Re: Anime Limited Pushes Kill la Kill Blu-Ray Back To 1st De
Every distributor has problem discs, right the way up to the biggest companies in Hollywood. In the US, every single anime company has discs with faults I can easily recall, whether they're called FUNimation, NISA, Media Blasters, Sentai, Aniplex of America or Discotek. I've written actual complaint letters to companies as big as Universal for shoddy DVDs in the past. There's probably no such thing as a perfect disc, it's just people don't care about tiny imperfections (as an extreme example, in this case I'd never have noticed the problem since I don't watch dubs and have everything hooked up in mono*).
While the mislabelling is human error (and one Andrew has to be rather sensitive about at this point) he's explained that the disc was QCed and the materials made correctly for Kill la Kill, but there was a problem with the master created by the professional BD replication outfit they used and a glitch of some kind was introduced. The fact that they're turning a fix around so quickly at this busy time of year (the fault was only mentioned at the weekend) shows they're taking it seriously, and they are being more responsive and open than any company I have ever dealt with.
We live in a country where other distributors will, in absolute seriousness, tell us to just deal with it when a show has audio so badly mistimed it's unwatchable, or content is missing, or a known bug is reported to them several months before release and subsequently ignored because nobody can be bothered to look into it. Anime Limited may focus on premium releases, but if I'm parting with even a penny of my hard-earned cash I want all distributors to take their releases seriously, not just those with a 'premium' label. If Andrew is clearly working well into the nights and listening to us so patiently, complaining about the one company which is trying to treat anime fans with a level of respect they've literally never been given before in this country just feels like biting the hand which feeds us. If we treat Anime Limited badly for trying to make everything right at their expense and without any fans having to go to the trouble of submitting a replacement request or posting discs around the country, what on earth are we going to end up with? What are other anime companies learning from watching this?
Honestly, I'm pretty happy to hear the anecdote about the Anime Limited staff all sitting around and poring over the discs during QC. I'm pretty sure some other distributors don't even watch their discs at all if they've let some of the bizarre bugs we've had in the past through - and if they were the fault of third parties too, why on earth are they never fixed? We've put up with people looking the other way and letting the customer take the punishment for far too long.
R
* I apologise deeply to the audiophiles out there for my crimes against their luxurious surround sound systems.
