Funimation Rising
Anyone who knows me, as well as anyone who has read this blog, knows that I’m an anime fan. However, I don’t really have the history of those fans who have put in the effort of the old days when anime was hard to find, and I’ve never been to any kind of organized event, like a con. This has been an ongoing discussion among people in the anime community – some people who had to deal with all the tape trading and poor translations and all that stuff feel that the newer fans, who have the Internet and access to all sorts of anime at the click of a button, don’t deserve what they have. For the record, I would love to have a hobby that required any sort of work, something that inspires a community of people – kind of like any of the old tape trading things. Mystery Science Theater is one of the other things that I came to after all of that. Technology has advanced far enough that a lot of the barriers that created the need for those efforts have been eliminated.
This all has a point, however. Recently a lot of anime companies responsible for bringing the videos and manga outside of Japan have been having economic trouble (just like everything else, though this has been building for a while). Everyone likes to blame file sharing for it, though I’m not sure what impact it has had on it – file sharing is a red herring more often than not these days. These events have sparked discussion among fans wondering if the old days of anime fandom are returning.
But one of the bigger players in the anime industry, Geneon, has been forced to cut back business. However, one company’s trouble is becoming other companies’ fortune, as other players are picking up the distribution licenses for things Geneon owned before. Recently Funimation announced a large number of properties that they picked up – several just recently at the end of 2008. This is all exciting news for me, because Funimation was a huge part of my introduction to anime.
Some of you may be expecting me to bring up Dragonball Z here. Well, Dragonball Z was probably the first thing I saw on TV that I was really aware was anime (Speed Racer and such don’t count, I think), but I only saw it infrequently – I never had cable growing up, so I was limited to watching it at friends’ houses – and it was back in the awful dub era of that show. In fact, I don’t think I would consider myself an anime fan until Toonami started showing Dragonball Z and the Robotech stuff that they picked up. (Shut up, it wasn’t just Dragonball Z. And please take into account that I was in high school at this point.)
I would then sporadically catch Outlaw Star, some Gundam shows, and the Big O on TV, but nothing really stuck and I never went out of my way to watch it. Adult Swim changed everything for me. Yu Yu Hakusho, as unlikely as it sounds, would be the series that turned it around for me. I caught it on late night airings while playing pool at college, and it just struck me that there was more out there. That, coupled with living with a roommate who would definitely be considered a hardcore anime fan, started a long chain of events that led through me discovering more serious animes to now, with a large pile of anime DVDs and an even larger digital collection. Funimation is responsible for a lot of that. Plus, I’ve recently even started reading manga.
It’s been over a decade since I started watching anime, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. Here’s to more anime to come – plus there’s a huge amount of material out there I haven’t seen yet!
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Comments
Yeah, it was expensive for a while. Some of it still is, but the larger companies seem to be listening to us – many of the new series are being released in reasonably priced season packs, and they are going back and re-releasing some of the older stuff in cheaper packs. You can usually get around 26 episodes for $30-$40.
If it makes you feel better, Trigun still goes for around that. Plus I’m envious, I don’t have it and it’s one of my favorite series.
The one thing with Anime I got really into before abandoning the medium almost completely, was the use of “import DVD’s” – which are very, very cheap copies of entire series, sometimes in questionable quality. I bought them partially because of the tiny price, but also, because they cram entire series’ in to 3-4 discs instead of 6-10.
Also, keep away from conventions…it’ll be the fans that break you eventually – at least, that’s what steers me away. (Anime is expensive, so cheat where you can…we may not have had to fight for imported VHS, but paying $27 for 3-4 episodes is a harsh trade.)