perfect collections

[Vicious]

Originally posted by nattysammy

Even if you excuse the exorbitant mark ups - if this isnt the case how can they sell cetain shows at greatly reduced rates and still make a profit, ie Gasaraki - as simple good business, they still show an attitude to their customers and the work itself which seems to me a little disrespectfull.

I guess they spread six episodes over two discs instead of putting six or seven on one [thus wasting resources and increasing their own production costs] because they realise that people would find it a little hard to swallow paying $60 for one disc. But do they really think their customers are so stupid as to not realise what they are doing? I recently bought the R2 Princess Mononoke for $13 new and it had a runtime of 130 mins with extra features such as behind the scenes and theatrical trailer, so what is this 3 eps for $26 shit?

Worse still is when they take a show that someone else has created, someone else's baby, bring it over to America and butcher it. The first example that comes to mind is that travesty of a film that was Warriors Of The Wind the edited version of Miyazakis Nausicaa cut from 116mins to 84 for US distribution. OK so thats an extreme case but it seems to happen fairly frequently that they will edit out scenes, re-dub music/sound effects, and generally change the tone in their translations.

You could say that as soon as a company buys the rights to a show it can do whatever it feels will make it the most money, and most businesses do operate this way, but it is not an unbreakable law. Some businesses do try to operate in an ethical way and forge good relationships with their customers, but I dont think this description could be attributed to the anime industry. I feel like I am being taken advantage of by a virtual cartel of several companies who have no interest but to wring every penney out of the anime market, and until that changes I'll stick with HK's. These critiscism are an apologists' justification of theft, but I think they are valid points too.

Let's address these in turn.

You mention Gasaraki in your 1st paragraph. Gasaraki wasn't initially released at that price point. It was released at the same price as all their other titles. Just like anything else, like shoes or clothes, when they realize that they're not getting any more sales at that price point, they decide to drop them some, and then drop them again. So they made some money at the 29.99 MSRP, and then decided to drop the price. They would've lost money if they had immediately decided to market the entire series at $30 total.

Your second paragraph, you talk about how you bought an R2 Mononoke for $13. And then compare it to god knows what. You fail to point out how the R1 Mononoke retails for about $25, but can easily be had for about $15 if you look around.

You also forget that R2 is the region it was developed in. In other words, the Japanese don't pay themselves for licensing rights, since they're the ones that are creating it. They are charging the US companies licensing rights, so it makes sense the US would have to pass those costs onto the consumer.

The Nausicaa example you use is very very old. Stuff like that doesn't normally happen nowadays. There's the occasional Initial D screw up, but it's not very prevalent anymore. And there are actually cases where the Japanese compnaies force the US companies to change stuff. The Japanese licensors made Funi change the title of the Detective Conan to Case Closed. I've also read that they made them change the characters names to Americanize it as well. The Japanese licensors are the ones that gave ADV bad Sailor Moon masters. The Japanese licensors are the ones that gave Rightstuf the master for His and Her Circumstances that had that one love scene cut out of it. So perhaps you should do some research before automatically laying blame on the US companies.

That last paragraph is pure bias. The US companies do alot to satisfy the customers. They asked us which plushie we wanted included with the Wolf's Rain release. They asked us what questions we'd want asked when they interview the Japanese creators to include as extras for some releases. One of my boxsets was missing a mini-manga that was supposed to come with it. Since Bandai didn't have anymore, they offered to send me a free copy of the next volume for that series. I've won at least 4 free boxsets signed by some of the VA's from ADV so far. Someone like Monica Rial doesn't have to attend almost every con that she's asked to do. They're not doing all that for themselves, but to try and make the fans happy.