Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Anime DVDs More Expensive Than Western Animation?
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Mikeski
Posts: 608 Location: Minneapolis, MN |
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Anime is similar. Drop the price to a quarter, and my parents still won't buy a Bakemonogatari box set. Anime is also dissimilar, in that I've never seen Robert or Shawne buzz by in a Bugatti, nor have I seen Funimation or Sentai's corporate jets landing at MSP (nor even Kyoto Animation's, or Aniplex of America's). Super Bowl ticket prices may fund ridiculous $20-million athlete salaries, but anime just seems to fund other working schmucks like me.
That has no effect on licensed shows; they aren't shipping the material over 1 disc at a time from Japan; it just gets sent once. (Heck, they might just send it all electronically, though that can be more expensive & time-consuming than putting a hard disk drive on a plane, if you're sending enough data. The company I work for has to ship large amounts of engineering data to our customers, and it's courier-carried encrypted HDDs. Internet is too slow.) Funi's BluRays are pretty much all stamped "disc made in Mexico," so shipping costs and import duties are apparently insignificant compared to labor and materials costs. And you can compare prices between amazon.com and amazon.co.jp, if you're curious. (Example: Disney's Frozen, $25 in USA (marked down from $45, heh), 3480Y in Japan. 3480Y ~= $28). |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar Posts: 16961 |
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Ah, another former Suncoast worker. Those were the days heh. I remember being the customer in the early 90's with my parents. Then later I got to be on the other side of the counter telling people the same thing when dvd's started replacing the vhs tapes heh. I will say once dvd's took over that employee discount got me a lot of anime and imported heavy metal cd's. |
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AnimeLordLuis
Posts: 1626 Location: The Borderlands of Pandora |
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Personally I find the Anime DVD/blu-ray prices in North America pretty reasonable especially the Limited Edition DVD/blu-ray combo pack from Funimation an entire 12 episode series for 69.99 is a bargain compared to Japan and if you really look around the Internet you can find said series for 45 bucks or less So it's all good ITS ALL GOOD!!!
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Tenchi
Posts: 4507 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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Don't you mean Top Gun? I remember that one was an early priced-to-own VHS tape, although I was only around 12 when it first got released on VHS so I can't say I was paying all that much attention to VHS prices at the time. Actually, at the time, most of the movies we "owned" were just taped off First Choice (the precursor to Canada' Movie Network) on free preview weekends. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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If it's Top Gun, then that makes a lot more sense. I was born in the mid-80's, so my movie-watching began in the early 90's.
Oh yeah, that made me think about how even when you're screening something for a school, you have to get permission. I'm sure there are a ton of cases of doing it secretly though. I doubt Disney gets much money from every math class showing Donald Duck in Mathmagicland every year. I did have a class in college where anime was screened on a biweekly basis, and it was done under the table like that though. No one complained. We got to see Paranoia Agent!
Okay, the phrase "inelastic demand" makes sense then. Anime must be on the other side from gasoline or groceries then: Whereas many people will buy gasoline or groceries regardless of the price, few people will buy anime regardless of the price.
Huh, I was completely unaware of that system. The $100+ tapes...were they advertised in any way? I always assumed, from that age until now, that companies would just release a tape about 8 months to one year after a movie came out for $20 or so. I figured that people would go out to rent a tape because it was $5 to rent, a quarter of the price of buying the tape. That being said, the local video rental stores never seemed to have any releases ahead of time--by the time they appeared in the New Releases section of these Blockbusters, they're already at $20 to buy. Or is L.A. special due to its proximity to Hollywood and it bypasses the $100+ system completely? (I never actually visited a video rental store until about 1994 though.) My father preferred to record everything off of TV though, which I guess is the next tier down in price, quality, and wait time. I think the only movie he ever actually owned a non-TV-recording tape of was Jurassic Park, and that was partially for me. (It was obtained for $5 where most other places had it for the usual $20, and the tape quality was terrible, so maybe it was a bootleg.) |
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CR85747
Posts: 116 |
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Disney actually has a division that sells videos to schools, and one of the titles is indeed Donald Duck in Mathmagicland. |
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Kadmos1
Posts: 13591 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Justin is right about Maoyuu not fairing well because, according to someanithing.com, it averaged 2912 units with a total of 3514, including re-releases. t brought in about $943,434.14.
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geishageek
Posts: 571 Location: Pleasant Valley, NY |
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This was not how it worked for me and I am sure for many others as well. The only anime exposure we had was on Toonami, Sci-Fi's Saturday morning anime block and some older Nickelodeon titles that they never advertised as anime, or if you were lucky, knew someone who had or could get vhs fansub tapes at the time dvds became big. If you wanted more than what was currently airing on those channels, you had to go to places like Suncoast and my favorite Media Play and just pick stuff off shelves that looked interesting. Media play had a whole corner section dedicated to anime at the time so there was plenty to choose from. Blind buying in the days before digital fansubs and streaming (the bad old dial up Aol days) are a huge reason my collection is a large as it is. I would go into Media Play and spend hours reading the backs of discs to see if something piqued my interest. And each time I would go back to pick up a new volume of something I already purchased, I would add new titles as I went along, usually spending way more money than I wanted in the process. |
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Alan45
Village Elder
Posts: 9951 Location: Virginia |
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@Tenchi
Tomb Raider was the first title I noticed and did get some press at being so cheap. I have no idea about Top Gun, as a former Navy officer I had less than no interest in that show. @leafy sea dragon The two tier system eventually broke down. That may be what you saw or it may have been that LA was special. Keep in mind that US studios were balancing US theater release, foreign theater release, possible prime time TV screening, rental release and home video release. There may have been other formats as well. I suspect some of their scheduling people may have gone bat shit crazy trying to figure how to get the most money out of the process. I'm losing it. It was Raiders of The Lost Arc I was thinking of, not Tomb Raiders. Last edited by Alan45 on Thu Dec 03, 2015 12:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Levitz9
Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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Anime is several parsecs away from becoming that "mainstream". 7DeadlySin's success and Warner's JoJo release aren't quite major indicators of being "mainstream". (IIRC, the latter only happened because Warner Japan was involved with the JoJo anime.) |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Wholesaler catalogs. My Mom was an early adapter/collector of VHS movies in the 80s, and she used to get those in the mail. They were always promoting the latest "first time on video" releases that were coming out, so you'd see something like King Kong or 2001: A Space Odyssey on the front cover being advertised for like $99.95 or whatever the new release price was. Those were the releases targeting the video stores. And a year later that same release would be down to $29.95 or $19.95, and that's when Mom would buy the ones she wanted. It may also interest you to know that a similar "dual price point" model still exists today with e-books. I work for a public library, and the way e-books work in the library world is that we buy a certain number of licenses to a title, just like we'd buy a certain number of physical books. So if we buy ten licenses for an e-book then ten of our customers can have that e-book borrowed at a time; everyone else has to wait until one of them gets "returned". And to buy a hot bestseller the publishers typically charge us around $75-$100 per license, versus the $10-$15 you as a private customer would pay to buy it for your Kindle (and unlike the video store we're lending it to you for free, so we're not going to make up that cost). And lest you think that since it's electronic we'll have it forever once we've paid, we don't. Most of the ebook publishers only allow libraries a set number of checkouts per license (typically around 25-30), and after that we have to pay again if we want to keep it available for people. We don't pay overinflated prices for any other types of materials - in fact, we can usually get books and DVDs from specialized library vendors for less than retail price since we buy them in bulk. It's just the electronic items, ebooks and e-audiobooks, that are so expensive. Last edited by WingKing on Thu Dec 03, 2015 10:17 am; edited 1 time in total |
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CasCrow
Posts: 15 |
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I actually seen Tokyo Ghoul manga in the Insirational Christian section of my Walmart. I was surprised and found it pretty funny.
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I never knew libraries had to pay so much money for ebooks! That's ridiculous! And audiobooks in general are expensive no matter how you get them. I'm visually impaired, and it's very hard to get decently priced new audiobooks--CDs and downloads seem to be priced at a premium, and Audible costs $14.99/mo just for the subscription fee, which only gets you one audiobook a month. If you want any more, you have to pay for it separately. Libraries are great, but only for a limited amount of time, which always seems too short for books that can be 30+ hours long. |
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TRNielson
Posts: 182 |
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You're telling me. I've been shelling out a small fortune for anime bluray/dvds lately (most of them on sale). Last thing I need is them jacking the price up even more for collector's editions that I don't want. |
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TRNielson
Posts: 182 |
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Funimation does bluray/DVD sales right. "Buy this series on Blu-Ray and get the DVD version for little to no extra cost!" They know how to sell their products the right way, versus someone like Aniplex which will charge the same price for Blu-Ray exclusive only (I know someone said I should be grateful for the "cheaper" prices here in the US but when it costs me $135 for Madoka Magica on Blu-ray ON SALE, that's ridiculous for twelve episodes of anything). |
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