A pair of articles about 4kids entertainment, the first about their plans for One Piece, and the second about fan demand for uncut versions of other shows.
Via Anime Insider: 4Kids Entertainment (October 2004)
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Via Anime Insider: Mitsuo Fukuda (October 2004)
Gundam Seed director Mitsuo Fukuda talks about how he prepared to direct the series, the degree of input he had on the story, and his respect for Star Trek.
Via Anime Insider: Crispin Freeman (August 2004)
US voice actor Crispin Freeman talks about getting into character for different roles.
Via Anime Insider: Mamoru Oshii (August 2004)
Mamoru Oshii talks about design choices, the title, and doll research for Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.
Via Anime Insider: Stand Alone Complex (August 2004)
Production IG CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and Director Kenji Kamiyama talk about Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Kamiyama talks about his take on the gits universe, and Ishikawa boasts about a sales total of 700,000 units, a total that blows away the DVD/BD wiki totals.
For season 1: 16019*13=208,247
For season 2: 19640*13=255,320
For a total of about 470,000 copies. There are some miscellaneous box releases that add ~10-20 thousand to that, but it’s still probably generous probably generous, since s2 had only released 6 of its 13 volumes at that point (with only 6 volumes out for s2, that total goes down to ~330,000). Not a factor of 5 like it might be with Chrono Crusade, and under-reporting by a factor of 2 has happened before, but still a huge difference.
Via Anime Insider: NBA/Tokyopop Media Deals (August 2004)
This article details a very weird tie-in between Tokyopop and the NBA that totally happened, as well as corporate sponsorship for viz’s shonen jump.
I mean, I like the NBA, and I love manga, but I don’t know what the market is here. They made 12 volumes, though, so maybe that actually did well?
Via Anime Insider: Competitive Bidding for Fullmetal Alchemist (August 2004)
A piece about Fullmetal Alchemist’s licencing for US release. The interesting quote here is one on the second page by Funimation president Gen Fukunaga; “Fullmetal Alchemist was a very hotly contested property. All of the top anime companies in the United States were bidding on it […]”
That poses a very interesting what if; what if one of those other companies had gotten FMA? If ADV gets it, do they then fortify their brand around that property and not wildly overbid for that series in the very near future? It’s possible, though not likely, that their overspending on B-listers was driven by the increasing need to get a real hit out of one of them, something exacerbated by Funimation’s cornering more of the A-list market. What if, say, Geneon or Bandai Visual, with their less-substantial connections to cable TV, got it and whiffed on the rollout? It’s food for aimless speculation, although I would love to see a timeline of who made what bids when.
Fun With Numbers: Anime as Light Novel Advertisments in 2010
2010 was a year with fairly thin pickings in terms of light novel/novel adaptations. I counted less than 15 new series with books as a source, and 4 of them (Tatami Galaxy, Katanagatari, MM, and Shiki) were done before the adaptation came out, limiting our ability to measure their impact. Thankfully, there was only one series that ran through the anime and didn’t chart; Asobi ni Ikuyo. There’s a wealth of data for the other 9, though.
In any event, the pre/post-anime two-week sales totals of the light novels for which they’re available are recorded here and plotted below.
Note that, for Shinrei Tantei Yakumo, I was tracking the editions of the volumes reissued under Kadokawa; it was originally published by Nihon Bungeisha in the early 2000s, and later had one new volume (9) released before the reissuing finished. It’s irregular for a lot of reasons. Continue reading
Unstoppable Hype Machine Summer 2014 #10 – Akame Ga KILL
Number 10 on our list is Akame Ga KILL, an already popular manga adapted to the screen for your viewing pleasure! Find out why were are hyped to DEATH! (heh)
Fun With Numbers: Anime as Manga Advertisments in 2010
I’m adding the 2010 manga-adaptation anime into the sample of adaptation effects on their source material. Many, though not all, series show some degree of significant bump. Nitty-gritty data is collected here, and displayed below. An impressive 20 of the 26 series I looked at made the Oricon charts at some point, though one of them (Rainbow) ended before the anime began. One that didn’t, Seikon no Qwaser, is still running at 8 years, 18 volumes (it’s hardly the only series to run that long without charting, I’m just pointing out that manga can run for a long time without seeing the light of day chart-wise).
Note: For High School of the Dead, both volumes 4 and 5 came out well before the anime, and volume 6 came out during its broadcast. The gap in time was so big that they came out before mal tracked numbers for series, only posting top 10 lists. I used the available 2008 manga data to approximate the average value, in volumes, of the #10 slot to get a rough estimate of the threshold. Even holding v4 and v5 to the maximum threshold from those weeks, the 130,000 v6 and 200,000 v7 it puts up post-anime is evidence of a significant bump.
Animetics 