Anime Central 2013

Funimation at Anime Central

Over the course of the weekend Funimation staff members, including but not limited to Adam Sheehan and Justin Rohas, hosted five events, including an industry panel, a panel specific to Funimation.com, a town hall session, a “Sneak Peek” session, and special U.S. premier screening of the dubbed version of Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail.

Funimation Industry Panel
In fairly typical Funimation style, the panel was heavily an enthusiastic promotional pitch for various Funimation services and products. After reviewing various Funimation series currently airing on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block, the panelists discussed Funimation's various online and mobile viewing options and their social media presence, including references to their YouTube channels (Funimation, Funimation Live, and Funimation Show) and their Tumblr and Facebook presences. Their most interesting announcement in that realm was a campaign to bump their “friends” on Facebook, which stood at around 974,000 as of Saturday, up over the one million mark. When that happens, they claimed that there will be a special announcement that will be “very, very big” or even “huge, huge, huge, huge huge!”

The panelists then went on to review recent releases, complete with short clips in some places. These included A Certain Scientific Railgun, Tenchi Muyo!: The War on Geminar, Toriko part 4, One Piece, Appleseed XIII, part 5 of Fairy Tail, and Eureka 7: AO. They also talked briefly about previously-announced upcoming releases, such as the scheduled release of the first part of The Future Diary on July 23rd, Guilty Crown and its casting, High School DxD, Fairy Tail: The Movie, and The One Piece movie Strong World.

The last announcements before taking questions were the other two special ones. The first concerned an upcoming total redesign of the main Funimation web site, which should be happening over the summer, and the second concerned Funimation's announcement that they have secured full home video rights for Attack on Titan, which is expected to come out in the U.S. in 2014.

Funimation Sneak Peek
Despite its billing, the “sneak peek” was really just a collection of short clips from recent and present Funimation properties as well as the newest episode of The Funimation Show, which is being streamed via YouTube.

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail Premier
This event, which was not originally listed in the schedule, took place Saturday evening. With Brad Swaile (the voice of Rock) hosting, it showed the first two episodes of this follow-up OVA series, which Funimation is apparently numbering as episodes 25 and 26. The entire original cast seems to have been retained, the language is just as foul as ever, and as an added bonus, these episodes actually have some nudity, too. Fans of the original two series should not be disappointed. Afterwards Mr. Swaile took pictures with a collection of Revy and Roberta cosplayers before answering questions from the audience.