Director Takahiro Omori gives quotes on Baccano.
Via Anime Insider: Takahiro Omori (August 2007)
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Via Anime Insider: Dai Sato (August 2007)
Writer Dai Sato talks about his career, his background as a musician, how Eureka Seven’s pre-production slot switch influenced its story, and his feelings on adapting manga (as opposed to adapting novels or writing original material).
Via Anime Insider: The Cast of Haruhi Suzumiya (August 2007)
Aya Hirano, Yuko Goto, and Minori Chihara talk about their different voice-acting backgrounds; Hirano was a child actor, Goto was a college dropout and ex-AD, and Chihara started after graduating high school.
Via Anime Insider: Joseph Chou and Jeff Conner (August 2007)
Producers Joseph Chou and Jeff Conner talk about the Appleseed movie.
Via Anime Insider: Hiroshi Ogawa (August 2007)
An article on Crayon Shin-chan that includes an interview with Hiroshi Ogawa, who didn’t think the show would last a year.
Via Anime Insider: Chris Patton (August 2007)
A short interview with NA voice actor Chris Patton.
Via Anime Insider: Fandom in North America (August 2007)
An article on the evolution of the demographics making up the North American anime fanbase.
Fun With Numbers: Appleseed Alpha Sold 11,093 R1 BDs in Week 1
As you may be aware, I track US anime releases on amazon, ostensibly to get a rough idea of how much particular lower-end titles might be selling. However, the titles I track each month come from amazon’s anime tag, which is not always applied to all anime-related releases. That’s what happened with the US release of prequel movie Appleseed Alpha on July 22 of this year. This is an issue because the BDs of this movie sold over 11k units in their first week on sale, via TheNumbers. It’s a lost opportunity because I could have used it to test predictions, but the datapoint itself is still somewhat interesting in its own right.
AA’s total is only 655 fewer copies than that of Attack on Titan’s first set, and that’s without accounting for the fact that the movie’s release was split between BD and DVD versions (as opposed to AoT, where the release was a BD/DVD combo pack counted as BD sales). Attack on Titan may well have the longer sales tail, though; it’s currently ranked at 1,022 while Appleseed Alpha fell back to 6,819 in Movies and TV. It’s worth noting the potential contrast between the two fanbases, one older (and presumably salaried) versus another younger and more casual.
(A screencap of relevant week’s BD sales chart is included after the break.)
Timeslot History: SUN TV 24:35
As an addendum to the stuff I’ve been doing on anime timeslots in the mid-to-late 90s, it’s interesting to note that Kansai-based broadcaster Sun Television Co. actually had a little anime slot of its own, set at Thursday 24:35, which aired a few new shows. Sun TV was not the only current broadcaster of what were presumably UHF anime, and it shared part of its broadcast order with KBS Kyoto as well as Television Saitama, but their slot was listed as the primary one for To Heart by the tv-drama db, a generally reliable source.
Let me be the first to say which station broadcast what first and in what relation to the others is a question that is almost certainly more complex than I treat it as here. I know these shows were aired together on one channel, and not all shared Legend of Basara, so I’m going to define SUN TV as the primary broadcaster for the purpose of outlining the slot.
Since it was broadcasting to a much smaller region of the country (as part of a larger group of stations targeting several regions with the same block), information on it is more fragmentary, but we know it aired the following series during the 90s:
Legend of Basara [04-1998]
Dokyuusei 2 (OVA rebroadcast) [07-1998]
Kakyuusei (OVA rebroadcast) [09-1998]
(Unverifiable period)
To Heart [04-1999]
Kakyuusei (1999 TV Series) [07-1999]
As a 10k+ hit and something of a spiritual successor to many early-2000s Kyoto Animation works*, To Heart stands out a bit from the rest of the list. I find it interesting, though, that they first aired a pair of TV-edited Elf-franchise adaptation OVAs in the slot, perhaps partially to test the waters for the upcoming one-two punch of To Heart and Kakyuusei in consecutive seasons.
*In an admittedly primitive sense – much of the in-betweening and motion work for the final 3/4 episodes was outsourced to their studio.
Timeslot History: Anime on WOWOW (1994-2000)
WOWOW was a satellite channel, and was thus responsible for 80% of “I’m really surprised this didn’t air later at night” thoughts I had while gathering timeslot information. This summary also took less time to put together because most of their dedicated anime blocks were a pretty localized phenomenon, opening between 1998-1999 and ending, at the latest, in 2003.
General boilerplate stuff:
If you’re curious about the details, you can find the data I’ve gathered on this spreadsheet. Note on the format: the master list has just the networks, timeslots, and years of airing. Other sheets contain the shows aired in a given year and those aired on non-Japanese TV, with relevant links for the numerous series for which the Japanese wikipedia page didn’t provide sufficient information on the timeslot.
For each broadcaster, I’ll be asking two questions. First, which, if any slots did they have dedicated to anime in general? To qualify as an anime slot for the purposes of this exercise, a timeslot has to have aired premieres of at least 3 TV anime from 1994 to 2000. This excludes, for example, the Fuji TV Sunday 18:30 slot, which has been running Sazae-san for a really long time. I’m more interested in timeslots that would have been available to new shows during this period. I do track timeslots before and after the period to get an idea of where their demos originated and where they ended up.
Second, which, if any shows did that broadcaster air after midnight? I want to give as complete a view as possible on the stance different companies took in regards to airing anime late at night. Since I’ve been poring over the data, I already have a decent idea of what the answer is going to be, but it’s neat to look at how different broadcasters’ stances were during this period.
Animetics 