Forum - View topicANNCast - Viewers Like You: Emergency Edition
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grooven
Posts: 1428 Location: Canada |
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LMAO coverage at the con in my city
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I have not gone since 2006, hasn't been good since 2003 and before that. The merchandise is overpriced or bootleg. I know they have been trying with the bootlegs but some people really are not experienced or can tell. I had one vendor kicked out (I saw him at the comic con here and knew he did the anime-con too), when I don't even attend (complained via forums). Not to mention it is almost 50 dollars! I wish they would expand a bit more with vendors and panels.They need a bigger range of merchandise or series, it mostly caters to only Naruto and that kind of crowd. Not to mention those children and teens....put you off. Summer fest? You mean Umanime, the university put it on then in 2000. That was when I first attended. Once you have been to Japan or Expo it can't really compare. I couldn't believe Expo when I went! But if your here, have cash and are bored out of your mind then this is what we have .
I LOVE Makoto Shinkai's art style that is amazing! I myself am not a fan of the stories but of the art just turn off the sound and play music! If he were to do the art and someone else the story (like EF) there would be some amazing productions! |
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Asrialys
 Posts: 1164 |
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Harry Potter post.
I loved the Deathly Hallows movies. However, one of my only nitpicks is that I don't think they ever explained why Harry stopped using Voldemort's name in Part 1. Apparently, it was in a deleted scene. I think Harry's "love" shield was made useless in Goblet of Fire, when Voldemort was brought back with Harry's blood. As for how harry survived...it's a bit complicated. I think it had something to do with that previous sharing of blood. Percy never died! In the book, he witnessed Fred's death and chased after the guy who caused the explosion. For Draco Malfoy, he did everything to protect his family. He probably started loyal to Voldemort, but continued to work for him out of fear. The Malfoy family never really did anything for Voldemort during his apparent absence through most of the books. When Voldemort returned, the Malfoys helped him out of fear for their lives. In the end, they found a way out while Voldemort was pre-occupied. |
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Melanchthon
 Posts: 550 Location: Northwest from Here |
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So I just started watching Brotherhood again today, after dropping it for like two years now. Crazy.
Brotherhood just isn't that good. There is too much humor that doesn't fit it well with the action. I can't help but compare it to the first version, and it is always wanting. And I think it is because it is too idealistic. I like the characters a lot better when they were all flawed, like in the first version. The characters in Brotherhood are so noble it pisses me off. OOP DVDs are my bane. Do you know how hard it was to find all of Vampire Princess Miyu? And I am looking to pick up Maze, but can't find it for less than $100, and I balked at paying that much for such a crappy show. See, as someone who got into anime in '07, trying to pickup something that went OOP in '04 is a bit difficult and/or expensive. And as for non-OOP anime, I am not bothered by the price. The first anime I bought was a Haibane Renmei boxset, for $75. Then I bought Moonphase--in singles--for 30 bucks a pop. Today, with my budget of $100 a month, I can get three or so complete seasons a month. It's great. Hell, it's so cheap I'm actually spending more that I was two years ago. I'm overruning my budget regularly now. And it's wonderful. /I watch all my anime from fansubs, but I don't care about the all that fanboi crap. I buy anime to collect it. Hell, I haven't even watched a third of my DVDs. //I still keep all my fansubs. Backups, baby. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4783 |
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Regarding the out-of-print anime market, even some fairly-recently series go for obscene prices. I just recently found out that FUNi stopped distributing that select list of Geneon titles at some point last year, and since Black Lagoon was something that seemed like it was right up my alley, I hit up Amazon out of curiosity. Yup, the full series boxset is already over $200. I know this sort of thing is the nature of the free market and all, but damn if it isn't a bummer. (Since FUNi has apparently licensed the new Black Lagoon OVAs, I'm hoping it's fairly likely that they'll pick up and redistribute the first two seasons at some point.) I have managed to luck out on picking up several series at opportune times in the past that go for some insane prices now, but every time I watch a new series that has an out-of-print US release, I have this fear that I'll wind up really liking it, and then discovering it's insanely priced to the point that I'll probably never be able to get it. It can really suck being a DVD collector sometimes.
(I think my biggest out-of-print coup ever was having a friend who gifted me a spare brand-new copy of End of Eva recently. I took some sick pleasure in opening the shrink-wrap and realizing that I had just killed about $100 worth of potential value.  )
And speaking of FYE, the anime section of the location in our local mall reads like a graveyard of old Geneon licenses. I mean, there are new releases in there too, but the majority of the shelf space is taken up by random Geneon single volumes. They never have a full series' worth of them, so it's fun to poke through them and see just what's lying around. I made the mistake at one point in the past of paying $30 on Amazon for a new copy of the first ROD the TV volume (I can't figure out why RightStuf sometimes has a few hundred copies of a particular series' volumes, but then none of one particular volume), only to later realize that FYE had a few copies of it going for all of $10 or so. Oh well. I did manage to score the FLCL collector's set there in the past, which is one of my most fondly-remembered purchases. Last edited by Top Gun on Mon Jul 18, 2011 10:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Tanteikingdomkey
 Posts: 2350 |
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I am one of those Out of print amazon anime sellers, I could not find a summer job last summer, and checked out amazon for FMP novels that tokyopop said they would start printing again... and discovered that I actually had stuff I could sell and actually make enough money for my textbooks. if you want to avoid being uncharged by people like me then the first thing I can tell you is SHOP AROUND. I can a lot of times buy stuff from one company and sell it on amazon and turn a $20 profit after amazon takes $10. 2 Don't be stingy about buying used most times they are in excellent condition. 3 Buy early. 4 shop around and look for other releases if you don't care about the packaging to much
Most times I only need to sell one or two copies and most times, since I only have 1 or 2 copies. Also I have been loving funimation recently because of their LE dvd/bluray combo packs, because what I can do is buy one, sell the DVD, then when the Limited Edition goes out of print sell off the Blu-ray plus the LE box P.S. I do fansubs of underdone stuff, and I did Night Raid and I bought S23's of night raid on bluray, because I loved worked on it (when my translator wanted to do it), not necessarily because of the qaulity of the show Last edited by Tanteikingdomkey on Mon Jul 18, 2011 11:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Asrialys
Posts: 1164 |
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Gosh, I have the Season 1 box of Sailor Moon, the singles for Sailor Moon S and Super S and all the Cardcaptor Sakura singles and the Clow Book and Sakura Book sets. I never looked their current market value till now. Those two CCS box sets are crazy. The singles vary, just as they did when I was gathering them all a few years ago. I think the prices are higher though.
Of course, none of these are rental copies. I would never buy those. Admittedly, I think most of the CCS singles are used, but they came in great condition. Glad I own them. lol Not sure if I could part with them. Last edited by Asrialys on Mon Jul 18, 2011 11:12 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Hypeathon
Posts: 1176 |
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I'll admit I haven't seen any of the Harry Potter films or have read any of the books, but listening to the discussion about the epilogue of the film sounds exactly like Hope Chapman's complaint about the Digimon Adventure 02 epilogue where it showed exactly what happened to all the Digi-destined 25 years from now. I'll be frank, I haven't seen any other films or TV series with similar endings like that. But despite not having rewatched much of Digimon until recently and have only rewatched the first couple of dozen episodes of the first season, I don't honestly mind endings like that based on what I remembered about the Digimon adventure 02 epilogue. I can understand how they feel irrelevant as epilogues to many people, but I just think "eh, kinda neat."
Also, when I first heard the guy talking about FMA and Brotherhood, I swear I almost thought that Bryan Massey was talking. Because seriously, that fan sounds very similar to Bryan as if he consumed Bryan's diet. Gravel for breakfast and charcoal for dinner. No, but seriously, hearing an anime fan sound like that is uncommon to me, so I felt surprised at first. Last edited by Hypeathon on Tue Jul 19, 2011 1:03 am; edited 1 time in total |
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toyNN
 Posts: 252 Location: Seattle, WA |
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FMA Brotherhood: The hard part for me is the special place FMA the first adaption has for me and seeing it done again following the manga verbatim isn't very compelling. I'd been away from anime for a while and got back into it by watching FMA so its got a special place for me. To me its so good that I didn't understand "why" Brotherhood. Every time I think about watching it, try to convince myself I should, but then hearing or reading others about Brotherhood - not many have never raved about Brotherhood - especially the first part.
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taster of pork
 Posts: 596 Location: My House |
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ljaesch
Posts: 299 Location: Enumclaw, WA |
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A long show this time, but it covered quite a few topics. I found them all to be interesting.
I haven't seen the final Harry Potter film yet, so I can't really comment on it. I do want to see it, though, since I'm a fan of the books and I have seen the previous seven films. Like last week, it was nice to hear from someone who has involvement in a convention. I especially enjoyed hearing Steph explain the history of the con and how it has evolved as the anime fandom has evolved. When it comes to Makoto Shinkai, I've personally only seen two of his films (Voices of a Distant Star and Place Promised in Our Early Days). I did also see She And Her Cat, since it was on the Voices of a Distant Star DVD that I rented from Blockbuster. I agree that Shinkai's art style is gorgeous. I also think that his style complements the types of stories that he tells. I've posted my opinions on these two films elsewhere in the ANN forums in the past, so I don't feel like repeating myself. Amusing side note: I was working on posting an article I'd written about Studio Ghibli to one of the sites that I write for while listening to this podcast, and nearly chuckled when I heard the references in the podcast to Makoto Shinkai being "the next Miyazaki" (since I was working on an article about Ghibli, after all  ).
I've seen all of Fullmetal Alchemist and the first three DVD volumes released for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. At the point I've gotten to in FMA:B, I basically know most of these characters from the original series, but the story being told at this point is drastically different. While there are some interesting differences in the characters and story in FMA:B, I'm not entirely convinced that these differences work. I don't think that FMA:B is necessarily bad, but I don't think it's quite as strong as the original series. Anime and manga prices definitely dominated the end of the podcast. There's no way in heck that I can afford those older out-of-print titles, even if I were to come across something I was interested in. I can afford to purchase some of the more current releases from FUNimation and Viz, and I do occasionally buy them from time to time when I can afford to. Generally, I check out copies through my local library system first, and if I like what I saw, I try to purchase my own copy later for my own collection. Between having three kids, a mortgage, and other bills to pay, even that can be hard to do at times. However, I am a strong believer in purchasing what I can when I can to help support the anime and manga industry.
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rewpbertt
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Hearing Christian talk about those movies in such an in depth way made me extremely emotional, i feel absolutely compelled to re watch them again, now.
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Sewingrose
 Posts: 579 |
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I'm doing something similar right now with some old Tokyopop manga which is going for crazy. Some of the series like Hetalia, which is some days going for $50-100 for each volume (so glad I bought doubles, and when Tokyopop shut down cleaned up my local Borders and B&N for them), I KNOW will be relicensed, and once that's announced I loose the potential gained by people who are buying it thinking this will be their only chance to own it. Of the shows you mentioned, I'm pretty confident Sailor Moon is going to get relicensed before too long. The manga being reissued will probably help. Then again, I don't know if I want to give up my current volumes, that are mine. Maybe I will want to keep these copies even when it gets reissued. |
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immortalrite
 Posts: 56 Location: Yonkers, NY |
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FMA Brotherhood: As one of the maybe 5 people in the anime world who is not a diehard fan of the first series, I may be somewhat biased on this account, but I have to say that I find Brotherhood notably superior in most every respect. In particular, I remember a few years ago actually dropping the first series after 10 episodes because I found it so boring (with most of the content seeming like standalone filler with very little plot development or episode-to-episode continuity), and only picked it up again later because everyone insisting to me that is the best anime ever made. While I did eventually finish it, and was fairly impressed by some of the ideas and plot twists at play, I think the occasionally dawdling pace and bizarre ending kind of derailed it for me. Watching Brotherhood on the other hand, aside from an obnoxious and somewhat unnecessary first episode (did they really need three short jokes in the first 10 minutes?), I blew through the first volume's worth in a couple of days. The pace was much quicker and much more deliberate, and the series clearly established from the get-go a sense of vastness and gravity which I simply never got from the original, even in later episodes. For example, spoiler[the confrontation with Greed at around episode 12 (vs. episode 30-something in the original) felt much more spontaneous and seamlessly interjected, whereas in the original was is trumped up and elongated to this epic boss-fight level confrontation with its own preceding story arc.] I also noticed that several events which were merely mentioned in Brotherhood within a couple minutes or so (e.g. the incidents with Barry the Chopper in Central and Yoki in Youswell) had been given entire episode-length stories in the original, further vindicating my original grievance that these episodes felt more or less like unnecessary filler. Oh well. One possible discrepancy is that I am watching Brotherhood with the dub, whereas I watched the original in Japanese. I'd like to sometime get around to re-watching the original with the dub in the hopes that the experience would perhaps improve.
Anime pricing/"fan" griping: I think there is probably a legitimate middle ground between the entitled whiny teenager who refuses to pay even a penny/episode for something they were never going to buy in the first place (and then goes on to spend $60 on the newest Halo incarnation) and the jaded middle-aged guy who reminds everyone all the time that back in his day, you had to sell your kidney and three pints of blood just to buy an officially-licensed subtitled VHS. Firstly, I find that the advent and increasing popularity of Blu-ray and HD anime has changed the scope of this issue significantly. For example, as a consumer it does not seem unreasonable to me to refuse to buy subtitled-only series on DVD when you have a native 720 or 1080p rip on your computer, especially keeping in mind that a Blu-ray release may still be forthcoming in the future. Secondly, I have been noticing some genuine problems with anime packaging, namely from Funimation and Section 23. While Funimation still packages most of their thinpak series in these terrible, made-to-break flimsy boxes, Section 23 seems to be putting nearly all their recent DVD re-releases in those horrid, scratch-prone spindle stackpacks, sometimes 6-7 disks at a time! Granted, Funimation now has been releasing recent acquisitions in chipboard boxes and the neo-ADV stackpack cases can be easily replaced with blank multi-disk ones of the same dimensions for fairly cheap, but having to deal with either of these annoying packaging schemes still makes me somewhat wary of buying their product--I am actually currently trading in my flimsy-boxed sets of Baccano and FMP: The Second Raid for the lite-boxed Viridian Collection and forthcoming Classic Line respectively, and am holding off on purchasing Bamboo Blade until in hits the likewise lite-boxed S.A.V.E. packaging later this year. Also, earlier last month I sold my crappy Azumanga Daioh stackpack re-release for that nice, chipboard thinpak set that ADV put out in 2008 ($25 brand new from RightStuf!). Anyway, I don't Blu-ray releases for the native HD titles and accessible, made-to-last-more-than-a-year packaging is too much to ask. |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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I didn't really explain the strengths of Brotherhood very well (the discussion went 10 minutes, and a lot of it was discussing the current state of the anime market) but the manga emphasizes more on story, action, and romance. In particular I always felt like the last few episodes where a mess simply because the changes the anime made to the gate simply made no sense. The massive number of name dropping that went on in those episodes didn't exactly help. They where also spending a lot of time setting up the movie. Since the manga was the original, the ending was the ending that Arakawa was the ending that she had in mind for the beginning so it's I also made a mistake when I said 12,000 copies, and not 12,000 units (12,000 copies per volume which while a hit pales in comparison to what the first anime did, it was a failure by expectations). It would kind of be interesting to see how Rurouni Kenshin does, if it will be a big hit in Japan or if it will got out with a whimper. I remember the Oh my Goddess OVA being a big hit (or at least a well known anime, Zac would have more insight into this) but when the remake was created it really didn't do anything in America, Media Blaster's didn't pick up the second season, and when Funimation got the second season from ADV I don't remember them really trying to push it. It had expectations of being an A-list title but the people who where into the OVA didn't seem to pick it up. The bit where me and Zac argue over whether or not the American anime industry has collapsed or shrank did cause me to laugh. I really do question if Zac knows something I don't with his contacts, or if it's just that his optimistic about the future of anime while I am extremely pessimistic. I did see Kekkaishi at Walmart recently, and if I remember right FMA: B was probably there as well, I can't check since it was in Michigan (I was there for a funeral). I should point out that Amazon is currently having a sale on the first 4 parts of FMA B where they are selling them for 20 bucks. They are the top seller right now. You know for a guy whose never smoked in my life I sure have a 12 pack a day voice. It's the american version of John Hurt. As for the rest of the podcast Snape's loyalty was always up in the air, he was always the best character, because you didn't know where he fits into the story until Rowling revealed it. Voldemort was never portrayed as a great thinker, his family suffered from being heavily inbred and a lot of them (including Voldemort) where insane. He also never understood the concept of love having been apart of a loveless marriage so never took into account that Narcissa would betray him for her son. Zac really wanted to escape Arizona, and ended up in California? Well be careful what you wish for. On one anime website one guy made a topic about how Viz censored Detective Conan so it's okay to pirate from them. When everyone jumped down his throat the guy began to bitch about how no one understood what he was actually saying (even though everyone obviously did) and how we where all wrong to be supporting Viz. Bleach get's good for the Soul Society arc and then proceeds to drop into the toilet. The characters power levels simply make no sense, Kubo Tite clearly doesn't have a plan so ideas are never really fleshed (they state that Arrancars don't have the limit that Shinigami and Hollows have but this is never shown). The cycle of Bleach is that people like it then began to hate it for the next three years, than they began to like it again, and this continues on forever. Personally I think the problem is that the culture of the fandom really isn't conducive to big hits, 7 years ago products like Wolf's Rain (a super niche anime that had little action, and no one could really understand it unless you knew about 5 different sets of mythologies) could make a ton of money, but now unless it's a remake you simply can't make a lot of money, I think Eden of the East is the only original series that really sells well now. The paying customer simply isn't there, if the first FMA came out now, I can't imagine that it would do any better than Eden of the East, that's why I consider the American release of Brotherhood to be a success. Unless we get another pokemon type hit I can't imagine just one series starting a boom. The way the world looks at anime is completely different from what it was 10 years ago. We are going to need a series of hit's instead of just FMA: B, and Eden of the East followed by Tiger and Bunny two years later. |
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ZakuAce
 Posts: 525 Location: SE Wisconsin |
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Ahhhh! When I heard "Summerfest" I immediately thought "OH MAN THERE'S ANIME AT SUMMERFEST (a huge music festival in Milwaukee)" and just for a second I got really excited. Then I remembered Steph's in Canada. I'm silly.
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