Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Anime Discs Re-released So Much?
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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In addition to stuff like DBZ, Naruto, and Sailor Moon (which Wal•Marts and Targets also carry), the local Best Buys around me also carry One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sword Art Online (at Aniplex's prices), 3 or 4 other series released by one of the American distributors over the past 12 months, and 5 or 6 other series that appear and disappear. It also depends on the specific location. The Wal•Mart in Golden Valley (a remote road in Los Angeles's Santa Clarita Valley) has anime mixed into its family, action, and TV sections, and they do it knowing what the series are about. Stuff like Nisekoi and Akame ga Kill! appears there, meaning they order stuff from Sentai. They always have 15 to 20 anime series, which, besides form the staples, are mostly new releases. No other Wal•Mart I've visited has nearly this much anime, so I suspect there's someone who works there with the authority to order discs who's an anime fan. Fry's Electronics has always been a strong holdout for home video. They still have 4 to 6 aisles dedicated to home video, depending on the location, length of their aisles, and size of their stores. The one in Burbank, which I visit the most, still has 2 racks dedicated to anime, but it gets mixed in with whatever rack is next to it (I'm guessing this is due to customers picking them up and putting them in the wrong places). Probably helps that Bang Zoom! Entertainment is on the same street and only a few blocks south. Of these retailers, Best Buy's stuff is indeed late and more expensive, Wal•Mart's gets them on release and about the same price as anywhere else, and Fry's is very good at undercutting even online prices. If I can find them at Fry's or Wal•Mart, I get my anime from these places so I don't have to deal with problems regarding shipping and handling. Where I live, shipping rates are high and packages frequently wind up missing or damaged, so I prefer to drive over and get them from physical retail stores. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9847 Location: Virginia |
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Tars Tarkas wrote:
I live in the Roanoke area so that would be a four hour + drive for me. I used to be stationed on a ship out of Little Creek so I can't say I envy you. We weren't in port a whole lot but what I did see of the area did not inspire me. It didn't help that the last I saw of the Tidewater area was a week in the Navy's Escape and Evasion course at Camp A. P. Hill. It makes perfectly good sense that Navy and Marine Corp personal would be into anime as some Navy and a lot of Marine Corp get stationed in Japan. We used to have FYE and Warehouse Music here but they left town. Their problem is that they wanted full MSRP for their new stuff. You could find decent buys in their used anime but it was all mixed together and hard to search. The amount they paid for used anime was just enough to make me feel ripped off so I turned to just giving it away here. The nearest Suncoast stores were in the Greensboro Highpoint NC area about an hour south of here. The next nearest was in Winchester of all places about three hours down (North) the Valley from here. We also had a couple of comic book stores that carried anime which is how I got started but they didn't make the shift from VHS to DVS. The problem with getting anime at the local Best Buy is that the clerks who stocked the shelves were members of the local junior college anime club and their friends tended to get first pick. They now don't carry enough to make it worthwhile even looking. I now buy from TRSI and RACS depending on who offers the best deal. Of course with RACS I have to pay sales tax. @leafy sea dragon When I first lived here I was in an apartment near downtown. After the first time I found a package hanging on my mailbox in sight of a sidewalk about ten feet away and about to be rained on, I got myself a post office box. It helped that the post office in question was on the way home. Where I live now this is not an issue . The mailman delivers packages to the kitchen door in the carport. If you are finding Frys to be better priced than online, they are offering better prices than any retail store I have ever shopped. Our Wal-Marts have two or three anime titles mixed in with the general video releases. Nothing I was ever interested in and very hard to find. Target around here hasn't had anime in the last ten years. |
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GVman
 Posts: 729 |
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Of all the stuff that can be termed first-world problems, "anime being rereleased too much for my liking," is probably at the top of the list.
On DBZ, I'm pretty sure Funi keeps cropping their releases because that's what people want. Folks want stuff to fill up their 16x9 TVs, whether it's supposed to or not. Lord knows I've gotten into arguments with my uncle over this subject. Funimation isn't stupid. They're gonna do what makes them the most money, and since those BD level sets didn't sell, I'm sure they're not too keen on doing another Dragon Box-based release for a while longer. I do feel like we will see one again down the road, but we might not see it until the next big home video format shift. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
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I think that that the shopping experience at Circuit City was negatively affected by the layoffs of 3,400 sales staff because they were "overpaid". I, for one, did not shed a tear when it went belly up – although I did feel sorry for the rank-and-file employees. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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It's not an issue of local theft (though I'm sure some of it is), but of incompetence by the local package delivery services. Some packages would arrive damaged because, to save time or something, they'd literally throw the packages onto our front walkway from the street. (I am fortunate enough to have never had this happen to me, but I've seen it happen to other people in the neighborhood.) The damaged stuff is also not the sort of thing vandals do, but rather, I'd get pages in books and magazines torn up like they went through a machine, some have been left out in the rain without any waterproof packaging, and boxes have been dented on the side. I had ordered a volume of One Piece and watched its tracking only to see it get stuck at Bell, CA. I got another copy and it got stuck there again. To this day, tracking info says they're both still there. Packages also take a long time to arrive. The worst case was Super Mario Sunshine many years ago, which arrived four months after the expected delivery date. There's zero accountability too. Any complaints filed about them is ignored. Incidents like these is why I only have stuff delivered by mail/courier as a last resort and why I'm glad anime availability at physical stores is a lot better the average in the United States. |
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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Yeah. I don't understand this at all. A lot of folks get annoyed by "black bars" and insist that the image fit the screen even if it's a different aspect ratio - which looks terrible, and I don't understand how they can't see that. But more importantly, it doesn't match what was actually filmed, which matters. Heck, lots of video surveillance systems stretch the video when they display it, which is downright stupid considering how much the authenticity and correctness of footage can matter in that field. Another symptom of this problem is when the news shows video from a cell phone, instead of putting the large black bars on the sides that belong there, they do some weird nonsense that shows some sort of dimmed, zoomed in piece of the image around the actual image, which is incredibly distracting. I think that some folks who are dumb about this have come to accept thin black bars on the top and bottom, since that often happens with movies - even when you have a 16x9 screen (since movies tend to end up with all kinds of aspect ratios that aren't quite 16x9) - but they seem to be completely allergic to black bars on the sides. Video doesn't magically have the same aspect ratio as your TV, especially when the standard aspect ratio for TVs had a drastic change from 4x3 to 16x9 ten to fifteen years ago. But nooooo. Somehow, they're supposed to come up with extra footage to slap on the sides to get rid of the black bars - or for some reason, cropping the video to fit so that you lose out on stuff on the top and bottom is acceptable. *sigh* Of course, these are probably the same people that think it's reasonable to "enhance" an image and suddenly come up with a bunch of detail that wasn't there in the first place. This is one of those topics that makes it so that I have a very low opinion of some people. They just seem so stupid... And when it means that we get worse products because of it, I'm that much more ticked off about it. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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It's one of those DNA-memory traditions that goes back farther than most people remembered: When Blu-ray and widescreen HDTV hit at the same time in '08, more people owned plasma screens than LED/LCD's, and plasma back then had a big, big problem with repeated-image burn-in, especially black bars. For the first two years of Blu-ray, studios were literally afraid to release anything 4:3--Some panicked movie studios actually talked about whether Blu-ray should even be in the business of releasing old 4:3 movies at all, or just leave that to the job of DVD, and some cheap companies tried to coin the new term of "Tilt & scan" for zoomed-in movies. When Disney started releasing their animated classics on Blu, they pushed Sleeping Beauty ahead in line because it was their widest-screen movie. But they knew they'd have to get around to their money well of Snow White and Pinocchio some time, so they created artistic "borders" for the sides of their 4:3 vintage classics, and while they weren't bad at all...the arguments basically stopped after that. The issue pretty much re-focused on the idea of Blu'ing the movie as it should be presented, and all the other fears before that just sort of became a bad dream. Except at Funi, where they're still cheap and commercially desperate. 
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Adamanto
Posts: 146 |
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I'm fairly sure Funimation has more or less outright admitted in interviews that the reason their Dragonball Z releases are so bad is that since Dragonball is such a huge hit, its fanbase is much much stupider than other shows' fanbases, and as such respond positively to garbage like cropped video and terrible filters. Just not with those exact words. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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It was DiVX. Even if they survived their fatal investment in it, home-theater fans never forgave them. 
(No, really, CBS comes up with eight reasons, and DiVX wasn't one of them? I didn't even know the other seven!) |
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Aphasial
Exempt from Grammar Rules
Posts: 122 Location: San Diego, CA |
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Yikes, where do you live? I've only had problems like that once or twice, and I'm a pretty consummate Amazon Prime and other online shopping devotee. I guess UPS/FedEx/USPS are more reliable in San Diego than in some other places. WRT anime, though, the local Fry's store is still the best-stocked location. Best Buys will have perhaps 5-6 ft of shelving for it, but front facing. Fry's had most of a whole aisle with spines facing out. Suncoast was the only other place I could think of that had a mildly decent selection locally back in the day. Target occasionally stocks things, but it's mixed in with their general Kids/Disney sections. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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It's because some people think that new footage is created, discovered, or re-shot to fill the TV space. I remember when YouTube's stretch tags were new, and uploaders everywhere were in a rush to go use it to stretch their 4:3 videos to 16:9. I kept my 4:3 videos in 4:3 and kept the pillarboxes. I don't mind them much, but I got plenty of comments from people who did, a few of them even calling the stretch tags as "magic" because, upon asking about their insistence, they thought YouTube somehow manipulates the video into filling in the pillarboxes. These people don't notice the horizontal distortion. And if they don't notice circles becoming ellipses and everyone looking a bit wider than they normally would, they definitely won't notice cropping, especially if they never knew what the original picture looks like. Either that, or they don't want to notice, because when I explained to them what the YouTube stretch (and later crop) tags actually did, none of them believed me.
UPS is more reliable than FedEx or USPS around here, though FedEx seems to fluctuate a lot. But the lion's share of these mishaps come from the USPS. I honestly don't know why, but looking at package tracking, they sit for several days (used to be weeks) at my nearest post office before being sent out. I won't say which one it is, just that anyone who doesn't live in the area it serves doesn't need to worry because this post office only does deliveries to its designated area. Local Fry's still has two or three shelves with the spine sticking out, and sometimes a separate clearance shelf also with the spines sticking out but emptier. I love looking for S.A.V.E. editions at Fry's. They always have at least a dozen different ones at a time. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Reading unfortunate tales such as this, I feel fortunate to be living in a third-floor apartment with communal balconies. Delivery persons can only deliver mail items by scaling the stairs, curtailing any lackadaisical approaches to package delivery. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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I've had maybe one carrier come to my third floor apartment; everybody else just delivers them to the office(which is probably for the best). I ended up getting a PO Box since it was more convenient to be able to pick things up on my schedule(which was overnight at the time); the only problem I've had with that is that FedEx wouldn't deliver an overnighted package there(despite delivering normal packages there all the time).
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