Who's Suin' Who: The "Hideaki Anno sues Gainax" non-story.

There’s a buzz buzz buzz about the recent legal action filed by the firm Khara Inc, filed against Gainax to the tune of 100million yen.  But like the buzzing of a bee, is it causing an unnecessarily overly energetic reaction to those it otherwise doesn’t pose a real danger to.  Are people making this out to be more than it is?  Cries of “Anno sues Gainax!” have already bee echoing through the interweb tubes and people are reacting like it’s the goddam Cuban Missile Crisis.  But let us not forget that 100,000,000 yen is (at the time of publication) the equivalent of US $879,275.06 which could be described the high-end of ass-wipe money in the grand scheme of things.  So even if Gainax can’t pay a single yen, Khara Inc may not necessarily come away with a tremendously significant ownership stake in the company (hell, with the price of wagyu the way it is, they’ll probably just end up getting ownership of a steak).

 Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Lawsuit.

Notice how the legal action does not include outstanding royalties, just the loan principal (doesn’t even mention interest, of which there may not have been any).  Outstanding royalties could easily be more than 100 million yen, depending on how long they’ve been outstanding.  This development could mean anything from the genesis of a real animosity between Khara and Gainax/Anno and Yamaga, to something like a side-step deal where Anno can take control of some of Evangelion IP assets in a way that keeps existing creditors and other debt issues out of the picture.  With Gainax showing very unhealthy income (in the article it is not mentioned if it is gross-adjusted or anything), their past failure to produce significant revenue since Evangelion may indeed invite the crows to pick the eagle sooner rather than later.  Although the beating of a dead horse may yet create gains if tenderized horse meat is what you have to sell, there need to be people willing to buy, and even then that only works once.  What I mean by that is; bringing back Evangelion again and again most likely is not going to be a successful survival strategy, you're going to lose out on the opportunity cost end.  The question then becomes, is there even any potential survival strategy that’s worth implementing?  Sometimes the answer is no.  While I hate to think about something like that for Gainax, when your best friend has to sue you for repayment of a (probably) zero interest loan, it doesn’t send a message of confidence to any other potential sources of financing regarding future projects. 

 

Without actually taking a look at the books and other accounting, the situation is very difficult to gauge in terms of the general temperament of the parties involved, as well as being able to know how much Gainax has gone the way of the cicada husk, presenting a rigid exterior while having been hollow inside for a long time now.  Maybe it’s exactly that, or maybe it’s not even close.  Regarding this kind of symptom, and based on how Japanese companies do things in general, I think Gainax may indeed be past the event horizon. 

 

I'm sure there's an easy solution.

So is this some sort of major event?  Well maybe not, since it involves less than $900,000 which for a company like Gainax shouldn’t be too hard to manage.  But it isn’t nothing either, it made the news, since not being able to just “handle it” is the position that Gainax seems to find itself in.  So it’s news. 

This mystery is going to make itself evident in the next year, possibly even before that.  Perhaps Anno really needs that money for his Dragon’s Dentist, or maybe this is a way for his good friend to get the best silverware off Titanic and into the right lifeboat before the thing finally starts going down.  That way Anno can keep his baby before insolvency ties it up and parcels it out.  That might be a good thing, but not for the reason you think.  Anno and Khara Inc might take Evangelion to Hollywood.  No one wants to do the same thing forever, and if a Hollywood Eva movie means that Khara can get financing for other projects as well, we might see something genuinely and creatively new, so why not tap that well...?  Anno is kind of a weirdo though so this could be well outside something he’d be willing to do.  But if a live action shit-stain of an Evangelian movie creates an opportunity for a Portal animated series (it won’t, but something equally awesome might be on the table), then it’s worth it. 

To truly understand what this situation might be, go watch U-571.  Remember that part where they put budget Ralph Maccio in the torpedo tube after that Nazi bastard killed him?  It was so that when his dead body and the rest of the junk floated to the top, the destroyer chasing them would think that they had sunk the thing?  Eventually that plan buys enough time to line up another plan (one that ends in ka-boom), and get out with the objective intact which was actually an Enigma machine and code book.  The bad news?  Despite once being state of the art, the battered U-571 ends up sinking.  Gainax may itself be a sinking ship, but the nexus of creativity can be kept alive and brought to where it can flourish, all by using the dead corpse of Evangelion to buy time (seriously people, stick a fork in it, just come to terms with the fact it was fun while it lasted). 

 You mustn’t run away.

As previously mentioned, the situation is far too vague for me to call that a lock in terms of what is going to happen.  This whole thing could just as easily turn some kind of ugly, and the vultures will pull everything apart in a terrible and damaging gut-splattered frenzy.   But I don’t mind engaging in a bit of wishful or nostalgic thinking every now and then.

20 year old coffee in a can anyone?

These are for sale if anyone wants them, as we try to raise funds to get new software for Pinky Mixology. Only $879,275.06! (Nah, but they are really for sale.  1997 edition, un-opened.  Message me or something).

Either way, one major problem no matter which direction this develops, is that it can be very difficult and quite tricky (some may even say impossible), to appraise or assign an explicit value to intellectual properties.  They are considered intangible assets, and so unlike financial instruments, they can not truly possess a net present value or be factored into the kinds of ratios that go into all that business stuff your roommate studied in college while you were wasting your time with Japanese Language 102.   Creditors and financial entities are going to have a very difficult time valuing Gainax for this reason.  It is not easily foretold how much revenue an entertainment property will produce.  Even companies like Disney and Fox have a hard time actually saying how much their flagships are worth in terms of actual real money on any given day, and they have entire rooms foll of math-people who's job is to do exactly that.  So while equations do exist for putting a monetary figure on entertainment IP (as opposed to patent IP... very different thing but IP none the less), they often aren't really allowed to sit down at the grown-ups table when it comes down to finalizing things, the same way polygraphs are used by law enforcement, but aren't admissible in actual court.  So if insolvency is a real possibility, then assigning a value to assets is going to be a guessing game at best and a cluster-fuck at worst.  Especially if more than one person is holding the leash to Evangelion.  This in and of itself may be an impetus for such a preemptive move to get Eva off the sinking ship sooner rather than later if that is in fact what is happening.  Much like electrons in the dual slit experiment, monetary value in entertainment properties only manifests as real when people look at them.  Finicky things these intangible assets are.  So we may be witnessing a great escape style egress of Evangelion, but pulled off out in the open for everyone to see.

Then again... all this might just be an epic disaster in the making.  Watching the company that fucked you over slowly go down in flames is always satisfying.

Yeah.

So obnoxious as other people's luck

I know how this crap gets made, but that doesn't mean I am any less frustrated.

So it is now apparent that history repeats itself on the macro and micro level, and we are all in store for another rollercoaster ride. A ride not so much a rollercoarster, but a twisted funhouse wherein everything that had a strong influence in growing Asian pop-culture into something of a staple of entertainment and cultural identity of the generations who have no idea what a dos prompt is, is turned on its head. As if run by the same idiots at the U.S. Mint that get their panties in such a bunch when told they must design a functional dollar coin and then do just the opposite out of nothing but spite, so too has mainstream American entertainment media finally admitted that the Japanese beat the crap out of them when it came to the battle for the hearts and minds of a generation that’s aware enough to see that the Boomers in charge have lost their minds and have refused to adapt formulas that no longer work. The kids in the fandom take it personally, and then in turn, so do the baby boomers running the show.

So what happens? Well if you have ever read Japan Inc, you’ll have a pretty good idea that we are in the “too little too late” phase of the death march of this market as we know it. Case in point; the new polygonal abomination that is the DC vs Mortal Kombat offering.
Gameplay is irrelevant: They can make an awesome fight engine for anything these days and have it look cool.
Platform is irrelevant: There are very few games that can spur noticeable increases in sales (especially when not combined with other hardware pricing promotions). This game will not be one of them.
Marketing is irrelevant: With 2 brands that such a long embedded history, people have already made up their minds. The pitiful e3 demo recently shown, where Superman ends a match with Sub Zero by pushing him down with a single punch, was either a tremendous marketing blunder or a symptom of a fatal abundance of "fail" in the game that they wish to prolong the exposure of as long as they can.

This game is an attempt to take Marvel vs. Capcom, and make what would hopefully be a modestly profitable franchise out of such a similar pairing. There are a great many things that are being done wrong here, but to keep the bullet points going:
Too Little: In this case, it’s a situation where too much in the easy parts (the “bling” of the game) and not where it belongs. The result is a game that’s going to be old in 5 minutes.
Too Late: Camcom vs. Marvel was first released last century, and like begrudged losers, the old guard is finally realizing that there is no reverse (or standing still) in the world of entertainment (although we have seen a lot of “reincarnation” however).
WTF?: The most glairing problem here is the inability to reconcile the boy-scout image of DC characters (even Lobo never actually attained true bad-ass status that wasn’t at the level of some sort of nicktoons joke), with the bloodthirsty realism of the Mortal Kombat game series, which has been putting ants in the pants of the likes of Captain Kangaroo, Jack Thompson, and Hillary Clinton. With 2 diametrically opposed psychologies, one of them is going to lose.

The sad truth is that by overemphasizing the technical capacities of the game, while at the same time having those technical achievements show an unfolding series of events and game play that are disingenuous to what the market is going to expect, effectively re-alienates an audience like a second Bush term. The minor steps forward in entertainment media searingly branded with the “we’re still in charge” message of the old guard, will send the new generation right back to their p2p fansubs, Japanese imports, and set the bar even higher for when a truly good piece of domestic work is made.

Now when starting with “video games” one loses a part of an audience, so in an attempt to lose the part of that audience which stayed on up to this point, I shall now bring up the same topic, different example. That example of course is Avatar. It has its faults, the sometimes seemingly arbitrary sprinklings of Asian culture here and there, the campy “feel-good” message of a GI Joe episode or Voltron Dub where hastily out-of-place lie is shoehorned into end dialog to falsify the notion that “nobody died,” or the character development that resembles the real-time action of a shrinky-dink (remember those?). For all those faults however, no mistake should be made that this program is perhaps one of the best examples of the new for of entertainment that newer and smarter generations of consumers expect and deserve… and that’s not saying much. The sad fact is that Avatar actually pushed the envelope in the eyes of the old guard, and may have pushed to far for their timid senses, while at the same time it showed the other end of the equation just how chicken-shit the powers that be still are, when it comes to accepting the inevitable.

For all of the steps that it seems we have made, in reality there’s only been one that has been indelibly taken up to this point, and that is the shaking of the taboo in animated TV that episodes can’t connect to each other to form an intelligent and entertaining storyline. The rest of these lessons, things that the audience takes for granted because we’ve gotten so used to them it’s like second nature, will all perhaps never be learned by the old guard, as they take them down with them to the dog-track in Daytona on their motorized chairs with their legs wrapped in airport blankets.

Their exit will not be the final hurdle to intelligent and well made entertainment, because as they have forced their will onto the creative minds of these programs, those creative minds have learned to take the path of least resistance; self-censorship. The notion of “don’t put that in the story, they’d never let us get away with it,” all too quickly leads to such an unbreakable mindset, that the potential illumination out of the animated dark ages that the next generation had in it’s luggage, was tossed off into a storeroom like a shampoo bottle by the TSA, while the rest of the passengers continue to fly on foreign airlines.

Now that the end of licensing as we know it has made the need for domestic creations a reality, the most difficult task in evolving animated entertainment into the thing that caused the great shift in the first place, will fall not to the old guard (they’ll go down screaming that “we’re doing it wrong” and take as many ships down with them as they can), but to the ones that take their place. The ones that spent a disproportional long time underneath aging company superiors who wouldn’t let go, and who by that time, will have to fight a serious battle within themselves against that “self censorship” which was so embedded into the industry, by a generation that in their own eyes “just couldn’t be wrong.”

HELP ME INTERNETS!

So I keep hearing these rumblings of the Evangelikon UCC coffee cans being worth something if they are the originals from 1997 and unopened. Anyone know where I can find out?

UCC Evangelion original coffee cans from the 1990's. Unopened.

PS; that "Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels" back there is signed.
PPS; Bonus points if you can name all the books there.