The Old School Otaku Lounge

It's not old-school, just a reboot, but on July 28th, Funimation will release a combo-pack of 009 Re:Cyborg The Movie, the 2012 anime feature film by Kenji Kamiyama. I've been looking for this one, based on an interesting Youtube trailer.

http://shop.funimation.com/The-Movie_57

So in an interesting last-minute twist, apparently Cinedigm's new re-release of Slam Dunk....will be DUBBED ONLY???

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT

Well, not that I am interested in Slam Dunk anyway, but that is a real "up yours" to fans to release the series dub-only. Stupid.

usamimi wrote:So in an interesting last-minute twist, apparently Cinedigm's new re-release of Slam Dunk....will be DUBBED ONLY???

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT

This has been VERY surprising news; I wasn't expecting this at all.

I would have been crazy for ANY Slam Dunk back when I was 13. Now, not so much.

Cinedigm released that Mononoke TV series a while back, didn't they? I don't recall ever seeing it in stores. Was it a website exclusive?

llj wrote:I would have been crazy for ANY Slam Dunk back when I was 13. Now, not so much.

Cinedigm released that Mononoke TV series a while back, didn't they? I don't recall ever seeing it in stores. Was it a website exclusive?

Nope, it was sold in stores as well, I've seen it in both my local best buy and hastings.

I'm really curious as to how they decided on this. The only things I can think of would be A. the couldn't secure the rights to the original language track, B. Toei wanted too much money for the rights to both so Cinedgm decided it'd be more cost effective to just have one, or C. Cinedgm assumed most Americans don't care to read subtitles anyway so skipped it all together for either reason A or B (since anime shown on TV is always dubbed...so fans want dubbed anime, right? ;P)

It's kinda lame they sprung this news kind of last minute, too....several of my friends had pre-ordered it and now they have no interest in it whatsoever, but their orders were already sent. At least you can still watch it all on Crunchyroll subbed....

I don't know, everyone always blames Toei for when shit goes wrong with a US release, but when you have small companies like Discotek who have released a fairly large number of unmolested Toei anime, I can't help but suspect in many cases that the US end simply screwed up (and I still think Viz screwed up more than Toei when it came to the Sailor Moon release)

llj wrote:I don't know, everyone always blames Toei for when shit goes wrong with a US release, but when you have small companies like Discotek who have released a fairly large number of unmolested Toei anime, I can't help but suspect in many cases that the US end simply screwed up (and I still think Viz screwed up more than Toei when it came to the Sailor Moon release)

Oh, I didn't mean to sound like I felt like "RAWR it's all Toei's fault!"...Cinedgm could easily have just thought "BAH, they want too much money for that!" even if it was affordable to them, to try to create a larger profit margin for themselves.

In the case of Sailor Moon, lately I think BOTH Toei and Viz have been making mistakes left and right, so I don't pinpoint that all squarely onto a single company, lol.

I didn't mean to imply you were blaming Toei, I just think it's a natural reaction in all of us sometimes because of key cases where the fault DID lie with Toei, but those still don't outweigh the situations where it was the latter. I just think Toei isn't very discriminating with how companies treat their properties in general, as long as they make money. If the US end of a deal wants to treat their property with respect, that's cool with them. If they want to frig around with it, that's probably cool with them too, as long as they get money.

With Viz, the problems really came down to how it was upscaled. I'm absolutely sure that what Viz received was the masters for the 2009 R2 DVD release. The problem is that instead of a straight no-frills upscale of that master, they tried to get fancy with it beyond their own capabilities, boosting colors here, and tweaking video there. The problem is that you have to be REALLY GOOD and experienced with upscales to do it properly and Viz had had zero experience doing this before. It's unfortunate that their first experiments in the realm of upscaling had to come at the biggest property they've gotten since Pokémon.

As for Cinedigm, I see that they also released some Digimon sets. I'm guessing they looked at how Digimon vastly outsold their ultra-arthouse sub-only Mononoke TV series and concluded that "DUBS SELL, SUB DON'T" without even taking into consideration the target audience of Mononoke. And also Slam Dunk seems to be pitched at a broader audience than Mononoke (understandable there). This is probably something fans of younger skewing anime have to live with, the allure of money over "purity". So we should all be happy in rare cases like how Funimation has generally treated One Piece with some respect for the older fans watching it. (Not so much a fan of how DBZ has been treated though. In all these years through dozens of re-releases, only the ol' out of print Dragon Boxes are the sets worth owning for purists)

llj wrote:With Viz, the problems really came down to how it was upscaled. I'm absolutely sure that what Viz received was the masters for the 2009 R2 DVD release. The problem is that instead of a straight no-frills upscale of that master, they tried to get fancy with it beyond their own capabilities, boosting colors here, and tweaking video there. The problem is that you have to be REALLY GOOD and experienced with upscales to do it properly and Viz had had zero experience doing this before. It's unfortunate that their first experiments in the realm of upscaling had to come at the biggest property they've gotten since Pokémon.

I totally agree there. Regardless of WHAT masters Toei gave em, whatever they did to em was just a mess, no matter how you slice it. It's really a shame.

llj wrote:As for Cinedigm, I see that they also released some Digimon sets. I'm guessing they looked at how Digimon vastly outsold their ultra-arthouse sub-only Mononoke TV series and concluded that "DUBS SELL, SUB DON'T" without even taking into consideration the target audience of Mononoke. And also Slam Dunk seems to be pitched at a broader audience than Mononoke (understandable there). This is probably something fans of younger skewing anime have to live with, the allure of money over "purity". So we should all be happy in rare cases like how Funimation has generally treated One Piece with some respect for the older fans watching it. (Not so much a fan of how DBZ has been treated though. In all these years through dozens of re-releases, only the ol' out of print Dragon Boxes are the sets worth owning for purists)

Yup, exactly. This was something I was thinking as well. I don't think Cinedgm really understands the anime market very well, considering they haven't really released much. Their social media is handled poorly too, as no one seems to be answering any Tweets sent to them, and as far as I know emails send to them have also gone unanswered. You'd think a company that wants to release anime would, y'know, try to listen to what anime fans are saying about your products! They're gonna be disappointed to see how many people who pre-ordered Slam Dunk will be sending it right back for a refund.