Forum - View topicANNCast - The Crunchiest Exposition
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3768 |
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Nice to hear that CRX was a good experience. Hopefully I can be in a financial situation where I can afford to go over and see some conventions outside my area, and if that happens and I am looking at the West coast, I think I might pick CRX over AX, based on what I've heard about both. Would have liked to have been at that Franxx panel at least. Glad the guests enjoyed the panel at least, even if they weren't keen on doing the press conference for whatever reason.
Before Charpedia poll for the most anticipated of next season came out and the subsequent discussion, RErideD wasn't really on my radar, but I decided to look into it after some people named it among their most anticipated, on account of Abe. I was concerned about the character designers previous credits (Chief Animation Director on Digimon Tri and Gunslinger Stratos, and character designer and Chief Animation Director for Ace Attorney, for example), but I was going to give it a try. After skimming the premiere report (I usually don't read them in full unless I've seen it myself to minimize spoilers), I was disappointed and decided to give it a pass, but after this podcast, I think I'm back at giving it a try, though perhaps for a different reason than before. I've seen a crowd turn on premiere with Eureka Seven Hi Evolution, though that wasn't so much progressing into laughing at it than revulsion and horror at the frequently achronological ordering of events in the latter part of that movie. I probably conceded too much to those arguing that Ulysses being only 70% done at the premiere with a month to go til it airs was totally fine, and not at all a bad sign of what is to come production wise with that show, in regards to how much the studio would finish that first episode for broadcast. Regardless, I would be surprised if they made it through the season without any further production issues, if not a complete collapse. I saw the very wet kiss you were talking about in the PV, and I dare say even Mysterious Girlfriend X has less spit than that. Jeez. |
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your fly is down
Posts: 27 |
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Help
How do i post that GIF of micheal.j eating popcorn At any rate enjoyed the show |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4633 Location: New York |
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Yeah, the fact that anyone praises HGS is beyond me. Besides the fact that it looks lame as hell, is derivative, the storyboards of the pilot Nickelodeon rejected are already up.
https://www.scribd.com/document/271056330/High-Guardian-Spice-Boards Take a look for yourselves. Honestly, if this wasn't on Crunchyroll, it would just be ignored. It's not a sexism thing (this time. The insanity over She-Ra and the fact that none of the complaints involved a lack of Skeletor are another matter). It's a concept that looks dull and was already turned down for being dull. |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2487 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Sigh. Could do without the hyperbole of "the only people who have a problem with High Guardian Spice are GooberGaters/4Channers/Nazis who hate women."
OK, Zac and Jake can stop reading, fine. Everybody else, let me tell you where I'm coming from. I'm a little on guard at the thought of Crunchyroll now being completely owned by AT&T, a company with a Not Great track record in the creative department. The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman already covered the angst at AT&T apparently directing HBO to make broader shows, and a lot more of them, apparently disregarding the traits that make HBO shows so good in the first place. Why shouldn't we be concerned about AT&T exercising its heavy hand over Otter/Ellation/Crunchyroll too, especially if the pundits say that AT&T needs them to compete with / be "the next Netflix"? Because here's another thing. Last year at Crunchyroll Expo, in the session for premium subscribers, they said that running their own convention would not affect their participation in other cons, and showed a slide with various con logos: AX, Otakon, ACen, AWA, etc. Fast forward to August 2018 and Otakon happens and Crunchyroll is nowhere to be seen. Do I think Crunchyroll broke their word and are therefore bad… no, but I do wonder if someone at AT&T changed their priorities for them. After all, what are Crunchyroll's growth prospects? Nearly anyone who likes anime is already on the service (save for a handful of "Crunchyroll is bad actually, so I pirate everything" trolls). So all they can do is get more money out of the current subscribers, for example, by flipping free-with-ads viewers to paid subscribers. Which is something you might do by being at all the cons and being everyone's favorite company. And when Crunchyroll stops doing that, it makes me wonder if they have different priorities now. Which brings us to High Guardian Spice. To me, the fact it has an all-women writer's room is the most interesting thing about it. Beyond that, to me at least, it does look at first glance like a Steven Universe wannabe, aimed at a demographic 40 years younger than me. So, not for me, fine. But why would you even make that show? Maybe because you want a different audience. Maybe because Crunchyroll has very limited growth prospects, but you think that its talent/connections/technology could get you some other, larger audience. And this is the part that sucks. Because we have all been users and fans of companies and services that decided we weren't wanted anymore. Last time we were on this thread in the forums, my example was Tokyopop, when Stu Levy decided that a loyal manga readership wasn't worth his time because he was going to go make movies. Now let me give you another example: Twitter. Five to eight years ago, we were all hanging out on Twitter talking about anime, or computers, or sports, or whatever, and it was great. Programmers were doing neat things with third-party clients and hacking on the Twitter API. But nerds weren't good enough. Twitter decided what they wanted was to have pop stars tweeting all the time, bringing their thousands of fans with them. Easier to sell ads to Pepsi that way. So they changed, and continue to change, the service in ways that the old-time users hate, thinking that somehow it's going to bring in this more desirable or lucrative user-base, one which may not even exist. So, yeah, I look at HGS and I see a show with American creatives and it looks like a big pile of the same ol' same ol' -- Jacob's comment that it seems Harry Potter-inspired is not encouraging -- aimed squarely at some middle-of-the-road audience that is not me. But, to be fair, let me counter my own argument. Sure, High Guardian Spice isn't anime. You know what else isn't anime? Anime Crimes Unit. Or Porter Robinson's Shelter video. Or the ridiculous Mike Toole-hosted holiday specials. Crunchyroll made all of those, none are honest-to-Madoka-kami "anime", and they're all pretty good. TBH, Crunchyroll does have a solid track record with its original productions, and we should cut them some slack. But big companies gonna big company, and AT&T is a really big company. I'll admit: I did take my Crunchyroll premium-plus subscription off auto-renew last week. I think I am going to want to take an annual look to see if it's still OK, still something I want to pay for. Last edited by invalidname on Sun Sep 09, 2018 5:12 am; edited 1 time in total |
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macattack
Posts: 257 |
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She-Ra got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much grief. The big difference between She-Ra and High Guardian Spice is while they revealed approximately the same amount of footage during their big reveals, She-Ra showed off a lot more of its story and Noelle Stevenson and her staff discussed the show and its themes first and foremost. HGS did not talk about its story during its reveal other than one sentence explaining the premise (the press release did reveal a bit more but still way less than She-Ra did). HGS chose to highlight its all-female writing staff and promote that over the story. She-Ra's staff is similar to HGS (it may even be all-female too) but Noelle and Netflix did not push that, and She-Ra also unveiled some of its voice cast as well. She-Ra let us see many facets of its show even without showing us much in the way of animation. We got screenshots, we got cast reveals, we got a general overview of the story and themes. HGS gave us none of that and while it looks like this closed-off panel did drop some serious information, I question why it had to be revealed at a closed panel and not on its announcement. I think it would have saved the HGS staff and Ellaton a lot of headaches if we had seen more of what they intended to do right from the outset, as opposed to the ultimately superfluous knowledge that the writer's room is all women, which attracted the usual array of trolls and skeptics. That being said, Crunchyroll's outdated player has been a real issue for a long time and Zac mocking those pointing it out with the over-the-top nasal voice was pretty uncalled for. While some of the critics are definitely making bad-faith arguments, I would say the majority are not arguing in bad faith. They are wondering why money's being spent on original productions instead of a modern HTML5 player that will function significantly better. Without much insider knowledge of the business, they have every right to question these apparently skewed priorities. How else are they going to learn how the business works? And Crunchyroll did give the answers they sought by announcing a HTML5 player is in development and will be unrolling testing of said player with the intent to launch it in October. Some of the vitriol did die down when Crunchyroll announced this, which proves this really was the crux of their issues. In the end, though, I think Crunchyroll would have been better off with the 3-4 show sizzle reel instead of bringing all of the focus on High Guardian Spice which was clearly not ready to come out of the oven. Last edited by macattack on Sat Sep 08, 2018 10:22 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13626 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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So, Franxx and HGS are the new running gags of ANNCast. Man, I miss the "Heat Guy J" jabs.
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4633 Location: New York |
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That’s another thing. Are there any indications of what was in that sizzle reel? For all we know it could be an adaptation of Cannon God Exaxxion or just another Tumblr webcomic.
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Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
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To be fair, a number of staff members on this site are friends with the people who are working on this show, as well as a bunch of other people who work at Crunchyroll. It's kind of to be expected that out of all the anime communities out there, this is going to be the one that isn't trashing it and defends all of Crunchyroll's issues. As far as She-Ra goes, that stuff just kind of shows that these shows aren't really made for kids, they're pet projects of creators or made for the internet dwellers. Mainly because I refuse to believe any decent size of little girls are going to find anything in She-Ra cute and marketable given what's selling to little girls right now. Probably won't even be half as successful as DC Superhero Girls. |
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JacobC
ANN Past Staff
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Skeletor is not the villain of She-Ra. What is this fake geek boy nonsense. |
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4633 Location: New York |
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That’s my point. I don’t give a crap about She-Ra and Hordak when they’re divorced from He-Man and Skeletor. Is He-Man here? No? Is Skeletor? No? Then why should I give a damn? And why are people crying for a spinoff removing the main characters of the Masters of the Universe line? It’s “who cares?!” She-Ra sucks, but the reasons it sucks are different from the reasons HGS sucks, and the latter does suck. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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What's most telling to me about this HGS "controversy" is that, apparently, the show is still so early in production that we hardly know anything about it, and yet the internetosphere has preemptively decided it's trash. That's never a good sign for the legitimacy of the complaints, and this sort of thing always turns out to be politically motivated.
Just going by that supposedly dull and awful storyboard, it reminds me a lot (in a good way) of Cucumber Quest (in both art style and setting), and the small amount of actual content talked about in the podcast also aligns with that pretty well. That's enough to make me interested in checking it out. But I might never have heard of this show if people hadn't gotten so mad about it. I guess there really is no bad publicity. |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5530 Location: Mexico |
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Yeah, my opinion as well. I sure wish I had the same clairvoyance powers of all the people who have absolute certainty that a show that has barely started production is gonna be trash. Maybe if I had the same powers of looking into the future of a show that isn't even animated yet, I'd save myself a lot of grief and disappointment 
That said, I also think, given what Jacob said about how early in the production they are, that CR rushed too much in announcing the series, and unnecessarily put the creators into a very vulnerable position. I hope the bigoted backlash doesn't deter them from making the show they envisioned. Maybe they should've waited until they had one full episode animated to show, instead they dropped this big announcement and it'll be around a year before the thing is actually finished for people to actually judge it by its own merits. Meanwhile, we're getting months and months of internet nazis convincing people who don't know better about how the show that doesn't even exist yet is this evil feminazi gay agenda waste of their oppressed white-male CR subscription money |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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My main concern with HGS & CR Originals is that it turns out to be a whole lot of not much like many of CRs other ventures. Their attempts at J-Dramas & Manga didn't go anywhere (& neither did the tiered subscription model they tried to gate them behind) & their move into co-productions sounded cool; but just seems to be a way for them to get some streaming licenses without having to bid on the open market.
I also kind of have to assume CRs marketing team knew there'd be some "backlash" against this (it's the internet. It was going to happen); both for the usual "why are you doing x instead of fixing y" reasons & the Sensitive Joss Whedon stuff. Indeed, one could cynically see their focusing so much on the staff in the announcement trailer as a way to generate buzz (positive & negative) while having little to show of the show itself. Corporate's gonna corporate, after all; & having the backlash now probably means there will be less when the show actually airs (unless it flops, which I hope it doesn't). |
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invalidname
Contributor Posts: 2487 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Too bad about the neglected Andersen Windows booth and Window-chan, and the apparently misguided strategy of catching the eye of hypothetical "bored parents" who weren't really at CRX in the first place (but a Discovery Zone reference? In 2018? Yikes.).
But it does remind me of some more interesting booths I've seen recently. At JAFAX, there was a table in the dealer's room for a local transgender support group, and ACen had a spot for a depression awareness / anti-suicide group, which also packed an info card into attendees' bags. I put like $10 in each of their donation jars. And you know what I'd like to see as an off-topic booth at cons? Voter registration. It would be an ideal place to reach out to the demographic that has just reached voting age, or is about to. And while it's probably a hassle to make sure you get all the forms and do it legally, it can't be that bad: in the 80s, Frank Zappa famously had voter registration tables in the lobby of all his concerts. |
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AsuraTheDestructor
Posts: 491 |
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My main Issue about High Guardian Spice is that the creators aren't letting the series speak for itself, but they have to bring up how diverse the story is (100% white women as staff doesn't sound very diverse to me), but alos that Kate Leah, the head writer, is a major bigot in her own right, and her Marvel Comic Succubus was a major bomb from a ciritcal and commericial standpoint.
I might have a look at it if the word of mouth is good, but otherwise, I don't intend on watching it if it isn't. |
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