Dead and dying Anime Review sites...

Just Passing Through

Just Passing Through

The Wildcard
I always used to think that the Internet was one big black box of permanence, that once it was online it would always be so. Of course that's hardly the case, with domain names expiring and servers being turned off. I always thought that reviews would always be there to read when I wanted to buy a golden oldie...

You probably don't remember UkAnime.com, as that's been defunct for years, but I often went there for old reviews.
I was also a member of the EyeonAnime forums before I came here, but that site fell into disuse years ago, and late last year, a random click revealed that domain name for the main site had expired (the forums went a couple years before)

This week it's been announced that Mania is switching off That's Mania, that bought out AnimeonDVD and promptly ran it into the ground. But there are a whole lot of AnimeonDVD reviews still on that site which will be lost to the ether.

The pity is that the wayback machine on the Internet Archive is too picky on what it backs up, and you only get a flavour of these old sites, not the content.
 
Tis a shame about Mania. Then again their anime forum pretty much never came back ever since the entire site was hit by a malware attack. The Fandom Post was pretty much refugee for anyone who wanted to view any anime artwork and news.
 
Wow, what a shame to lose all those reviews on AnimeOnDVD. That's where I visited way back since anime came to DVD and I was in my teens. Hopefully Chris Beveridge could somehow salvage that content.
Most of the community seemed to abandon the site once Mania bought it, and the forums went down many months back and were under indefinite maintenance. Figured that would be the beginning of the end.
 
I continually think of old threads I want to refer to and realise they were on Anime on DVD and thus are lost to the ether.
The plus side of Mania is that after they took over they stopped expiring old threads (on AoD they were eventually pruned), the bad side is the forums went down with no warning, never came back, and aren't archive.org friendly.
 
Anime-on-DVD was one of the first places I would go to for reviews. When they got bought up by Mania I just stopped going there. I do go to Fandom Post occasionally but I don't really read the reviews any more.

I think the very first anime review site I went to was Animetric.com. When I got back into anime again, I got my recommendations from there. The owner then sold it to someone else and it continued for a while, but now it's just died off and there hasn't been an update for 3 years. The former owner still runs her own blog, but it's about other unrelated things.
 
I don't read reviews much but AoD was invaluable in the early days of blind importing. What a shame.

R
 
Sad story overall. For some reason I never felt the urge to actively use TFP the way I did with AoD over the years, truly one of the pillars of the development of modern fandom in the West.
 
Sad. Animeondvd used to be my go to site back when I was at uni. Good reviews + a great community. When I pretty much stopped following anime after then, I stopped visiting, and by the time I returned to the fandom it had been sold to mania.com.

I used to visit Animetric as well. I appreciate why people sell the sites they've invested so much time in, but it so sad that all too often this hails the beginning of the end for those sites. Perhaps what could have exacerbated the demise of these two sites is that they were sold late into the anime boom period, and the enthusiasm of the fanbase was waning. (For the record, I count the closure of Geneon USA at the end of 2007 as the harbinger of the end of the boom).
 
With all this doom and gloom, I figure it might be worth mentioning that I just launched my own just-for-fun anime blog.

It has a Facebook page as well - if you head over there and do a search for When Are You Gonna Stop Watching Those Cartoons?, it should take you to the main page. Feel free to give it a like, or whack the follow button on the blog itself (it's tucked away in a slide out sidebar)

It won't ever trouble the likes of some of the biggest review sites, but a few folks nagged me to do something like a site or blog. Apparently I say stuff that people like. Who knew?
 
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