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AnimEigo Launches Otaku no Video Kickstarter on June 2


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aquascor



Joined: 12 Jul 2012
Posts: 11
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 8:12 am Reply with quote
I find it sad that an established company has to resort to crowd funding to release properties they already have access to and have released previously. Nozomi, Discotek and Sentai have all released older titles to the market without going to this.

Did Nozomi crowd fund Rose of Versailles, Cobra, Cat’s Eye or Dirty Pair? Did Discotek crowd fund Fist of the North Star, Captain Harlock, Unico, Galaxy Express 999 Movies, etc. etc. or even upcoming releases like Robot Carnival or Giant Gorg? Did Sentai crowd fund Patlabor, or Royal Space Force? Nope, they all took a risk to release this material.

I also love the fact that once these projects are funded to sell off the remaining stock they charge more (the BGC BD set is $70 where you could have contributed $50 for the same product). Anime Sols was similar as who will buy the remaining stock on Rightstuf from Creamy Mami, Black Jack or Dear Brother, but then again they were an upstart.

I smell a rat which is sad because this company used to release great works like Macross, Urusei Yatsura, Arcadia of my Youth, etc. without begging for money.


Last edited by aquascor on Fri May 29, 2015 8:23 am; edited 1 time in total
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zawa113



Joined: 19 Jan 2008
Posts: 7357
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 8:17 am Reply with quote
Eh, I already have this on DVD (which can be bought for like $8 on rightstuf still, excellent cart-topper if you ask me, and they never seem to run out either). It's a must series for anime fans, especially older fans, but even for newer ones to understand what it was like back then and it's a fun little two-part OVA. But blu-ray? I don't think it's worth the double dip honestly.

So, required viewing: yes. Tremendous need to own it on blu-ray? No.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 8:21 am Reply with quote
aquascor wrote:
I find it sad that an established company has to resort to crowd funding to release properties they already have access to and have released previously. Nozomi, Discotek and Sentai have all released older titles to the market without going to this.

Did Nozomi crowd fund Rose of Versailles, Cobra, Cat’s Eye or Dirty Pair? Did Discotek crowd fund Fist of the North Star, Captain Harlock, Unico, Galaxy Express 999 Movies, etc. etc. or even upcoming releases like Robot Carnival or Giant Gorg? Did Sentai crowd fund Patlabor, or Royal Space Force? Nope, they all took a risk to release this material.


NO. That's the point. Like, "Maybe AnimEigo's not all that established anymore".
And if the one defense to keeping them around and not letting Nozomi, Discotek or Sentai handle it is saying "But I remember the UY Mail Club!", yeah, I used to buy my anime on VHS, too. Confused Happy days, twenty years ago.
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Cptn_Taylor



Joined: 08 Nov 2013
Posts: 925
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 8:38 am Reply with quote
@ aquascor : I don't think Animeigo is begging for money as in they're a sinking company. They're simply not in the anime market anymore and don't give a rat's ass about investing in it a.k.a taking a financial risk like all the other companies do. So they resort to kickstarter campaigns. If Diskotek can publish old time material without going under you bet your ass Animeigo can do it to. They just don't care.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 9:26 am Reply with quote
Cptn_Taylor wrote:
@ aquascor : I don't think Animeigo is begging for money as in they're a sinking company. They're simply not in the anime market anymore and don't give a rat's ass about investing in it a.k.a taking a financial risk like all the other companies do. So they resort to kickstarter campaigns. If Diskotek can publish old time material without going under you bet your ass Animeigo can do it to. They just don't care.


It's not so much "they don't care", as trying to relive glory days that they CAN'T live anymore, because the industry's grown past their 90's fan-garage days, and they can't get back any of the other anime licenses they lost when they moved on to being a live-film company--And all they have left is fan memories and the starting fragments they were able to hold on to because nobody else was trying to get them.
Hence Kickstarter, which is not only begging, but trying to turn nostalgia into cult-of-personality, where fans feel it's their duty to keep them out of just folding up and cutting a financial risk they can't take anymore.

If Carl Macek was still alive, he'd be trying to stay in the Funi/Viz game too, by selling us his "Special Limited Edition 25th-Anniversary Platinum Blu-ray of Twilight of the Cockroaches!" Nnnnno.
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Mr. Oshawott



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
Posts: 6773
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 9:32 am Reply with quote
It seems that AnimEigo has been frequently relying on Kickstarter to debut their older anime shows for quite a while now...
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MarshalBanana



Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5296
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 9:39 am Reply with quote
@aquascor

if this was just a standard, shove the old version on a DVD, slap some cheap extras on and put it in a box, then yes I would agree.

A lot of effort is going into this, a bunch of sub tracks, getting an old show into HD, new art. Plus there are some really good stretchgoals, 8 page Manga.

This goes beyond a simple release, which wouldn't have a kickstarter.
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walw6pK4Alo



Joined: 12 Mar 2008
Posts: 9322
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 11:57 am Reply with quote
classicalzawa wrote:
So, required viewing: yes. Tremendous need to own it on blu-ray? No.


If the DVD weren't still so cheap and available then the BD would the be clearer choice.
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azabaro
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Joined: 06 Jul 2007
Posts: 251
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 12:13 pm Reply with quote
Mr. Oshawott wrote:
It seems that AnimEigo has been frequently relying on Kickstarter to debut their older anime shows for quite a while now...


AnimEigo was actually doing things like this well over a decade ago; when they were planning to release the original Macross TV series they needed to get a certain number of pre-orders so they ran a pre-order drive. There weren't varying pledge levels back then, and the only "stretch goal" for having lots of people sign up was reduced prices per-buyer due to economies of scale. But overall, Kickstarter hasn't fundamentally changed the way AnimEigo releases anime - it just offered them a widely-known and accepted method of doing the same things they've been doing since the beginning of this century.
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Swissman



Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 767
Location: Switzerland
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 12:48 pm Reply with quote
azabaro wrote:
Mr. Oshawott wrote:
It seems that AnimEigo has been frequently relying on Kickstarter to debut their older anime shows for quite a while now...


AnimEigo was actually doing things like this well over a decade ago; when they were planning to release the original Macross TV series they needed to get a certain number of pre-orders so they ran a pre-order drive. There weren't varying pledge levels back then, and the only "stretch goal" for having lots of people sign up was reduced prices per-buyer due to economies of scale. But overall, Kickstarter hasn't fundamentally changed the way AnimEigo releases anime - it just offered them a widely-known and accepted method of doing the same things they've been doing since the beginning of this century.


Exactly. They did the same thing too with Kimagure Orange Road back in the nineties when they needed a certain amount of pre-orders to produce a Laserdisc-Boxset. Aquascor seems to have forgotten about this, or he didn't knew to begin with.
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aquascor



Joined: 12 Jul 2012
Posts: 11
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 1:01 pm Reply with quote
My apologies for not knowing AnimEigo did a similar practice in the past. I am not a fan of the crowdfunding process, but that is my personal opinion.
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Kruszer



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 7981
Location: Minnesota, USA
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 1:40 pm Reply with quote
Meh, not interested in this one. However, I hope it succeeds so that Animego continues to dig into that pile of old anime. Maybe the next time they'll pull out something I do want.
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AbZeroNow



Joined: 14 Jan 2013
Posts: 519
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 1:45 pm Reply with quote
Kruszer wrote:
Meh, not interested in this one. However, I hope it succeeds so that Animego continues to dig into that pile of old anime. Maybe the next time they'll pull out something I do want.


At Animazement, they did tease that they'll be making an annoucement of a different anime probably in a few weeks(Hazukari was there, and I was following his tweets).
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 1:56 pm Reply with quote
Swissman wrote:
Exactly. They did the same thing too with Kimagure Orange Road back in the nineties when they needed a certain amount of pre-orders to produce a Laserdisc-Boxset. Aquascor seems to have forgotten about this, or he didn't knew to begin with.


They also took a survey of a choice of three or four shows to license, back when they actually could license anime shows, and teased us with the possibility of releasing Yawara.
Three years, and a lot of negotiation hell for UY, later, they started releasing the limited sets, just because they had promised to (no Kickstarter, just fan interest), even though they were at the point of already losing some of the anime licenses they'd used to have.

To some, such dedication to an impossible and outdated promise solely for the sake of keeping it inspires admiration; to others, just pity. Sad
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minakichan





PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 2:07 pm Reply with quote
I'm all for crowdfunding. It's a risky project and this is clearly done out of love-- I think crowdfunding is the perfect way to make something that's not financially viable but should still exist on principle occur. If the choice is "crowdfund or don't release" then I'll always side with crowdfunding. And I disagree with the idea that it totally could've happened anyway without crowdfunding.

One of the biggest benefits of crowdfunding is that it enables price discrimination-- fans can pay as little or as much as they want to to support a release. Superfans can help make a project actually viable (without just buying the same release multiple times which is dumb), which allows a project to get funded without forcing everyone to pay more than it's worth, and people who can't really afford to get the release but still agree it's a worthy cause can also participate and feel like they made a difference.
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