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DBZ's "seasons" are even more arbitrary than you think. Even if you go by the gaps between clusters of airing episodes on Cartoon Network back in the day, the show only has maybe five or six seasons, and yet Funimation insists it has nine, based on there having been nine "season sets". DBZ never had any "seasons" in Japan, it ran from 1989 until its completion without a break.

Of course, then there's the people who more appropriately break DB and DBZ into "arcs" (or as "sagas", ignoring what that means as a narrative convention), though even Toei doesn't even know where one arc begins and another ends. People have been so cowed by the "sagas" thing, even when VHS fansubs were going around, you had people labeling tapes with "Imperfect Cell Saga" or "Gotenks Saga". Do YOU know when the Freeza arc officially begins and when it ends? Is the stuff with Raditz, Vegeta, and Nappa part of the overall Freeza arc or is it its own arc? It all depends on where you draw the lines.

But Funimation, and a lot of other licensors, just like to use "seasons" because it's an American convention their costumers understand in a general sense.

Quote:

Warner Bros., the last Hollywood studio to exclusively support the format

Warner was never HD DVD exclusive, that was Universal and later Paramount. Warner did have some exclusive HD DVD releases and there were rumors that they might be bribed into becoming HD DVD exclusive like Paramount was, but the opposite happened and they became Blu-ray exclusive.

FUNimation used "sagas" for DBZ to label their VHS/single DVD collections, though it goes back to the Pioneer VHS releases of the early dub. There were 16 "sagas," each one came in a completed boxset or separately by tape (they formed a picture when they lined up!). They ranged in size though. The "Captain Ginyu" saga was only two volumes long, while the "Frieza" saga was ten. The series was a lot more fun to collect back then, even if it was more tedious and expensive.

The "season" sets of course don't cover real seasons. The first season ends at episode 39, even though the Saiyan/Vegeta saga logically should end at episode 35. They wanted to end the set on a cliffhanger so people would buy Season 2 (indeed episode 39 does end on a pretty sharp cliffhanger). Most of them cover specific sagas though (ex. Season 5 was Imperfect and Perfect Cell sagas, Season 6 was Cell Games, etc).

Buster D wrote:

Quote:

Warner Bros., the last Hollywood studio to exclusively support the format

Warner was never HD DVD exclusive, that was Universal and later Paramount. Warner did have some exclusive HD DVD releases and there were rumors that they might be bribed into becoming HD DVD exclusive like Paramount was, but the opposite happened and they became Blu-ray exclusive.

Back when it was pretty much all over but the shouting in favor of Blu, Warner believed they could write their own peace treaty to the Format War that was stifling the industry and driving everyone out of their skulls, by developing a two-sided "hybrid" disk that would satisfy everyone.
To do that, they had to keep stringing HDDVD along, and Toshiba started getting a little too overconfident that Warner was their last greatest friend in the world, hence the "bribery" theory--That's what THEY thought, anyway. Wink

When the Hybrid Disk proved impossible, Warner dropped the losing format like a hot potato, and Toshiba famously lost the one last card in their hand. (See reference to Angry Hitler Video #1, which was more appropriate to the ending scene of Downfall than most of the other videos have been.)

Paramount had been Blu from the beginning, but needed Toshiba's filthy lucre to finance the Star Trek:TOS restoration, and Universal was considered to be in Microsoft's pocket, back before they ended up in Comcast's.

GATSU wrote:

Really, the only reason Blu-Ray 'won' over HD was because Sony lobbied for it.

Blu-ray has more content protections than HD-DVD - and ya know how big studios like content protection. The studios gradually saw that "feature" then a light-bulb lit on their heads, so they eventually realized that Blu-ray is the one that has to be backed.

And so it will be on the next format wars (if there is a next format or war). Rest assured that the format chosen will be the one with the more content protections. Studios don't care about consumers; they care more about protecting their contents. Still people will follow where the content goes; it's not like they have a choice (going to other format with nothing in it). Just ya watch. Laughing

EricJ2 wrote:

TarsTarkas wrote:

While that helped, I think it was more that every family that bought a PlayStation, got a Blu-Ray player. There was no need to spend more money for another HD player, since you already had one. That was Sony's slickest move and the winning one.

You could get an HDDVD add-on if you had an X-Box 360, which unfortunately turned the format war into a Gamer-D00dz war, and....when don't we have one of those?

Also remember that the PS3 when it came out was much more expensive than the 360. If ya bought the HD-DVD add-on for the 360, it'd add up to about the same price as the PS3.

EricJ2 wrote:

Any time there's a gamer-fan PS vs. X-Box war, regular people just shrug "A plague on both your dorm rooms".
Sony was perfectly content to fight with the D00dz, which didn't help Blu's image in the early days, while X-Box was famous for the "Red Ring of Death" that pretty much insured that you would only be able to use your player for two or three years at a time.

Yet people bought it anyway. The holiday season one year after the 360 was released, it was flying off the shelves.

Here's another reason why I don't agree with referring to split cours as "seasons" unless they're labeled as such: American shows like The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad and Mad Men had their respective final seasons split in two halves that aired a year apart from one another, and yet, when you look at the BD/DVD releases, streaming services and episode guides, the two halves are still grouped as a single season. So why is it that two cours of an anime series can't constitute a single season?

EricJ2 wrote:

You could get an HDDVD add-on if you had an X-Box 360

That wasn't the point. The Blu-Ray player was the PlayStation. It wasn't an add on or something you had to get separate.

If you had a PlayStation, you had a Blu-Ray player. It conveniently eliminated the need for any other player.

CandisWhite wrote:

Is the disconnect of the differences between 'cour' and 'cours' a Japanese cultural thing that English Westerners are simply aping, or is this a 'karaoke' being pronounced Carrie Oakey situation?

The Japanese use "kuru". "Cour" is a re-romanization, not a direct borrowing.

EricJ2 wrote:

Sony didn't sell Blu-ray, DISNEY sold Blu-ray, pushing Sony aside just in the nick of time, as we were about ready to laugh/sneer/ignore both formats off the market.
Sony had the hardware, but it's the movies that sell the format--And the studio with the bigger sell-through mass-market for movie software took the sales pitch away from the short-attention Red Bull-swilling teens and showed the grownups who really had the money just why the format looked better and was just as easy to use as DVD, if you wanted those classics on disk for your kids. You can do more with telling people they can get Sleeping Beauty in hi-def, than telling them they can get Talladega Nights.
(Namely, because HDDVD had Microsoft as the power behind the throne, and was hoping that Windows would corner the market on movie-coding. Steve Jobs was hoping that a more .MP4 friendly format would win out and keep Apple in the game, and was now on Disney's board with the Pixar merger.)

Thank you for that speech, Mr. Madison. Now let me tell you why that's bullshit:

Toshiba bragged about selling a million players - 360 add-ons included - a year after HD-DVD went live; Sony sold millions of PS3s in the same time period. PS3 games are made on Blu-ray Discs, so even if everybody somehow magically lost interest in HD video, the production facilities would've had to remain in operation just for the Playstation; apathy alone would've won Blu-ray the war. Without the ability to match Sony on its own terms and its co-creators unwilling to go all-in, Toshiba had as much hope of winning as Poland did.

Let's cool it down, folks.

Last edited by Hameyadea on Tue May 19, 2015 6:38 am; edited 1 time in total

One of the big reasons with the BD won the Format War is just due to its specs compared to HD-DVD's:

In order to play one's HD-DVD movie, they would've had to buy either a HD-DVD Player, which cost some $499 back in 2007, or an Xbox 360, which the cheapest model - the Xbox 360 Core - was priced at $300 before being reduced by $20 in August 2007, along with an external HD-DVD Player add-on (another $200), add to that the fact that before August/September 2007, all Xbox 360s didn't had an HDMI port, sending consumers back some $18-or-so back, and if they had HDMI-capable Xbox 360, it most likely came without an HDMI cable in the box, so another $18 at bare minimum into this endeavor. What's our total so far? $300+$200+$18=$518.

On the other hand, the PlayStation 3 was priced at $499/$599 for the 20/60 GB models, respectively, and also didn't include an HDMI cable (for production costs reasons).

So what was the appeal of the BD, cost-wise? Basically, the added functionality - in the Xbox 360, one had to hop quite a lot of hoops to get their HD-DVD disc playing (either get an HD-DVD Player, which can only play movies, or go and search for a dedicated add-on for the console, which again, will only let one play their movies), or they could get (for nearly the same price) a Blu-Ray Player that can also play games, and requires less steps to walk-through before the consumer can start enjoying their BD library, be it games, movies, or audio.

I don't get the arguments. BD has more space then HD-DVD, a plus for consumers. BD has more protection the HD-DVD, a plus for corporations. Of course it won, it was better for everyone.

So I had to leave my post half finished, and naturally forgot all about it.

Blu-ray holdbacks and HD-DVD came together in a perfect storm with 5cm/s - at the time Manga UK gave up and released it DVD-only (the BD had got as far as an Amazon listing and both versions were delayed multiple times) it had been out in HD long enough in Japan that it was released on HD-DVD as well as BD.

In some cases where Sentai has re-released a DVD-only title on BD it is because they've made a deal with Austalia ad/or the UK to split the costs which makes a previously unviable title viable.

Ironically HD-DVD was technically better for (some) anime than BD because of one specific combination of resolution and framerate it supported, although I fail to remember what that was now.

TheAncientOne wrote:

Cour isn't confusing at all. A cour = 1/4 of a year. It is that simple.

A season is also 1/4 of a year so should also be that simple, but...

CandisWhite wrote:

Is the disconnect of the differences between 'cour' and 'cours' a Japanese cultural thing that English Westerners are simply aping, or is this a 'karaoke' being pronounced Carrie Oakey situation?

From the Anime Encyclopedia:

Quote:

Cours (plural courses) is the French term for a period of time, used in Japan to refer to a television season of 13 weeks. Because the s is silent in French and invisible in Japanese, this has often been misspelled in English as "cour."

enurtsol wrote:

And so it will be on the next format wars (if there is a next format or war). Rest assured that the format chosen will be the one with the more content protections. Studios don't care about consumers; they care more about protecting their contents. Still people will follow where the content goes; it's not like they have a choice (going to other format with nothing in it). Just ya watch. Laughing

Fortunately, we don't have a "Next format war", all we've got is UltraHD, which is "What if they gave a format war and nobody came?"
The answer is that the "war" would be two or three generals on the empty field having a girly slap-fight all by themselves until one or the other cries: Razz

The industry itself hasn't even hit shelves yet, and there's already a house divided between the hardware makers hoping to sell standalone disk players, and studios hoping that "disks are dead" and everything will be studio-controlled digital 4K content.
As DigitalBits.com points out, those most interested in early-adopting the new format would ideally be the home-theater buffs who keep everything on the highest hard-disk format available, and THEY'RE the ones being snubbed and orphaned by the disk-phobic studios before they can even shell out their money for the product--While those most interested in digital content are more interested in quantity and availability over quality, and couldn't give rattus tucchus about the high-end digital presentation the set makers are trying to sell, if the price goes up too high or the bandwidth is too impossible.
Bad move. Like "Deliberately steering the ship too close to the icebergs" bad move.

(Which is why it's the Anime fans who've known since the 90's:
KEEP YOUR DISKS. The Digital Bubble's one step away from popping, and we'll put the looneys back in their cages afterwards.)

It's amazing how many people rave about how we'll have an all-digital future when hundreds of millions of Americans have always received higher-end equipment before the bandwidth to use it(and how many with FCC-approved broadband(1Mb/s) are completely unable to stream anything in current HD?) and something tells me the number of videophiles outside Google's planned service areas vastly outnumber the ones inside them. It's like looking at a map is a superpower of some sort.

VILLAINS BEWARE! I AM PERSPECTIVE MAN!

Shiroi Hane wrote:

Ironically HD-DVD was technically better for (some) anime than BD because of one specific combination of resolution and framerate it supported, although I fail to remember what that was now.

It was said that HD DVD supported 1080p30 while Blu-ray didn't, but in actuality it wasn't really true since the vast majority of HD DVD players sold (the XBox 360 add-on could do 1080p, but only if you used VGA or HDMI, the latter of which was only on newer 360s) only output a maximum of 1080i anyway, and the high-end HD DVD players that did output 1080p only did it by deinterlacing 1080i, they didn't output the 1080p streams directly. And it was just as possible to store 1080p30 streams on Blu-ray and flag it as 1080i, similar to how 480p flagged as 480i can be stored on DVD.

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