Personal opinions on distributors excised from the Bargains thread (temporary title)

anime_andrew said:
To at least the best of my knowledge £5.99 wasn't the SRP for Evangelion 1.11 on BD, it was the lowered price for sell off and campaign more than anything too, so expecting that to return to that price in a rush across the board is tough.

Best,

AP
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I bought it on release day from play.com for £14.99. That's a long time ago though so £14.99 is closer to £17.99 nowadays if not more. Also to derail the thread even further... how about a nice shiny chipboard box for our other rebuild boxes to go in when 4.44 comes out and we can complete the set? Chipboard within chipboard might be a touch too much for some of the more fanatical chipboarders though and they may ruin it with excess salivation.
 
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Jaysgba said:
I am legitimately confused now. Ignoring the price completely, I don't understand how there can be enough people that want to buy that bad movie for it to go out of print, let alone within a year.
That must mean that, somehow, there are people that bought Manga's release on the cheap, watched it, and actually deemed it a title worthy of buying a second time. I'll never understand people.
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You realise you're in the minority on this one, right? Like, I'd say more people like, if not love the film, than dislike it. I know I bought it in a heartbeat.
 
Wow, I take an evening out to watch a Harry Potter film and all hell sure broke loose.

My thoughts.
  • Please keep the bargains thread for bargains. Start a new topic if you want to critique the value in other people's use of money. It's basically flamebait anyway but at least it's less spammy.
  • Defending Jerome (who doesn't talk to us or listen) at the expense of slagging off Andrew (who talks to us and listens to our feedback) is below the belt. Defend Jerome if you like Jerome, that's fine. People like AL for what they're doing, just like you like Manganimatsu for what they're doing.
  • The Eva Rebuild films are great. Fight me.
  • Chipboard boxes are perfectly acceptable reasons to want a specific release. Not only do they look nice, they are often freestanding and work as art pieces - great for those with small collections and also for those with large ones who can put them at the front of shelves (or on top) to save space. If you're paying more to have something better than a stream in the first place, why not pay a bit extra for something a lot better? If you don't like the box, there's always a box-free version eventually.
  • A license rescue doesn't remove old releases from circulation (in fact, it often floods the used market due to upgrades) so nobody is being shortchanged by AL rereleasing the Evangelion films. Let the buyers talk with their wallets. If there's no appetite for a CE the figures will clearly dictate future strategies.
  • Personally, I avoid UK releases from Manganimatsu because of the years of utter contempt they have shown for me as a customer and a human being, ranging from glitchy releases of titles I wanted to calling me a pirate to my face for buying a legitimate Japanese release (logic, please) to calling all CE fans idiots (repeatedly) to blocking my access to a show I wanted to watch so they could make more money based on an unproven theory they made up. However, if Jerome wants to make a perfect release which hits all of my notes he is more than welcome to win me back; I'm here for the taking and I've probably spent vastly more on Manga UK releases than most of the Jerome apologists here in my lifetime. Miracle Train still isn't licensed on disc anywhere in English, c'mon Jerome!
  • Second guessing the views of other fans and labelling them as Jerome haters or Jerome lovers is disrespectful. It's also really, really weird. Stop doing it. Everyone.
R
 
It's moved!

On the subject of Eva 1.11 it felt a lot like a greatest hits compilation and it did hit on all the key points covered in the early episodes. It could have been MUCH worse. For me 3.33 was the big disappointment, it felt very poorly handled with the whole overdone 'flashback' angle. End of Evangelion was much better. I also liked that 2.22 brought in Mari who reminded me a bit of Mana from Girlfriend of Steel (Neon Genesis Evangelion: Girlfriend of Steel - Wikipedia) though I wish they'd just integrated her unchanged as I liked her character.

Edit: Maybe a good title would be: You Can(not) like Jerome lol
 
Jaysgba said:
Looks great? Is that how you describe bad CG? A child could draw better Evas with crayons.
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This probably isn't the place, but the CG is probably some of the best I've seen, no doubt helped by a movie budget. I can now only assume you're not visually impaired, but literally blind ;P
 
Maybe I should just call the thread Fight Club and turn a blind eye to all of the trash talk so we can get it all out of our system.

For Eva 1.0 I went to a cinema in Japan (lol, coincidence) with a bunch of friends, some of whom were Eva veterans and some of whom were new. Everyone had a good time. I think being a veteran is better and we need a UK BD set of the TV series one day for sure, but it's a spectacle everyone can enjoy. I flat out loved Eva 2.0/2.22 a lot. I also liked the latest one but I'm a Kaworu fan so ;p

R
 
I think there are objective reasons 1.11 is a bad film, but even I'm confused by @Jaysgba's assertion it's a bad looking film.

Notably that the film lacks a beginning, middle and end, and that a key sequence requires knowledge from later on in the TV series it's supposedly remaking to make any sense. It's a solid work, but it suffers from hefty structural difficulties that it never manages to overcome. It's very obviously adapted from a much larger work and it was very obviously written as the first in a series, rather than a single entity. It definitely works as spectacle, but I don't know that it stands alone on it's own merits, which is a huge problem for me.
 
Buzz201 said:
Notably that the film lacks a beginning, middle and end, and that a key sequence requires knowledge from later on in the TV series it's supposedly remaking to make any sense. It's a solid work, but it suffers from hefty structural difficulties that it never manages to overcome. It's very obviously adapted from a much larger work and it was very obviously written as the first in a series, rather than a single entity. It definitely works as spectacle, but I don't know that it stands alone on it's own merits, which is a huge problem for me.
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It's interesting that the JP titles for the first three Evangelion films are basically 'start, middle, end' (greatly oversimplified) so you could argue that the Japanese audience would be going in completely expecting to be getting only one chunk of the story from the moment they bought their tickets. Completely accept that it's valid to want them to stand alone (and it would certainly make the raging between each film less intense, because it's such a painful wait!) but I do think it was structured that way knowingly. For better or worse.

The lack of a modern release for the TV series here really sucks in general.

R
 
Buzz201 said:
I think there are objective reasons 1.11 is a bad film, but even I'm confused by @Jaysgba's assertion it's a bad looking film.

Notably that the film lacks a beginning, middle and end, and that a key sequence requires knowledge from later on in the TV series it's supposedly remaking to make any sense. It's a solid work, but it suffers from hefty structural difficulties that it never manages to overcome. It's very obviously adapted from a much larger work and it was very obviously written as the first in a series, rather than a single entity. It definitely works as spectacle, but I don't know that it stands alone on it's own merits, which is a huge problem for me.
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The film lacks a beginning middle or end? What kind of sense does that make? Of course it has a beginning, that's when the third angel attacks and we're introduced to our characters. What more do you want, a Shinji origin story? I kind of get what you mean when you say it doesn't have an end, but it's part of an ongoing series of films, so I'm not sure what you want. It's like complaining that Harry doesn't kill Voldemort in the fourth Harry Potter film, therefore it has no ending. Also saying it has no middle is just confusing. I mean, the middle is what happens between the beginning and the end? It's not like it goes straight from the start to the finish or anything, so that complaint just befuddles me. I suppose you could say a flaw is that it's clearly based on episodic content, and as such feels a bit more fragmented than a traditional film, but I wouldn't say that is enough to make the film a bad film. Hell, I love 1.11 and 2.22, even if 3.33 was a wash. Different strokes, and all that I suppose, and I have seen the series, so perhaps that has influence on me, but calling 1.11 straight up 'a bad movie' just seems incorrect. Flawed I could handle, but actually bad? I don't really see it.
 
Buzz201 said:
I think there are objective reasons 1.11 is a bad film, but even I'm confused by @Jaysgba's assertion it's a bad looking film.

Notably that the film lacks a beginning, middle and end, and that a key sequence requires knowledge from later on in the TV series it's supposedly remaking to make any sense. It's a solid work, but it suffers from hefty structural difficulties that it never manages to overcome. It's very obviously adapted from a much larger work and it was very obviously written as the first in a series, rather than a single entity. It definitely works as spectacle, but I don't know that it stands alone on it's own merits, which is a huge problem for me.
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It's all about Anno's ego lol. He's a diva and honestly, I don't think he ever had a clue what to do with the series and it's surprising popularity went to his head which is why it takes so damn long for these films to come out.

I have always wondered if Evangelion would still have the impact if it came out today and what mecha we'd have missed out on without it.

For me I think the rebuild films are largely for people who already know Evangelion, like a kinda director's cut/alternate ending. We always knew it would be 4 films so it never did really need to resolve itself until the actual 4th, the only real issue here is the length of time between films which really makes the issues you have stand out and I agree with what you've said on those terms.
 
Are people really resorting to bringing up the subjective quality of a work to try and discredit a re-release, when neither the original or new distributor had any creative input?

I purchased MangaUK's DVD releases of Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 and while I can't confirm the price I paid for each (retailer no longer exists), I vividly remember their individual prices being at least double that of HMV's blu-ray sell-off price. Years later, I finally owned a blu-ray player and upgraded using HMV's previously mentioned sales price (I wanted my releases to match 3.33...don't worry, you can laugh). However, I have no ill will towards Anime Limited's upcoming release - it looks really nice, the Evangelion franchise deserves to be available and the simple fact is, designing and producing the discs, packaging, extras etc costs money that needs to be recouped. Even when excluding Anime Limited's Early Bird, retailer pricing isn't looking too bad if you shop around (£25 on Base.com).
Really, the only consideration I'd like to see from Anime Limited regarding the original release, is design consistency between the films (fingers crossed that approvals don't become a pain for that! :p).

Are people also really nit-picking a simple pun in a press release? I mean, if that's the thing that sticks out as "problematic", then it sounds like we've got a perfect release on our hands. Come on people, it's just an inoffensive, throwaway line in an article we'll likely only read once. Any supposed double-meaning is honestly, such a stretch that it should audition for the Fantastic 4.

I also wouldn't consider not following the beginning-middle-end formula as being a flaw, considering Miss Hokusai didn't either and that film was superb.
 
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FWIW IIRC the Manga release of Eva 1.11 was only for 1.11 and to get 1.01 in the UK you had to buy a special edition exclusive to HMV at a higher cost, too. I'm not sure of the RRP but I Googled and found a post with a fan saying 'Picked up the HMV exclusive in Newry yesterday for £25.' so we can assume it was a lot more than the current price the old 1.11 is going for.

While most people don't care about 1.01, Eva fans are really nerdy and this was a very specific example of withholding actual video content people might want to benefit from an exclusivity deal. A lot of people didn't even know about the exclusive at the time (Manganimatsu don't like providing anyone with much information, a bit like the posts we get every few months with fans asking about why their version of Bleach looks different to a box they saw in CEX because nobody understands the first press rules) and I remember several fans had to buy the release twice to get both versions once they found out - so they would have been paying more than the cost of the AL CE for that old release!

R
 
1.11 is the boring part of the show anyway and they skim over when Shinji flees which weakens his character imo. 2.22 is a great standalone film but does far too much changes to EVA that irrates me 3.33 Is bollocks.
 
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