The News Thread (for news that does not need a thread)

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... -tv-series

The North American home video distributor Discotek announced on Monday through its Facebook page that it will be releasing the original Captain Harlock TV series on DVD. According to the post, the series will be sold as a subtitled, complete box set containing all 42 episodes.

Leiji Matsumoto's original Space Pirate Captain Harlock manga ran from 1977 to 1979, and its 42-episode TV adaptation from 1978 to 1979 was previously made available in the United States via internet streaming by companies including Crunchyroll and FUNimation Entertainment. The 1982 Arcadia of My Youth film from the franchise was released in North America by AnimEigo in 2003.
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Also the forums on ANN mentioned they had also licensed Lovely Complex.

More good news from Discotek.
 
HdE said:
Just Passing Through said:
Madman set to announce release date of Gosick - Part 1
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VERY good news.

This, I'll remind everyone, was one of the upcoming shows that disappeared in a puff of smoke when Bandai Entertainment shut up shop.

I do believe madman had made soem low, rumbling noises about releasing teh entirety of Gundam Unicorn on DVD as well, although I'm hesitant to put complete faith in that.

Anyone know anything?
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Cover Art

Collection 1 on 2 DVDs (subtitles only; should be 12 episodes)
Collection 1 not officially solicited yet, but will likely be released in July 2012.
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From AOD
 
mangaman74 said:
Bit late to the party Doraemon666. I mentioned this in the sticky news thread hours ago. They have also got Lovely Complex as well.
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oops sorry mangaman lol,as soon as i see news like this i always post it without looking to see if someone else has posted it already. :oops:
 
Don't worry about it, you're not the first to cause a double news post like this. When I first saw the news on ANN I knew you would be jumping for joy.
 
If your excitement starts a huge discussion I'll split it back out into a thread again ;)

Strangely I'm not that interested in the Harlock series, though I'm certainly pleased Discotek have grabbed another quality older show. I will definitely be buying Love*Com.

R
 
Completely bowled over by the LoveCom announcement. That must be the most recent show Discotek has licensed. The manga is fantastic, quite possibly the best romantic comedy I've read (along with MI), so I probably don't NEED the anime, but I'll probably get it anyway to show my support for the series and Discotek's decision to release it.
 
Manga have a got a blog up about the continuing woes of blu-ray in the UK. I think they mentioned this piece in their podcast.

http://www.mangauk.com/?p=the-blu-ray-blues

The topic has probably been beaten to death already but I think it's still a big issue. I left a mini uninformed rant in the comments box out of frustration :p
 
The European PS3 thing (Haruhi) still confuses me. What about European PS3s could possibly be so different to all of the other kinds that a disc wouldn't work in them? I don't doubt their story, and indeed if it would not have been financially possible to release it at all that's fair enough, but the problem seems very odd and surely Sony should be fixing it if it's true.

Interesting piece, though nothing much in there we didn't already know. At least they're posting it all together so fans can put the pieces together more easily as it must get asked a lot.

R
 
Yeah that European PS3 thing was odd, perhaps the Disappearance bluray was encoded as "A" only by accident? Madman have done that before if I remember with Xam'd which had to be recalled, but Disappearance was released in Australia with no problems...I'd almost be tempted to import the Australian bluray and test it on my UK PS3 if my bank balance wasn't so tight.

Either way Haruhi seems to have been a huge headache for Manga in general. From the initial July (Ha!) release date for Disappearance to the mono audio on Haruhi-chan/S2 to the subsequent delay/cancellation of Disappearance. I'd almost feel sorry for them if I weren't still annoyed about the Disappearance cancellation! If Angel Beats gets cancelled that really will be the final straw for me!
 
The stupid thing is that not everyone uses their PS3 to play their anime blu-rays. I had preordered the region B Disappearance bluray but I ended up cancelling it and getting the region A version when the PS3 problem was mentioned back in September.

I also cancelled the Haruhi S2 boxset and got the region 1 version when the mono audio problem surfaced.
 
“They’ve got specific ideas about how they want the release packaged: when it’s released, how much we can sell it for,” Jerome says. “The licensors for anime have a hell of a lot of control over these shows, unheard of in the normal video licensing business. They could say, for example, that you can only sell it at this price; that you can’t release it until six months after it’s out in Japan; that you can’t do x, y or z...”

“International licensing for anime, for most Japanese companies, is probably less than 10% of their overall business,” Jerome points out. “So why would you give your prized anime licenses to a foreign distributor and let them do whatever they want with it unchecked? Let them put it on Youtube or itunes or Netflix? Let them sell it at stupidly low prices, so that Japanese customers can import it? All the decisions the Japanese licensors make are based on protecting their distributors in Japan, and Japan sustains a model where a K-ON! three or four-episode DVD can sell at £30, and the Blu-ray at over £40, and sell a quarter of a million copies.”
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This is what concerns me the most of everything which was said. It makes me wonder why anyone would even bother to go to all the hassle of licensing anime outside Japan at all. Hell, if I was a distributor I'd be tempted to shut up shop and just encourage everyone to pirate anime if this is the kind of attitude they have to put up with from the Japanese licensors. Or at least form some kind of united front with other international distributors and agree to refuse to licence anything which has certain restrictions placed upon it, particularly WRT pricing and release dates. Region coding I can understand (even if I don't like it) but Japan should have no business deciding those things in a foreign market at all.
 
I don't have a PS3, but I do have the Region B Disappearance of Haruhi Blu-ray, and it does work in a normal Region B Blu-ray player. So it's not coded Region A. And I don't think it's possible to stick two region codes onto one disc for two different appliances. The screw up must have been in the masters that Manga got, not the AU release.

The problem with presenting a united front to the Japanese industry is that it is structured in such a way that they make enough money to keep ticking over from their domestic, overpriced anime home video releases. £100 a disc, 9-12 releases per 24 episode season, 10,000 customers, is enough to pay for a series just about. Foreign sales are just the cherry on the cake for them. As long as they have the cake, they can live without the cherry. Which is why they dictate terms to be as protectionist as possible.
 
Considering how well Manga manage to handle things I wouldn't be too surprised if the "problem" was that they hadn't updated the firmware on their PS3 test unit since release and the disc used newer features requiring an update.

They didn't even manage to sort out the mono-audio issue on Haruhi S2 after being told 6 months in advance that it was a problem on the US discs - which I believe got a corrected reprint in the states.
 
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