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[simpleyuji]

I don't know what you've seen/read, but you can try Kimi ni Todoke.

Nice. Looks very promising, and I like the art style.

[Cruxador]

Anyone read the manga Horimiya? I found it incredibly good (at least the first half of the series). Was wondering if there are similar manga/animes.

I don't know what you've seen/read, but you can try Kimi ni Todoke.

I suppose you already know this, but you're really good at recommendations. It's exactly the same kind of cute feeling.

[Max™]

So anyone read Shingeki no Kyojin and feeling like they're losing their mind?

See what I did there?

[Egan_BW]

nope

[scriver]

HARMONY GOLD MANAGED TO GET ALL THEIR LICENSES RENEWED GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

For us know-nothings, what does this mean?

[Frumple]

Macross and some other stuff remains in licensing hell, near as I could tell with a quick look.

We might get more robotech, though

[wierd]

It never ceases to amaze me how big companies think they can make *MASSIVE PROFITS!!* by putting their IP into the tiniest box they can find, and then putting the weight of an entire legal team on top of it, and refusing to distribute.


You would think that content creators would want their content to... you know.. BE FUCKING SEEN.  But Nooooooo. "This is for JAPAN, and ONLY JAPAN! Screw you gaijin bastards!" seems the most likely explanation, but then you have to remember that these companies exist to make money, so why aren't they selling product to people that are literally shouting "JUST SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" at them?

It's mot just Japan doing it either.  You see this with just about EVERY major media company. "Oh, What's that Australia? You want to watch something made in the USA? FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU WITH A FLAMING, NAIL ENCRUSTED DILDO! HAHAHAHAHA! TWO YEARS WAIT, AT LEAST!" and other such dickery just flies every direction.

Now, the problem with Japan and Anime seems more drastic, since we are talking titles that were created more than TWENTY YEARS AGO, like Macross and Robotech. (as cited.) The local market is already totally saturated; Everyone in Japan that would be interested in those franchises, knows about, and has pruchased merch, for those franchises.  They are NOT making any additional money through import controls, or regional licensing.

So...

What the fuck are they thinking?

The world may never know.

[IronyOwl]

At a blind guess- might be dick waving and control for the sake of showing you have control.

Mod makers are the poster children for this- there was that big fiasco a while back where somebody bundled several Minecraft mods together, and this enraged some of the authors of those mods so badly one of them edited his mod to permanently corrupt the worlds of anyone using that modpack. From a "this is my art, I'd like as many people as possible to enjoy it" perspective, this is a truly deranged level of insanity- but from a "this work is MINE, only I get to control it!!!" perspective, obviously punishing traitors is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

In big companies, that's probably the main impetus behind anti-piracy measures... and more recently, one of the big pluses for trying to own your own distribution service. Both are probably asinine and inefficient from a raw sales perspective, but both give you (or at least make desperate clawing motions at) CONTROL, which is probably selected for in scheming corporate environments where you're more affected by an internal social/power structure than you are by how much money your company's actually making.

[Reelya]

HARMONY GOLD MANAGED TO GET ALL THEIR LICENSES RENEWED GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

For us know-nothings, what does this mean?

The Macross/Robotech story. Harmony Gold was an anime distributor in the USA that licensed some different mecha series in the early 1980s and shoehorned them Frankenstein-style into a single series, this was intended as a cheap knock-off, however the series proved really popular. Macross was one of the two big mecha franchises, and Gundam wouldn't be localized until 1995, so nobody had seen any full-blown military mecha series in the west before this.

So, they have the license for one show, Macross, made in 1982, and ever since then they've greedily held onto that license, and prevented all the Macross sequels from being released in English, while making their own, ultra-shitty "sequels" themselves. Harmony Gold is a company that basically shouldn't exist anymore but they're holding on by milking some poorly-worded dubbing contracts for some shows from 1984, which weren't really even intended to be a long-term thing.

The equivalent scenario would be a Chinese company license Star Wars, Flash Gordon and Krull in China, redubbing them as a "series" and blocking the Chinese release of all actual Star Wars sequels, making their own local "sequels" to Star-Flash-Krull wars, and meanwhile anyone in China who wants to see the rest of Star Wars has to bootleg it and gets told it's no the "legit" version by half their countrymen.

Another analogy would be if some foreign company bought the distribution rights to the first Beatles album, then turned around and sued the Beatles for releasing more albums, claiming they owned the rights to the Beatles name and logo.

[wierd]

Ironically, Disney kinda did that very thing with Lion King.. (not as bold-faced, but pretty close.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion#The_Lion_King_controversy

[Reelya]

You really have to see some show reels to get an idea how similar those actually are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHps2iC8W3o

Sure, you can say that some of the shots and the plot aren't exactly the same, however, keep in mind that sometimes when people adapt from the very same source material the end result is in fact more divergent than Lion King and Kimba. e.g. you'd be hard pressed to take any two movies based on the same book such as Bram Stoker's Dracula or Frankenstein and do the same shot-for-shot comparison as you can with these two works.

However, more recently, Disney XD aired a show called "Motorcity" which has a lot of shots which look like straight up Redline ripoffs, which I did mention in the WTF thread ages ago and had to look for, because I forgot the name of the Disney show. Just take a look at these shots and even listen to the soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfET2BNbdQA&t=173
Similarities include the visual look, the soundtrack, the main guy's car, the tracks, the hero, the way when hitting "turbo" the car bounces around before taking off fast, and they even have that scene where

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 the car totally comes apart because they're going too fast and they have to keep driving just an engine on wheels.

The guy doing this review is baffled why they suddenly and quietly canned this show ... my guess is lawsuits.

[scriver]

The equivalent scenario would be a Chinese company license Star Wars, Flash Gordon and Krull in China, redubbing them as a "series" and blocking the Chinese release of all actual Star Wars sequels, making their own local "sequels" to Star-Flash-Krull wars, and meanwhile anyone in China who wants to see the rest of Star Wars has to bootleg it and gets told it's no the "legit" version by half their countrymen.

I'm left agog

That sounds like the greatest thing ever

[Jopax]

Boku no Hero live action fan short

Pretty damn well made, if extremly short.

[Mephisto]

The Macross/Robotech story. Harmony Gold was blah blah blah

This gets especially delicious when you learn that Harmony Gold licensed Robotech to Palladium Games (who I might say would be the legal equivalent of Harmony Gold in the RPG world as far as licensing goes) for an RPG adaptation which crashed and burned amazingly.

[Cruxador]

The Macross/Robotech story. Harmony Gold was blah blah blah

This gets especially delicious when you learn that Harmony Gold licensed Robotech to Palladium Games (who I might say would be the legal equivalent of Harmony Gold in the RPG world as far as licensing goes) for an RPG adaptation which crashed and burned amazingly.

Yeah, RPG consumers are discerning to a fault (and can afford to be, due to high market saturation) so something like that was never gonna fly.