×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

News
ADV Films Removes Titles from Website - Update

posted on by Egan Loo
Current list of removed titles

The website of the North American video distributor ADV Films has now removed the following anime titles from its store and trailer sections:

In addition, the live-action Ghost Train The Movie has been removed from the website, although other live-action works, including Synthesia, remain available. Likewise, dozens of older anime titles in ADV Films' catalog, such as Gantz, Get Backers, Golden Boy, Hello Kitty, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Noir, Prétear, Princess Tutu, and Samurai X (Rurouni Kenshin), are still available. The DVD releases of Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora and Sgt. Frog remain unsolicited or delayed.

Several of the removed titles, such as 009-1, Ah! My Goddess: Flights of Fancy, Air Gear, and Best Student Council, are still listed in the website of the Anime Network video-on-demand service. However, the standalone websites for some of these titles and others, including Air Gear, Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor, Nerima Daikon Brothers, Pumpkin Scissors, Red Garden, and Sgt. Frog, are now down.

An article appeared briefly on the website of the ICv2 retailer news resource with a similar list and a description of financing issues between ADV Films and ARM Corporation. ARM Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Japan Contents Investment Business Limited Partnership (JCI), which in turn is an investment fund formed by Sojitz Corporation, Development Bank of Japan, and The Klockworx Co., Ltd. JCI acquired equity in A.D. Vision, ADV Films' parent company, as part of the partnership between A.D. Vision and Sojitz in 2006. Milton Griepp, CEO of ICv2, gave ANN the following statement:

The article on Sojitz and ADV you refer to was one of several contingency articles we prepared and posted on a staging site.  Although that staging site is not accessible through ICv2 navigation, an unpublished article was indexed by Google using a spidering technique of which we had previously been unaware.  We discovered the Google indexing within an hour or two of when it occurred and immediately removed the article from our staging site (along with any other unpublished articles).  Unfortunately, the article was cached by Google and has now been brought to the attention of anime fans.  It's unfortunate because as this is written, the article isn't true. It may still be one of several possible outcomes of the current situation, but as far as we know today ADV has not sent a notice to its retailers or placed the titles in question on hiatus and may not, pending the outcome of events that are still unfolding.  We regret that our efforts to prepare for any eventuality led to this draft article becoming public and have taken steps to prevent such an event from happening again. 

ANN has contacted several prominent retailers and distributors, and all confirm that they have not received a notice with a similar title list in any format. ANN has also contacted ADV Films, but the company has declined to comment.


This article has a follow-up: ADV Films Removes Titles from Website - Update 2 (2008-01-30 17:09)
follow-up of ADV Films Removes Titles from Website (Updated)
discuss this in the forum (58 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

News homepage / archives