So is anyone else miffed?

That companies like Bandai have cracked down and stopped the showing of all non licenced anime at cons? I mean with the internet they cannot stop us from watching the latest and greatest, but there is something about crowding into a stuffy room with a group of fans and watching something new. I miss it. Geeze they were dubbed! I guess we just have to face it, anime has not just become accepted,, it has gone mainstream.
I feel the same way as the day I walked in on my mother singing a Butthole Surfers song.......

Wow. This actually happened at Otakon, I assume? I guess licensors are just one-upping each other now. Who can mistreat their core audiences the most and still get away with it? What Bandai and other American distributors are going to find out is that their supply is going to overwork their demand as they continue to license every show, no matter how bad, and they are going to have tens of thousands of leftover DVDs.

Why? Because there will be too many shows where the initial encounter with the show will be through a DVD on a shelf. I've seen a few thousand hours of anime and *I* can't tell the difference between a lot of new shows. I can cite this important fact: anime is getting stuck on shelves. DVDs are getting dumped on the front doorsteps of used-book sellers such as Half-Priced Books by the truckload by distributors. Once prominent "anime DVD" sections at retailers are being relocated/shrunk/closed out. The Internet isn't stealing (most of) your revenue. Stop thinking like the RIAA. It's trying to protect a 15-year-old business model instead of evolving with challenges. It's crappy business sense.

So, good luck to the silly, greedy, American license holders. Fans will still fansub and steal your shows anyway. The only difference is that "word of mouth" sale is going to vanish in the next 2-3 years and the business lackeys won't understand why. The real crime is that the Japanese don't respect their own intellectual property and price it accordingly so Americans can afford to lose money on a dozen shows as long as they make money on one.

Wanna get really concerned?

This is how much animators make:
http://www.asahi.com/english/arts/TKY200406020134.html
This is how much they get taken for:
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2004/01/12/story2.html

Pass those links around. I don't think most anime people have seen them yet. Post them on any popular anime boards. While license holders are well within their rights, their clearly amateur business sense is going to either kill the market for anime or kill the animators themselves (or at least finish off the job the Japanese already started).

Those were interesting articles. I kind of wonder if the fact that most anime is CG now makes it any better for the animators. Then again, I imagine that stuff like "Last Exile" would take the same amount of time to make...

I find it kind of fitting that you said something about DVDs going to wholesalers. The company who's titles I end up seeing the most in these "Bargin Bin" places is ADV. With their monthly release schedule, they can flood the market with title after title. I guess if you make your money back within the first few months, it doesn't matter how many extra copies of "Rahxepheon" you have lying around your warehouse...

I look at fansubs like this: They sell the anime. At my friends' shop, we have been showing stuff like "R.O.D the TV", "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex", and "Naruto". When "R.O.D" came out, they sold all 15 of the limited edition "books" they got in the first week they came out. Likewise, they managed to get 11 pre-orders for the limited edition of the first "Stand Alone Complex" disk. Every piece of "Naruto" merchandise they have managed to get their hands on has also flown out of the store. If these aren?t good reasons to show fansubs at cons, I don?t know what is?

Numerous articles point to the Japanese animation industry and the economy in general being on the decline. Americans companies have a chance to rescue it. That's all it is, though, a choice. However, most of them seem far too myopic to make such longterm investments. (Hiring an anime studio to

It's not that Bandai and Viz and ADV and whoever else are evil, it's that they're just not very bright. The De Beers cartel is evil. The anime cartel just likes to handicap itself.

Why rally against your best free viral marketing device? Allergic to money, are we? Did the RIAA convince them every download equals one lost sale? It's quite baffling to anybody with real marketing sense why any company would just fire off knee-jerk reactions that alienate their best customers. And the best part is... those hardcore fans? They're gonna keep fansubbing things *anyway*. *head slap*