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.

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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.

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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