Re: Another Anime is Dead Rant

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:11:07 GMT, Derek Janssen
<ejanss1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

starcade@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Nov 26, 2:41 pm, afedakendragon <afeda...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is no value in the current licenses in the CURRENT MODEL. There
is no value in selling snow to eskimoes. Don't sell snow to
eskimoes. Sell snow in the desert. GO FIND THE DESERT.

Actually, that's why the whole thing is dead, and you said it more
perfectly than you think.

Selling snow in the desert is useless because it's not snow anymore.
It's _water_ -- and that's something akin to what the industry has not
realized. As Sevakis said: There's no value in the anime itself once
they've already seen it. NO financial value whatsoever.

Gee, that must've come as a shock to all of the rest of us back when we
were getting excited...yes, EXCITED...that Disney would be selling all
those Ghibli films we already owned the VHS fansubs to all those years,
on regular commercial store shelves.

And remember that strange ritualistic phrase we always invoked when we
were excited that "Totoro" or "Porco Rosso" would be coming out on
Disney DVD?:
"Yay!--Now I can"...<pause for effect>..."RETIRE MY FANSUBS!" @_@

But really, how many of those sales can you count on?

I mean, that's weird, isn't it?: Fans buying something they'd already
owned for free or tape-cost all those years? And then actually *looking

I think the point here is that there aren't enough of those "good"
fans to support the market in its current state. The "Bad" fans are
the ones who might buy, but will take fansubs out of convenience,
because the come out faster, or in protest of bad translations. You
might get some of those to switch, with a decent download service.

Then there's the pirate fans. Raising the black flag and all that.
Ain't never gonna get them.

forward* to get rid of their bird-in-the-hand that was worth two on the
shelves, just throwing it away in the trash, like that? That's just
plain loopy!

Arguments about Phil Hartman's voice aside, show me even *one* person

Aww. Don't speak ill of the dead. And for the record I liked Phil
Hartman's work!

who KEPT their homemade club-tape or degrading fansub-only copy of
"Kiki" after Disney's DVD came out, and you are looking at one stupid,
stupid fan. :)

Sell anime to someone else. Quit going after a target demographic
that has already demonstrated that they're not willing to pay. Target
the market that will pay. Change your product. Change your market.

Fine. You just ensured that you're down to about six series a year --
the only way that could be workable is to turn the US anime business
over to the likes of Cartoon Network and the like. They provide the
studios, the dubbers, the whole shooting match. That's pretty well
about it.

Um, actually they don't--
Most of their Bandai and Funi broadcasts are produced by the video
companies for the DVD's, and simply rebroadcast for the exposure.
Unless it's a deal-sweetener, such as letting CN get an exclusive on the
translation/distribution rights, which ka-ching's up the license rights
another notch.

Or at the very least spreads around your cost. If they could get
networks to pay for the translation and dubbing costs, well heck, if
we believe what Justin Sevakis said, the R1 distributors have just
sliced a large portion of their costs out of the equation.

Then they could concentrate on their core business (such as it is) of
distributing those little plastic discs we all know and love.

Take that year old license, and repackage it. Use anime as a
promotional material to drive another product. Find a new broadcast
medium. Find a new distribution medium. The license is already paid
for! Sunk cost arguments aside, it'd be foolish to just toss away a
license without exploring other methods of extracting value from it.

WHAT VALUE? And what value would you get from a Kaleido Star, for
example, in any of the above respects?

...Retroactively re-selling it under new repackaging to fans who just
now learned who directed Princess Tutu, and want to see other shows?

Well, at the risk of arguing Mike's side, if they downloaded the first
time, whats to stop them from doing it again after they figure out
that Junichi Sato is the living god of cute girls, seinen slice of
life, and all things wholesome?

(Insert artistic developing new-fan example you might be familiar with.)

They're worthless in the current market, with the current model. That
doesn't mean you have to use the current model. Or sell to the
current market. Snow to eskimoes.

Water in the desert, if it doesn't evaporate by the time you deliver
it.

(It gets more perfect, the more I think about it... Think of anime as
snow in a desert. First, it melts. Then, it warms. Then, it
evaporates. D -- O -- A.)

(Um...it was just an EXPRESSION...Like, selling something where they
don't have any, and might like it.
You don't have it to mis-analyze every word within an inch of its life.)
-_-

To be fair, I probably could have picked a better example. But I
slipped that one in between support calls and server maintenance. :-)

Reminds me of a pair of expressions I've heard.

The old adage was that "Business is supplying a product(service) to
service an existing market demand".

The new one seems to be "Business is creating a market demand to
service."
Why is it such a stretch for you to understand that people aren't
going to pay for it unless _FORCED_ to do so?

We have more contact with actual human beings, and don't mistake cynical
paranoid fantasy for "logical" argument by proven example?

Derek Janssen (who's hoping for presuppositions a *little* more
cohesively cogent than "Just watch! They'll do it! They'll ALWAYS do
it!!")
ejanss1@xxxxxxxxxxx
--
Abraham Evangelista
.

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