The Old School Otaku Lounge

So while I was away, I discovered that Media Blasters actually updated their "news" portion of the site with some actual updates on the current state of their titles as well as the company as a whole: http://www.media-blasters.com/main/inde ... e-posts-up

If you don't want to read it, it's basically saying:

-Apparently the head of MB WAS going to just let MB "die out" and move onto something else, but then decided to "try to rebuild one last time".

-The market isn't as good as it used to be (NO DUH), so the company's much smaller now and not releasing as much because of it.

-Titles they bought the rights to that they have no plans to actually release: Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, Moyashimon, Bakuman. (Apparently these titles are up for grabs now, but since MB sat on them for so long, I don't think anyone will want them, since they're no longer "new".)

-They no longer own the rights to "many" of their older titles (they say "too many to list", so I'm assuming more than half of their old catalog)--they specifically singled out Rurouni Kenshin and Berserk as titles they no longer own. I'm assuming because they might still get a lot of people asking about them? I hope this means someone might try to buy either of them for re-release...especially Kenshin. (Man, I loved Kenshin.)

-They want to focus on releasing more titles under Kitty Media (their Adults Only line), and say this year they want to release one Kitty title per month (lol what? I guess they figure that will bring in the sales?)

-They still own Godzilla and Toho properties, apparently, and are trying to work out more details for releasing more of them.


I'm honestly more surprised that they're trying to keep the company afloat than anything, because I seriously thought with all the bad publicity they got last year they were just going to let MB die out. I suppose it's good that they keep trying, but at the same time, I'm just like...UGH MEDIA BLASTERS. (Especially with their re-release of Fushigi Yuugi...they cut corners so badly on the packaging for the Part 1 Box set that I heard a LOT of people don't have much enthusiasm to buy the second one. If they keep shooting themselves in the foot like this, they're not going to draw back many customers.)

usamimi wrote:I seriously thought with all the bad publicity they got last year they were just going to let MB die out.

Can you elaborate? Are you talking about their layoffs, or something else? I'm not really "with it" with the state of the industry, really. Plus, MB isn't a company I have bought much from.

If they really think that they will stay afloat by focusing on releasing pervy stuff instead of great shows, then they are really shooting themselves in the foot. I can't imagine that the demand for H stuff is greater than for regular stuff, but then again, maybe I'm naive.

I enjoyed Kenshin too, but I gave up collecting the series because it was just TOO LONG. I suppose it's nothing compared to the incessant flow of One Piece or whatever, but my love for the show couldn't convince me to keep buying them.

Mostly the fact that they kept buying properties and then delaying them for months, only to finally say "oh, sorry, we're dropping the title." Not to mention ANN ran a story saying that it seemed like on paper the company was bankrupt and didn't really exist anymore while some people still had preorders for stuff (they later had a press release saying everything was fine, they had just filed their taxes late or something, but by then the damage had already been done.)

I used to have Kenshin Fansubbed on VHS. I wanted to get it on DVD, but by the time MB started actually releasing affordable box sets instead of freaking SINGLE DVDS, no one was carrying it anymore, so I missed out on getting it while it was actually affordable :/

usamimi wrote:I used to have Kenshin Fansubbed on VHS. I wanted to get it on DVD, but by the time MB started actually releasing affordable box sets instead of freaking SINGLE DVDS, no one was carrying it anymore, so I missed out on getting it while it was actually affordable :/

Kenshin is a title I NEVER see used. But I see "Samurai X" all the time. lol

I'm pretty sure someone else will pick up Bakuman, considering it's popularity. Most likely Funimation I think. The other titles, like Kenshin and Berserk should get re-picked up too.

greg wrote:If they really think that they will stay afloat by focusing on releasing pervy stuff instead of great shows, then they are really shooting themselves in the foot. I can't imagine that the demand for H stuff is greater than for regular stuff, but then again, maybe I'm naive.

No offense intended by this, but yes, you are naive. I'm not a fan (of hentai, yaoi or yuri) either but I CAN say that I have some friends that ran an anime rental store in the early boom years and pervy and/or hentai titles were the best renters. I believe they noted that F3 got stolen TWICE but had already paid for itself in rentals both times. Whereas many other quality titles got few if any rentals. This is one reason I was never a believer in anime becoming "mainstream".

Well, I can understand rentals being lucrative for H series, but I was under the impression that most guys just downloaded rips of H stuff online for free lately instead of buying it?

usamimi wrote:I was under the impression that most guys just downloaded rips of H stuff online for free lately instead of buying it?

People download rips of EVERYTHING. I am not plugged into the market, so I can't say definitively, but I will say this. EVERY discussion I've had with people who do business (of any kind really) is that "sales" scale as the market does. IE. as a ROUGH (not 100% accurate) guide, if you sell 100 units in a room of 10,000 people, you would expect to move twice that if you double the number of people. It's probably not as "straight line" as that, more of a curve, but the gist is that as you increase the market you sell more. (DUH, right?)

So, point being, if 100 people watch "clean" titles and 1000 people watch H; maybe 90 people download the "clean" and you'd expect 900 to download the H. So, that still translates to 10 sales of "clean" and 100 sales of H.

I think it also comes down to:
In the case of a hypothetical 100 people. To sell a show, a number of people need to AGREE on the merits of the show (or else it needs to excel in multiple areas). To whit, either 50 people buy it because the writing is phenomenal or 20 people buy it because the character designs are cute or 30 people buy it because it features popular actors. But for Hentai, that one "merit" is "does it have sex in it?" As long as that LOW bar is cleared, the rest is irrelevant unless it is distracting from that main point. One person might love the character look of Lucky Star and hate the design style of Fist of the North Star and someone else is the complete opposite, but they can buy the same hentai because they "ain't buying it for the designs".

Hmm, I suppose when you put it like that, it's true, eh? And I know there are a lot of people who collect those, too, so there's that...I guess forums and just seeing guys talk online in general, I'm more used to hearing dudes talking about downloading torrents of H stuff more than talking about buying them.

Heero wrote:No offense intended by this, but yes, you are naive. I'm not a fan (of hentai, yaoi or yuri) either but I CAN say that I have some friends that ran an anime rental store in the early boom years and pervy and/or hentai titles were the best renters.

I guess I'm not surprised. I just don't see the appeal of this stuff. When I was a single guy in college, my friend rented this one hentai video that was a spoof on Sailor Moon. I remember the girls giving the cat a hard-on and there were definitely tentacles involved. We were both laughing through the whole thing, but perhaps his was a nervous laugh because he kept renting those stupid videos. Not all the time, but fairly often. I suppose sometimes they make hentai that involves actually falling in love and characters behaving like normal people, I guess, but I wouldn't know about that. All the ones I know about involve women with no pubic hair unrealistically acting like hopeless, annoying retards and... oh wait. I guess that describes pretty much every porn.

When I was younger I would have wanted to run an anime store, but I'd have gone broke because I'd have stocked it full of COOL stuff that too few people would have wanted to buy. But I learned a LONG time ago that as much as I SHOULD be, I'm not anything close to the final arbiter of taste and popularity.