Forum - View topicNEWS: Crackle Adds Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, Lupin III: The Legend of the Gold of Babylon,
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EricJ2
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No, as for why Urusei "didn't catch on", you're just in time to catch "What happened to Robert Woodhead and AnimEigo" stories over on the "Can fans license a title?" Answerman thread. AnimEigo scored a gold mine in getting literally THE most fan-demanded cult title of the '90-'92 underground campus days (when "Otaku no Video" parodied early 90's US fans as single-mindedly obsessed with Lum, they weren't kidding, and I was there), but stayed a fan-made garage company while Pioneer, Viz and ADV rose to corporate power. While Viz got Ranma 1/2 onto Suncoast shelves, and Pioneer sold Tenchi and Record of Lodoss Wars, Urusei was still struggling away as a website-by-mail exclusive, with no outreach to retail mainstream, until they got a few--few--dubbed VHS's of the movies out onto shelves, which was a major accomplishment for them....And sapped most of the money AE would need to renew the license. If late-90's fans remember Ranma or Tenchi as their "first" comedy anime, well, how did that happen? Basically, imagine if some little fan company bought the homemade disk rights to Kemono Friends before the show had gone to Crunchyroll, made their homemade DVD-Roms by Kickstarter, and then sat on the license for fifteen years without selling it to streaming. That's how frustrating things were in getting fan awareness going with AnimEigo and Urusei back then--if you were lucky, you might get a friend to find one of the remaining random TV-episode volumes that hadn't dropped off of disk-by-mail Netfix yet--and that's leaving aside a three-year gap in release while license troubles were being sorted out, which cooled the fan momentum considerably, followed by AE having to re-release 20 volumes of the tapes mid-series, once the market finally went to DVD. What started in 1992 ended in 2005, that should give you some overwhelming idea of how difficult it was to grind this show out on the spit-and-shoestring level that AE was grinding it, never mind the changes in the industry that were already taking place and leaving them behind in the garage.
Maison just borrowed Mendou/Mitaka and Benten/Akemi, it's nowhere NEAR the Ryuu & Shinobu/Ranma & Akane similarities once Shinobu started becoming a platonic "girl consultant" best friend to Ryuu. (Now, the Ranma/Inu-yasha similarities, OTOH...) |
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