's mo is. They claim to be a distributor, yet apparently also exist to help acquire licences for other companies, while still have strong links to the shell of Manga Ent. We might never know exactly why all three left the company within the same timespan, although in the months prior to them going, various releases had been criticised for poor encoding, subtitling, timing etc - something that has persisted to this day. A recent disk was even released with the wrong region code. I suspect Stars had probably started reducing their resources for things like qc, effectively deciding to spit out releases with as little effort as possible, in addition to reducing the public faces of the company. Now Blu-ray production of certain series like Fairy Tail have even been halted midway through their cycle. The guys were likely put into an untenable position and had to go, willingly or otherwise. I'd love to hear an exact version of what exactly happened. Unfortunately, in its current position, Manga Ent is basically hovering over a cliff face. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5146 |
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OK, now I'm curious: How did your parents react when they actually saw the thing?  
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Bamble
Posts: 130 |
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Discotek has certainly used Manga Video dubs, but I suspect like many of the other semi-obscure English dubs that turn up on their releases, they acquire them from VHS tapes and simply seek approval for using these from Japan, with no involvement from the original dub producers/owners. I may be wrong, but I can't recall seeing Manga's name acknowledged on the Lupin release either.
Unfortunately, the UK never got Karas on Blu-ray either. You're correct in as much as Karas was solicited for UK Blu-ray release a few years ago, but the release was indefinitely delayed by Manga back in September 2010.
The scale of Manga Video's original success can really be measured by this. Every UK anime-related publication in the 1990s desperately tried to intone that it should be "anime", but over twenty years since Manga Video began, their company name is still the colloquial term used by the mainstream to describe anime releases in the UK. No wonder they tried to file a UK copyright for the word "Manga" back in 1994! Manga Video truly were were a juggernaut in their heyday, and I think their early UK-produced dubs in particular, that used ex-pat actors, still hold a certain entertainment value to them, especially when they "fifteened" them so outrageously. The Devilman OVA dub is downright hilarious in that respect! Andy Frain could be quite an abrasive figure for others within the nascent UK anime industry back in the 1990s (just look at the history of the Manga Mania and Anime UK publications), but his take on how to market the blood-n-guts releases they had was a marked success. As Justin says, the gamble on Ghost in the Shell never really paid off the way they wanted it to, and it was something of a shame this led to a protracted downturn in the quality of their releaeses and dubs. Manga's 1998 releases of Psychic Wars, Sword for Truth and Vampire Wars (the latter two mentioned by Justin) were the last regular releases by Manga to use UK-produced dubs (with one last belated isolated release in 2000 with X: The Movie). By then, their dubs really were of exceptionally poor quality, perhaps all the better to match their equally poor stories. At least one UK-dubbed title originally intended for VHS release, Iczer 3, sat on the shelf for five years before being released directly to DVD in 2002, so even without keeping a close eye on the company it was clear that that particular time period was a tumultuous one behind the scenes. Last edited by Bamble on Mon Sep 14, 2015 4:07 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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thekingsdinner
 Posts: 1097 Location: Geertruidenberg, Netherlands |
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Oooh so that's where Animatsu Entertainment suddenly came from.
I do love Manga UK a lot though, I have quite a few of their releases and more recently I picked up all their Dragon Ball sets. I hope they'll be alright and the whole UK anime market for that matter. Lately everything has gotten more expensive for me as the euro is constantly losing its worth. |
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Ushio
Posts: 635 |
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They never saw it I watched it my room with headphones
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JDude042
 Posts: 261 |
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So instead of Manga Entertainment, they should have called themselves Anime Entertainment.
 They're selling Japanese animation(anime), not Japanese comics(manga) after all.
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Cptn_Taylor
Posts: 925 |
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I remember reading about Urutsukidoji in an anime fanzine in France must have been the late eighties. The magazine printed some small really evocative images and qualified the film/OVA as a mix between hard core science fiction and porn. The future of "real" anime so they said. I was 16 at the time, and wanted really bad to watch it. Hey it was science fiction, and more edgy than Akira. But it would be years before I could find the damn VHS to buy. Then in the mid nineties the whole glorious Legend of the Overfiend was sold at a Virgin Megastore. No back section, just in plain sight for all to see. Those were the days. Anyways I bought it (a manga video release) together with Ghost in the Shell and Royal Space Force.
Got to watch it late at night, and man what a show. Nice but so violent. It wasn't even porn, more like sadistic porn. Disgusting stuff really. But the visuals were so pretty. Anyways watched it once and stored the VHS for posterity. Have never watched it again. It's just too violent. Violence for violence's sake. Worse than Violence Jack. Much much worse. One of the sequels were even dumber (published by Kiseki). They sold it as some kind of collector's edition. Today, well anime isn't what it used to be. Sanitized beyond belief, homogenised and sterilized for moe loving hordes. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4618 |
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Manga Entertainment is a company that I've been curious about, even when they were more active. I would see the company's name attached to things that I knew were from other companies, namely Bandai. For example, the GITS SAC DVDs had previews of Bandai shows, and the Manga Logo would still show up during SciFi's Ani-Monday block, even when Manga's shows were replaced with Gundam and Gurren Lagann.
Manga Entertainment is actually one of the reasons why I used to have a Netflix account. Thanks to being part of Starz, Manga was ahead of the competition in terms of getting content on the streaming part of Netflix. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4447 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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actually they were doing all the way back in the 80's. when then named scifi was going manga ent series on saturday mornings and nighttime. the main suspects were usually robot carnival , lensman , twilight of the cockroaches , ninja scroll , and macross plus. of course they showed the more violent ones like ninja scroll , mad bull 34(edited) and akira very late in the night. too bad their going under like central park media cause it seems that starz have given up on them. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13615 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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At least it seems that Manga UK is more "alive" than Media Blasters.
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Tenebrae
Posts: 490 |
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Ahah, this finally answers how Manga E. got U2 music for GitS ending theme: their existing music industry contacts. I became aware of the true ending theme only quite a bit later when watching a laserdisc version while set to japanese+eng subtitles (VHS version naturally had only one voice track),
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