Fun With Numbers: Pay Dirt in Blu-Ray/Amazon Monitoring

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A couple days ago, I was refreshing home media magazine’s site like a madman in hopes of getting a rough estimate of Attack on Titan’s placing. The result, a top 20 BD chart with no anime in it, was a disappointment to me despite my hedged bets about how shaky my amazon fit model was. Turns out, this might not be so much an indictment of the model as of the usability of the HM magazine/VideoScan First Alert charts they use.

Because it turns out that, contrary to their April 6 BD chart, a certain classic series sneaked on to the The Numbers’ top 20 BD disk chart, giving me my first solid high-end number in ever:

BDchart-DBZs3

For reference, using the amazon fit formula on the existing data (daily sales=300,000/daily amazon rank) and counting preorders of the series, the model estimates the first week sales of DBZ’s season 3 BD rerelease would be about 6034 copies. That’s a bit lower than the actual result, likely because of a possible storefront effect for popular titles that reader fredofirish brought to my attention. Still, that’s only off by about 20% of the actual value; not bad at all for a rough guess. Given this result for a series that peaked in the upper 300s, I am 99% sure we’ll be seeing the AoT release that made double digits on these same charts in a few months, and we might even see Berserk III on there in two weeks.*

Also, YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!

*It peaked at a similar place to where the DBZ release did, though this week’s threshold was also fairly generous.

Via Newtype USA: Various Novelists Interviewed (Various Issues, 2003-2004)

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I wasn’t able to find anything particularly interesting about these articles, but I did scan them, so I figured I’d just post them in case they were something anyone else cared about. Two of the names on this list are significantly more famous than the others in Western circles; Mardock Scramble’s Ubukata and Haruhi Suzumiya’s Tanigawa.

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Via Animag: Shoji Kawamori & Haruhiko Mikimoto on Macross (1990, Issue 11)

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This Animag article, in addition to providing a contemporary view of the Macross franchise, features a couple of neat anecdotes about Shoji Kawamori having to choose between Macross and college, redrafting the script of DYRL, and reacting to the voice acting in Robotech.

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Via Animag: Leiji Matsumoto Interview (Issue 6, 1988)

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Via a very awesome US fanzine, Leiji Matsumoto talks about his choice of pen name, cultural exchange of ideas in the 80s, and the increased creative freedom afforded by the rise of OVAs. Also, Yattaran is based on the creator of Area 88, which is neat.

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Via Newtype USA: [inside] Xebec (October 2004)

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Along with an understanding of the broader context of the subject, the most vital ingredient to good anime coverage is a reliable source. So when US journalists actually interview people on the production side in Japan, it’s generally worth noting unless the interview consists entirely of fluff. This is the latest of what will hopefully be a couple more posts archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. In this feature on Xebec, President Yukinao Shimoji describes how friendship with Mitsuhisa Ishikawa (President of Production IG) led to his founding his own studio and Director Nobuyoshi Habara talks about building architecture and setting in DN Angel.

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. They’re also in greyscale, because I’m interested in archiving interview text and color scans make the process more of a headache than it needs to be. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

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Fun With Numbers: CD Singles’ Loose Disk Average Relation

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As it does with many others, anime is somewhat intertwined with the music industry. One of the biggest production outfits in the business, Aniplex, is a subsidiary of Sony Music Japan, whose music labels typically get first dibs at on involvement in a show that Aniplex has greenlit. Even outside of shows with blatant music themes tied into vocal superstars, the relation between a show and its associated singers is an interesting topic for study. Previously, I took a look at how a series’ OP/ED CD sales corresponded to the presence of a visible boost in print source material. This time, I’m going to take a look at the same CD sales data, but compared with disk sales.

Specifically, I’m looking at the week one sales of a series’ first opening single and first ending single, via the myanimelist news board.* That is, when they’re both on sale as individual CDs and not bundled with disks like the openings to the second season of Monogatari were (in such cases, I only counted the one towards the average). If a CD didn’t chart, I put it down as a dash and counted it as a 0. If a CD contained both the opening and ending theme, I put that total as the average. Data for disk averages for each show in 2013 is taken from someanithing. It was pulled a couple weeks ago, and it may be slightly out of date, but should be fairly close to the current values. The analysis can be found here, and is summarized below. Note that I decided to exclude series with episode lengths under 20 minutes from the final sample.

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Via Newtype USA: Rie Kugimiya on Being Alphonse Elric (December 2004)

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Normally, I don’t scan voice actor interviews, because they’re mainly canned puff bits on emotional connection to the character. But this one contains an interesting fact – Rie recorded her FMA lines in a separate room from the rest of the cast, to give Alphonse’s voice a more hollow sound.

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Via Newtype USA: [inside] AIC (December 2004)

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Along with an understanding of the broader context of the subject, the most vital ingredient to good anime coverage is a reliable source. So when US journalists actually interview people on the production side in Japan, it’s generally worth noting unless the interview consists entirely of fluff. This is the latest of what will hopefully be a couple more posts archiving articles from Newtype USA’s [inside] series of articles written by Amos Wong. In this feature on AIC, president Toru Miura discusses starting up during OVA boomtime and how the studio landed the original Ah My Goddess job in a 3 studio race, while Hiroaki Goda discusses his taste in music and getting a chance to do Ah My Goddess again with more development. 

Note: Pictures are scans of the article made on my crappy scanner, which cover the article text but not the entire page. They’re also in greyscale, because I’m interested in archiving interview text and color scans make the process more of a headache than it needs to be. Apologies for that. Scans after the jump, along with comments on the contents of the article.

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Fun With Numbers: May US Amazon Data and Attack on Titan’s Nonzero Shot at the US BD Charts

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Amazon data for the series I was tracking in May is here. It’s largely unremarkable; only 4 series spent prolonged periods of time ranking in the quadruple digits, and 3 (Yugioh, Fairy Tail, and DBZ) were long runners.

More interestingly, Attack on Titan started soliciting this week. If my calculations are correct, it has a very real chance of snagging a spot on the BD charts in the US, becoming the first anime release to do so since I began tracking series this February.

Note: While what follows is based on data I have gathered, it is largely speculative and makes a number of assumptions, among them that amazon performance is indicative of the BD/disk market in the US and that anime does not perform significantly differently from other types of titles in similar places in these rankings. These may well be way, way off, so take it with a heavy dose of skepticism.

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