Bri

Hilarious!

I'm very much in two minds about this anime. On the one hand I love the interesting experimental animation, the great soundtrack and impressive VA performance, but on the other hand it's just a harem comedy with very conventional one girl per arch build up, and the supernatural element in high school with monsters, possessions and vampires is very cliche. It tries to hard to be different and cutting edge but kind of fails at it...

A few recent posts about the relationship between HG and Tasunoko made me wonder about the following situation: what happens in the case of a breakup between the two? HG owns the trademarks on Macross but needs the license from Tats to have access to the copyrighted material for the Robotech animation and merchandise. Tats on the other hand can't license it's SDF Macross and DYRL rights effectively to another party as HG sits on the trademarks in every major anime market outside Japan. Mexican stand off? Would anyone be able to shed a light on what would happen?

Since HG renewed several of their trademarks last year I don't think their relationship is going to end soon. Why else would HG spend several thousands of USD if they would not be sure about their agreement with Tats?

Only if that country is the USA. As Azrael said the US trademark system has a peculiarity that it counts first usage of a name/symbol (and you'd still need to use it in a commercial sense as in sell Zardoz DVDs in your example). Other countries, at least the ones we looked at in regard to the Macross trademark, have a first registration rule.

Unfortunately, the whole point is not to have track and trace, SAL with track and trace suffers from the same issues as EMS. Without track and trace, there is a large chance to escape the whole customs clearing procedure (as SAL small pac only gets sampled with a chance of roughly 1 in 10), which makes SAL small pac shipping time so much faster. Another benefit is that without going trough customs there is no 20% VAT nor $25 surcharge for administration costs. You refer to SAL parcel. As for Fedex, it just as expensive as EMS but it is 4 times faster (due to faster custom clearing). If I pay for fast shipping I don't want my stuff to sit around for weeks in Amsterdam.

Seeing Planetes and Patlabor mentioned in one line kind of made me think how similar both are in some respects. Two groups of misfits going about in their daily lives. Non standard main lead characters, hmm only thing missing in Planetes is Goto. As for anime: Finished Sora no Woto: Was quite good and it had a very Macross ending, also I want a modelkit of that spider tank. Finished Munto: one time where I have to go against public opinion. It gets burned down quite often but wow on the animation front. You can see the it was a labor of love for the people at Kyoani. So many little animation details and visual experiments. I loved it. Shame they get more recognition for their far more safe romantic adaptions.

Hmm, I have no doubt you have acces to better sources then I have but BW is not credited as a contributor for any of these series with either ANN or Anidb...how annoying. Edit: Ah I see, the Japanese Wiki page.. checking it now with google translator. 株式会社ビックウエスト should help Edit 2: Okay, it's quite small: Big West Advertising: 15 employees, $11mln annual turn over, "advertising agency specialized in advertisement planning for media such as TV, radio and magazines and in sales of Internet adds" (Jobstock).

Do we know for sure it was BW pushing for Frontier? Other then being involved with Macross, they haven't done anything anime related in years. I can't escape the impression that they are just a rights holder these days.

Seto nails the issue here. Any attempt to find a logical in-universe-explanation for the all the style differences is going to end up in a headache. Still, I have some small hope that Macross the First will be able to provide a working synthesis between DYRL and SDFM.

"Although Kawamori participated in Satelight's founding in 1995 with the production of Kenji's Spring (released the following year), he did not officially become one of its board directors until 2003. Satelight produced projects without his participation back then, Kawamori worked on projects without Satelight's participation back then, and both still do so now." (Source Egan Loo, 2007)

No worries and I should thank you for showing that sarcasm, while universal, can be beyond the means of the individual. The vast majority of anime out there is simple, disposable entertainment, requiring virtually no cultural baggage to understand so yes, on average, anime is very much the equivalent of reality television.

This kind of information just can't be found on the net. It would require talking to an industry insider who worked during that period. If we ever want to get an answer to all the questions in this thread we'd need to send a macross world reporter to the press and industry day on the Tokyo international anime fair

Dubs are like decaff coffee, Coke zero and light beer, not quite the same but they serve a purpose (...ok...except light beer). To each his own I guess. (Although sometimes a dub can add something like the BBCs hilarious dub of Lum, which ironically seems so much more in tune then normal accurate dubs and yes I read tv tropes at times) Oh noes, I'm not a native speaker so I cannot hope to understand the depth and intracacies of America's Next Top Model... Now shall we get back on topic?

The last co-operation I can find between BW and Tatsunoko is the Irresponsible Captain Tylor from 1992-1993 (source ANN). I don't think you should read to much in to this partnership as BW is a small company. Advertising agencies like Big West are often part of anime production comitees to run the marketing effort but to my knowledge they are rarely the initiator/senior partner (with the exception of Dentsu which is a very large firm). That role is often for broadcasters, publishers or (multi)media and entertainment groups who can supply the captital needed. I don't know anything about the Uisu Corporation but if they folded during preproduction then it's not unlikely to assume that BW either saw an opportunity to step in or had commited to deeply already to bail out. Either way BW role as anime sponsor seems mostly incidental. Speculating further, this would fit with their very limited involvement with anime outside of the Super Dimension block and a few TV shows/OVA. Marketing (let alone sponsoring) anime is unlikely to be their core business. As a side note, I haven't been able to acces the BW website (bigwest-ad.co.jp) lately nor can I find any link on the macross.co.jp website. All remaining info I have is that it's owned by Kaya Onishi and Big West CO.,LTD. 6-12-3 Sotokanda Bigwest 3rd 5F Chiyoda-ku Tokyo

Yea, it focusses heavily on Lafiels and Jintos development. In my humble opinion the whole Seikai trilogy one of the best space opera's out there.

There is nothing special about anime sales. It's all about market size and cost of production. Movies like Star Trek already turn a profit on the box office and have a much lager audience to spread the costs over. An OVA like Unicorn has to recap it's money purely through DVD/merchandise sales to a small audience. The only anime that sells in the same manner like Hollywood movies are Studio Ghibli productions who have the same worldwide audiences and cinematice releases. The anime you find in the Best Buy is no longer current material and only has to recoup the costs of the licensee. Unicorn is new and a worldwide release by Bandai, so there won't be a license. The Blu-Ray already has english dubs and subs (even the Japanese version). As region encoding is uncommon with BR there is a risk of cheaper American versions to be imported back to Japan, hence the similar price. In the end it's a matter of choice, you pay the premium to see it now, or you wait till there is a discounted version (excluding the illegal option of a pirated BR rip).

You won't see any decent quality fansub of the movie until the DVD/BR gets released and that won't happen for another 4-5 months at least. The Haruhi movie is doing extremely well in Japan (for an anime) and it has been announced that it will be shown in more then the 24 cinemas originally planned. Probably delaying the DVD release. Any torrents you are going to find in the mean time will either be fakes or camrips.

Hmm, doesn't that conflict with Hikaru being a test pilot for the VF-4 on earth during the 2010-2012 period?

I understand that the quality of express services differs per region. For example I have some Canadian relatives who start to rage at the mere mention of the word DHL, while they are the most reliable express service over here. I use Fedex reguarly for work and haven't had any complaints sofar. EMS is handeled by the Dutch postal service, TNT Post. Unfortunately they see EMS as some kind of cash cow. TNTs customs service has a backlog of weeks and you have to pay a hefty service charge upon delivery at the door assuming the delivery guy even bothers to attempt a delivery and not dump it at a local post office (your lucky if he puts a note in your mailbox) as it costs them to much time (they get paid for the number of deliveries completed). On average EMS here, is two to three times as slow as SAL shipments. Unfortunately most Japanese retailers do not allow SAL small pac (without track and trace) for Valks and other large/expensive items. HLJ seems to have worked out a deal with Fedex. Example in my case: Fedex works out to be a bit more expensive in shipping from HLJ (600 yen or so on a 1/60 VF27 as EMS has a 20% discount) but has cheaper clearings service costs ($15 versus $25 TNT EMS). So costs don't differ much in the end, except delivery time Fedex is 4-5 days, EMS 3 to 5 weeks, and Fedex does not force to pay on delivery but sends a seperate invoice. Not to mention the benefits for my sanity of not having to deal with the TNT customer service again. I don't always care for the delivery time but it stinks when you order an item as a birthday or christmas present and it doesn't arive in time.

Thank goodness for a Fedex option. I'm so happy that I won't have to suffer trough TNT's EMS "service" any longer.

I would agree with Miles here. The external attacks from Gigile kept the military busy while the vampires could do their scouting, monitoring and research. Given that M7 has no cellular network, civilians informing authorities of vampire movements would have been a lot more difficult. I have to agree that the vampires looked a tad lame in their trenchcoats with masks, but they are a key part in the Protodevlin strategy. Not to mention they are used for events in Fire Bomber daily lives.

Using a first generation variable fighter to beat multiple much more advanced VF-14 derivatives just shows how much of a master Milia is.

I have to admit, critical as I am of the F-35s esthetics, that the TB paint scheme looks stunning on this plane. They should all be painted in this scheme.

In terms of reviews we're up to 13.