The Old School Otaku Lounge

Well, here's another anime company that is going goodbye. According to ANN, Bandai is calling it quits as of March of next year. The second half of the final episode of disc 2 of volume 1 of my Gundam DVD set is bonkers, and I need to get it replaced. Their website, bandai-ent.com, is kaput. I'll try calling them during their business hours and see if I can talk to somebody.

This is very sad. The American economy has really gotten poor over the past few years. So many nice companies are biting the dust.

Bandai is a big loss because they hold a lot of desirable properties. While some of them will be license rescued, a lot of them won't be.

Still, for all the old companies going kaput, they've pretty much been replaced by a bunch of new ones. So nothing really dies, they just pop up as a different company. Discotek didn't start getting heavy into anime until 2009-ish, NISA is pretty new to the game (they're also a game company, haha), and Sentai Filmworks is simply the surviving members of ADV. Nozomi has ramped it up in the past few years too.

I'd recommend keeping your eye out on getting a new Gundam DVD set altogether.

Well, it turns out that the DVD works just fine on my desktop computer. It's strange how some DVDs will freeze up on some players and be just fine on others. At least I know that I won't need to replace the disc!