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Feb. 1st, 2005 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThere's an article on news.com today, about fansubs. They're illegal, for folks who haven't quite gotten up to speed on the issue. Illegal, illegal, illegal. Meine Leibe, which I picked up last week? Illegal. The tennis cartoon (PoT) I go on about? Also illegal.
We're all on the same page with that now? Good.
Now, if I really want to see PoT with English subtitles, what I *should* be doing is petitioning US anime companies to license and release the show. Problem is that it's a hard sell. PoT is a huge show -- there are about a hundred and seventy episodes out now. The license is going to be expensive and it's a big committment for any US company to make. Smaller shows recoup their expenses more quickly and represent a lot less of a risk in the first place. Also, I think sports anime is an underserved market in the US, at least compared to the market saturation for Giant Fighting Robots, Magical Girls, and Harem Shows.
There's a very fair testing of the sports anime waters coming this spring with Slam Dunk, a hundred and one episodes of high school basketball picked up by Geneon. It's an older show, from 1993, but the art isn't that dated and the age of the series probably dropped the price point down to where it apparently looked like it'd be worth Geneon's time. A similar thing happened some years back with Media Blasters and fangirl favorite Weiss Kreuz, which I have in (VHS!!) fansub and in official DVD. It did rather well for Media Blasters -- they kept saying how surprised they were that it was, y'know, selling.
The success (or failure) of Slam Dunk is something to watch this spring, anyway... when I'm not busy watching my illegal, delightful PoT.
We're all on the same page with that now? Good.
Now, if I really want to see PoT with English subtitles, what I *should* be doing is petitioning US anime companies to license and release the show. Problem is that it's a hard sell. PoT is a huge show -- there are about a hundred and seventy episodes out now. The license is going to be expensive and it's a big committment for any US company to make. Smaller shows recoup their expenses more quickly and represent a lot less of a risk in the first place. Also, I think sports anime is an underserved market in the US, at least compared to the market saturation for Giant Fighting Robots, Magical Girls, and Harem Shows.
There's a very fair testing of the sports anime waters coming this spring with Slam Dunk, a hundred and one episodes of high school basketball picked up by Geneon. It's an older show, from 1993, but the art isn't that dated and the age of the series probably dropped the price point down to where it apparently looked like it'd be worth Geneon's time. A similar thing happened some years back with Media Blasters and fangirl favorite Weiss Kreuz, which I have in (VHS!!) fansub and in official DVD. It did rather well for Media Blasters -- they kept saying how surprised they were that it was, y'know, selling.
The success (or failure) of Slam Dunk is something to watch this spring, anyway... when I'm not busy watching my illegal, delightful PoT.
