Toon Zone Talkback - Bandai Entertainment Announces New March Titles Including "Gundam 00" S2

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King Fu

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This is the talkback thread for Bandai Entertainment Announces New March Titles Including "Gundam 00" S2.

No delays this time? Wow.
 
Only by virtue of not having previously announced any of those sets. And the gap between Gundam 00 sets is 1 month longer than the gap between the sets so far.
 
I'm in for Gundam, obviously. I really wonder when they'll get around to boxing up Lucky Star. Seriously, they might as well. Now's the time with the manga doing so well.
 
Nothing for me, however I am planning to order Gundam Unicorn Vol.#1 when I get chance. It's supposed to be coming out in March for us here as well. Guess they'll make some big announcement out of it.
 
The "barebones" one will probably go for 25-30. Honestly though, Bandai doesn't seem to get yet that anime fans just aren't going to pay as much per episode any more.
 
You act like its something mind-blowing new. It's not. At least with 7 episodes at $40, you get an English dub. Compare that to Hayate no Gotoku. Not that I care about an English dub since I've adapted to the new market of a majority of companies (in particular my Top 3 - Nozomi, S23 and Bandai Ent) resulting in sub-only releases. That said, I'm waiting for Anime LegenRAB collections of Geass and Gundam 00, maybe Blu-Ray but given how Kurokami is treated (reverse importation fears).
 
'Mind-blowing'? No, not at all. I see no exclamation marks in my post whatsoever. I am expressing dismay that this is continually coming from a company that should have more financial backing than FUNimation, which sells their titles for far cheap with more content per release.


The English dub isn't that big a plus, either.
 
I don't know, Bandai dubs are usually pretty strong. Code Geass' first few episodes were iffy and Nunnally's bad from start to finish (and Kallen isn't much better) but otherwise the dub's fine. Kurokami's dub is excellent, better than the show deserves actually. Gundam 00 does some typecasting but also brings in some new voices and that results in a decent Ocean dub (Scott McNeil doing some scene-stealing as Ali Al-Saachez didn't hurt either).

I think Bandai's parent company is just greedy when it comes to stuff like this.
 
I don't think Bandai Ent has as much financial backing as they used to. From all indications, Code Geass and Gundam 00 are selling poorly. Code Geass Season 1 was 3 sets with nice LEs and a box. Season 2 was expanded to 4 sets with weak and pathetic LEs, no box. Gundam 00 1st season got no box but was 3 sets and the 2nd season will be 4 sets with probably no box either.

... and who knows how badly in debt they are. They have to do what they have to do to stay afloat.
 
They have more financial backing because they are an extension of Bandai in Japan, not an independent source like FUNI. Basically, Bandai will never fall as long as Japan doesn't.
 
What bothers me about both dubs is that a lot of the characters have goofy voices to cover up the fact they're also doing background characters (less so with Geass, but still...goofy voices and poor casting in a few spots). With the 00 dub I can typically pick out Drummond or Morrow putting on some goofy variant of one of their voices for a background character, for example. Not to mention you have Swaile playing his fifth Gundam pilot, Sam Vincent his second, and Scott McNeil his fiftieth role in a Gundam series, if you want to count the nuraber of background voices he does. I cannot even take Saachez seriously because it's Scott McNeil doing a dangerously close goofy performance.


And then the Geass dub sees fit to actually dub Charles. That's blasphemy against God...er, Norio Wakamoto.
 
I do think you're onto something as far as Bandai's present financial state goes, unfortunately, but perhaps the diagnosis isn't entirely accurate. I doubt that the structural reason behind their problems is that those shows are selling "poorly" in absolute terms.

For one, Code Geass was one of the best selling properties of Spring 2009 and, while it was at the bottom of the list, that still places it above the vast majority of anime releases, most of which never even come close. I'm assuming 00 isn't doing too badly either, but I'll admit I don't have any concrete proof of that.

We're not in Spring anymore, of course, but even if the later volumes of both series have done worse I wouldn't assume the problem is a lack of sales, period, but rather one of not meeting whatever insane Japanese targets were in place.

There's a long and ugly history of Bandai Entertainment's Japanese masters being jerks, making unreasonable demanRAB while imposing ridiculous restrictions on their releases, and that's more likely to be the real underlying issue.

If I had to describe the problem here, it's the result of having to do whatever the Japanese say, which includes setting unrealistic sales expectations and sticking to a release model that's on the wrong side of the scale between singles and collections.

In short, it's making bad business decisions. Which doesn't mean the titles aren't selling, only that they're not meeting whatever those targets were, thus Japan must have ordered them to cut costs and raise profits...without actually doing anything innovative, naturally.

I'm sure there are other factors involved and I've listened to the infamous ANNCast on Geneon, which contains detailed descriptions for the kinRAB of problems anime companies have had to face and also confirms that the Japanese in general aren't exactly known for being reasonable business partners (Bandai Visual included)...but I'd say that's likely to be the gist of it, more or less.
 
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