Your Name, here: Digital film distribution to global audiences.

Digital distribution makes the world smaller, films more accessible, and offers audiences an escape from what seems to be an endless shit-parade of Hollywood drivel.

Siiiii, bitches.

If you haven’t gone to see the feature length anime movie Your Name yet, then you should go do that because it’s good.  Like, one of the best films of all time level good.  The best part of what I just wrote, is that it almost doesn’t matter where you are, because thanks to digital media storage, you can be in flyover-country and still be able to access film selections that were once the exclusive domain of places like The Angelica in hoidy toidy big cities. 

Despite the fact that human douchebagery continues to infest almost any aspect of life that involves a shared space, going to the movies can still be fun.  In fact, over the past decade, this activity has actually improved in terms of the enjoyment factor.  This is in large part due to the obsolescence of the 35mm film print.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s nostalgic and fun to hear the sprockets engaging and seeing that celluloid turn, but there’s nothing about it that doesn’t suck when compared to modern alternatives.  They degrade quickly, are easily damaged, expensive to make, expensive to maintain, even more expensive to insure, they can burst into flames, to watch them requires complex high-maintenance machinery which is prone to malfunctions, and they are quite a heavy and inefficient medium for motion picture storage.  You can wax nostalgic all you like, but if you need an ambulance, you want a brand spanking new one showing up, not a friggin Ford Model T, no matter how nice it looked.  When I was in the home media business back in the 35mm print and VHS days, sending prints anywhere was a pain, and sending them to Canada was damn near impossible.  This was because Canadian authorities assessed taxes on the insurance amount, even if the prints themselves were simply being returned to their original owner after a simple telecine transfer.

They ended up driving them back across the border themselves without declaring the film prints, because, as he put it; "Fuck You, Canada."

You put all this together and you can see why art-house cinema was a limited entity, mostly existing in larger urban areas.  Going to see Ghost in the Shell back in 1995 was a major undertaking and required convention attendance to do it.  Not so is the case today, where digital mediums allow for any cinema across the globe to screen just about anything relatively instantly.  No waiting for the print to arrive, no rundowns, no re-spooling the fucking things, and no massive insurance costs.  Just calibrate and hit go.  Enter the modern movie-going age, now with 20% more anime.

Right now there are kids in school who are going to reach adulthood not knowing what the hell this is.

This has allowed something like Your Name to receive a much wider distribution than something like Princess Mononoke did in 1997.  Getting a print of a movie with a limited audience and no major studio behind it to mall multiplexes in whatever-town, was and continues to be, prohibitively expensive (read; impossible).  Not so today with digital distribution and projection taking the print "out of the picture" quite literally.  A studio in LA can have it's new release in theaters from NY to Guam within a few hours now.  However, with movie theaters in decline as an industry in general, what does this really mean?  Well, independent and foreign titles being available with close to zero overhead is no white knight magic pill happy day fix everything cure all that is going to come in and save things, they just are not a big enough draw.  But what I do see is that within 10 years, this kind of thing is going to help facilitate the rise of the popup theater.  What’s that?  It’s independent entities which license films and screen them in third party auditoriums.  College theaters, performing arts centers, non-traditional venues, convention centers, and hell, maybe even the occasional drive-in are all potential screening locations for limited runs.  These entities can operate out of a friggin PO Box until it’s show time, then bring the digital cart with the movie on it to whatever venue and collect at the door. 

In 3D too!

On the converse upscale side of that, there is also the possibility of private screening clubs.  People who buy memberships in private clubs which can have their own screening rooms and offer premium first run movies in an environment free from phone-using d-bags and that trashy mother fucker who just lit up a spliff in the back.  The “we’re rich and want to watch anime movies” demographic is something I am assuming is not really that big, so I think this kind of thing is going to be more of an outlier if it actually manifests at all. 

Again, eventually movie theaters most likely will stop being a thing within our lifetimes.  As internet becomes more internet-y, ah la cart Hollywood films are going to show up on services for people who either don’t feel like having to share space with other assholes, or we’ll all be too terrified to sit in a dark room with strangers because we’re in for a few more James Holmes Aurora Specials and that will be that.  This will slow going in development because studios are going to hate the idea that more than one person can potentially be watching the movie in a living room somewhere for one single price, and consumers won't be ok with paying what would most likely be something that's 3x the price of a movie ticket that the studios would charge because of that first thing.  Eventually, they're gonna have to accept that they're now just pay-per-view, but with no sports, and just go ahead and jump in so they can avoid becoming completely irrelevant.

Everybody Panic.

Your Name currently benefits from the largest potential theatrical audience of any anime in the USA, even though Makoto Shinkai doesn’t want you to see it.  Well, fuck him, he doesn’t tell me what I can or can’t do.  If he doesn’t want people to see the movie he can wish in one hand and shit in the other.  Notice I wrote “the” movie, not “his” movie.  You know why I did that?  Because it’s not his movie.  He didn’t pay for the fucking thing.  He didn’t finance it, he doesn’t control the rights to it anymore, he wrote/directed it and while that's a big deal, that’s as far as it fucking goes.  That would be like you designing a T-shirt, and then selling it to the public via major vendors, but then you go around telling anyone who has one that they can’t wear it on an elevator because …reasons!  No, shut up ass, you're acting like George Lucas.  The movie belongs to CoMix Wave and Toho, and they have bills to pay, none the least of which include all the salaries of the massive amount of people who worked their asses off on this movie.  Fucking selfish creative-types who forget where their actual domain of ownership ends, just piss me right the fuck off.  So go see the movie.  Go see it twice, and be sure to buy Junior Mints and Dr. Pepper.  You’re being entertained and helping the economy.  That’s good.


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Hell is Other People: Commercial media consumption in the age of fucktards

There was once a time when the only thing to complain about at the movie theater was either the price of popcorn, or the movie itself. To be sure there were some theaters and certain showtime that always had a reputation of the type of place you didn't go if you actually wanted to watch the movie rather than be involved in some sort of culture-specific MST3K improv. There were always "those places" which were that on the surface.

Fast forward a few years and there was the occasional pager that went off in the respectable places. Maybe it was a brain surgeon or something, and it happened maybe once every 10 times you went to a show. Fast forward a little more, and you had cell phones going off. But this was still the era of pre-reality TV, Saved by the Bell was still making new episodes, and when AOL was a legitimate way for people to connect to the internet. The type of people who could own cell phones were mostly those who were of a respectable sort of behavioral set, knowing to turn the thing off, or having forgotten, quickly silenced it should it ring during a screening. But what was happening was an irreversable forward progression of a sad march to the situation we have today.

There was a congruous curve of both the availability of mobile technology and the increase in permissiveness of obnoxitude as a virtue facilitated through the generation of toddlers told by Mr Rodgers that they were "special", then being exposed to reality TV when they reached the age where illicitly procured alcohol was plentiful. Combine all that with the kind of social and cultural malaise which comes from seeing your college tuition sky-rocket while the baby-boomers still get their medicare subsidized Hoverounds and boner-pills; (sorry kid, no free college for you like I had, but don't worry that crappy job you have will still get taxed to pay for my scooter and viagra, because I'm a boomer and I'm worth it),... all wrapped within the American blanket of individualism trumping the collective good, and you are going to produce a segment of people our age who are just terrible to be around. A ruined movie going experience is just one result of it.

From people answering cellphones, to dumbasses showing up late, to even dumber bumbasses all talking to their one smart friend because they can't figure out what's happening because there aren't explosions happening, to the shit bags that show up late and then just HAVE to twitter during the thing, and the breeders with the 11 kids in the rated R film that sit them all over the place and then have to run back and forth to tell each other things... going to see a movie in an actual theater is something I almost never do and deliberately avoid.

Perhaps having a summer-job as a theater usher back in college has something to to with it also. Nothing gave me more job satisfaction than to bounce a cell-talking douchebag or some human ashtray that couldn't wait to light up. The job satisfaction I had didn't come from the feeling that I was taking something from someone and kicking them out, but that I was protecting the value of the expensive movie ticket of all the other people who had paid their own damn money to see whatever the hell Hollywood crapfest that was playing. You using your iphone to checkin on foursquare, or talk to your home-girl isn't your individual right, it's you straight up stealing from the people around you who paid money to see a movie, a price tag which does not include having to deal with your obnoxious ass. This notion directly clashes with American psychology where Gordon Gekko espouses self initiated value creation at the expense of the "resources" around you, regardless of whether those happen to be the well being of others. From that experience, I learned the value of cellphone jammers. Something indispensable not only at movies, but also at meeting and job interviews, because let's face it if they're busy twittering while you're trying to have a conversation even if it's more informal -incredible rudeness aside- you might as well not be there (...right Patrick?).

Seriously, have one of these if you're going to an investor pitch meeting or interviewing for a job. You don't want their cell to ring and take time away from the 12 minutes they're going to give you anyway.

Hence, movie going in Tokyo. A different universe. Sold out theaters where I guarantee everyone has a cellphone (maybe 2), and never a beep, chirp, or ring, let alone someone actually pick up the thing. Old people who can't tell what's going on wait until the thing is over for someone to explain the thing to them, and no one leaves their trash behind. Because that would be YOU causing a loss of value to OTHERS, which is something that Japanese culture has always placed an inordinate amount of importance on. I found myself thinking that I was definately getting a better value for a $30 movie ticket in Japan, than a $12 one in New York despite the fact that the theaters were identical in quality and technology, there were still half an hour of previews before the feature, and a pack of Twizzlers or whatever was still at a 1000% markup.

Unfortunately, in the USA, there is no way to ensure a separation of asshats simply by paying more money. You go to a different theater, different price, and all you get is a different flavor of a-hole that ruins your experience. Not even subtitles are enough to guarantee a proper movie-going experience. So rather than pay in capital, I pay with time, and wait for these media products to become commercially available in a form in which I can enjoy them in an environment more controlled and free from the chance that a d-bag on a cellphone might fuck the whole thing up from across the room.

This dynamic also holds true for the differences in anime fandom between Japan and America, but going into that at this point would just give me more of a headache. Sufficed to say, I'll be covering it again once convention season starts up. Sufficed to say that this is one of the many many Japanese cultural nuances that fail to port over with the proliferation of anime, and many American otaku remained puzzled as to why they are treated like martians by other Japanese when the scream "SQUEE" on the middle of a train platform or something like that.

There are a number of films I'd like to see, but none so much as to take my chances with $20 on a roulette wheel where the entire experience is turned to shit if even one of the other people in the shared communal space we've all payed to experience, decides to be a fuckwit and make my ticket worthless by doing something that has no place in a theater. Nothing (not technology, not the widening of genres or increased number of indie productions) will hasten the end of the movie theater in favor of at-home media consumption so much as the obnoxiousness of others, and the desire to avoid it.

The $30 streaming of in-theater titles concept making the rounds at this point is the harbinger of the impending end of profitability for movie theaters. It's still a long way away, and the problem of "piracy through pooling" (a group of people pay to stream a movie once, but all watch it in the living room of the richest single guy with the best TV setup) has yet to have a conceivable solution present itself. But still, much like the progression of cars replacing horses, the death of rotary phones, or the CRT monitor, this line only moves forward, and movie theaters will become as alien to our grandchildren as floppy disks. The upside is that studios will have less middle men in between the consumers and producers, which will not make anything cheaper, but it will allow for instant international availability that can actually produce revenue. Streaming the latest Japanese, Chinese, or European films will be just as easy as streaming the latest Hollywood release, once things are in place. That's still gonna take a while.

Is Paris Burning? The departure of Central Park Media

The departure of CPM and the new “anime” world order (no, not those three).

So CPM exit stage-whatever can come as not really a surprise, since if you just look at their sales and acquisitions, and combine that with the fact that they were a home media company, and not a media-media company (I’ve written about that set of cosmic rules too many times already). I am actually surprised that this took as long as it did. Next on the block, I’d put Media Blasters, since they’re already being sued by Color West Inc, in what I can only assume is going to be a growing list of bills that don’t get paid. Rather than imploding, I see them moving to a much cheaper city/state, and dropping a lot of anime in favor of live action cult schlock. That scenario is no guarantee though, and they very well might go the way of the dodo within a year. Is this “early retirement” for CMP’s master and commander? It could be… but after talking to the JOD himself at this year’s TAF, there might be something to come from this yet. Time will tell, and the market will either be there or it won’t.

Next on the agenda is this thing. I can’t say anything about it… I want to care, I really do, but after the crap that was BGC 2040, and the swine flu celluloid abortions of both Dragon Ball and The Legend of Chun Li, I just can’t get excited about this project at all, no matter how much I love BGC. This live action project has some things going for it, and some things against it. So far, Hollywood isn’t involved, but this is a neutral aspect, since if they are going for a combined Western/Asian cast, you’ll probably want to have actors that can actually act… and if you’ve ever seen a Japanese or Korean movie with gaijin actors in it before, you know that it all too often looks like they just grabbed someone off the street. So if they want good actors, a Hollywood Studio might work its way into the project, and then the story, designs, and everything good about the concept will die right there as they demand changes for the post 9/11 American consumerist SUV driving movie theater audience that somehow manages to pump money into pieces of pure cinematic shit like Ghost Rider or Wanted. Seriously, who pays money to watch these things? Well as time goes by, we’ll see if this is even real (remember in 1999 there was all that “live action Ninja Scroll” talk… still waiting on that one).

So the holdouts are running out of ammo, and the Russian winter is closing in on the anime market as we know it. Some big boys will still be left, but most things are going to fundamentally change. It is the rebuilding of the decimated landscape and the form it will take which is going to have far reaching effects for years to come. In the absence of any kind of Martial Plan for the new way of doing things, there will be a few major directions we can see from our very early vantage point;
A new, old-world-order, where properties are rarely licensed and domestic productions continue to follow the American dumbed down style with few notable exceptions like Avatar and Teen Titans and so on. Previously, this kind of thing was spoon-fed to a captive audience, when fansubs were available to only an intrepid few who knew how many VHS tapes could fit in a Tyvec priority envelope. With fansubbers out there now doing their best to devalue a license the moment a show hits the air and take money away from the creators and rightful owners, it will be interesting to see if that ongoing will effect the popularity or potential of domestic American animation (once it pulls its head out of it’s ass and stops making pure shit). Or will we have a new version of media delivery which allows anime producers to circumvent the losses they currently incur with fansubbers devaluing their licenses, which will allow them to make more money to make better titles, and also actually take the American market into account. It is interesting to hear American otaku audiences complain about a lack of input and effect on the Japanese production companies, when it is this same otaku audience that is blatantly consuming the product while at the same time pumping exactly $0 back into the system. It’s a big market, but an unprofitable one, so why should producers cater to it?

There are a few factions that are racing to get their version of the next step in Anime market evolution across the finish line first. With dubbing into English now seen as more of an option rather than a requirement when courting a large enough American audience, the rules of the game have definitely changed. That’s why I would watch what Crunnchyroll (and other services like it that may pop up) does pretty closely. They have a shot at something, but it’s no slam dunk.

Omake:
Quick trip to FUKUOKA... it's a happenin' place.

February

An unabashed expression of joy from witnessing the misfortunes of others.


If something bad is going to happen in your life, it’s going to be this reject month of the calendar. February sucks, and for those of us who can remember when Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday were two separate holidays, know that nothing is safe from the ravaging misfortune that this month shall visit upon those of whom fate has deemed worthy of punishment. There is of course, an upshot to all of this, and that is every once in a while, you get to escape unnoticed and watch these horrible things happen to someone else. With the month of darkness only 24 hours old, there has already been an abundance of schadenfreude (thought it seems that it would have its genesis in the previous month, but lets not get all wiki-nerd about dates and shit).

First entry, very a unprofessional piece (No, really. This is not going to have any kind of relevance to actual industry topics and will be written in the style of a retarded 11th grader. If you’d prefer the regular dry and uninteresting banter that this blog has come to embody, skip to the next color).

Someone Set Us Up the Baum. Or, karma is a bitch. For so many years the walking pimple of the internet Eric Bauman of Ebaum’s World has made money off of other people’s work with his little tag and watermark. For years the virus riddled poorly run website supplied n00bs with cheap thrills until they learned that only n00bs go to Ebaums World and then quickly jumped ship like rats on the Titanic. If you actually know nothing about what I am talking about - you fail the internet. To avoid the criminal penalties as such, please inform yourself by watching this fine documentary film. (Links to Youtube).

Now I am not opposed to shamelessly making money by breaking the unwritten rules of the internet, but only if it’s me. This guy makes the mistake of taking some .com investor money a while back, and now he and that site are now a footnote of a footnote in the great economic collapse of the Bush years. Ebaum being fired from Ebaum is such a nice thing to find out, but then to see the little jerk try to rise from the ashes with some Tuvalu hosted (that means .tv) forum for expressing his butt-hurt lowers your cholesterol just be reading it. It just shows how things come back to get you in the end if you are a dickwad (although that’s not really true at all if you do the math).

It’s not a problem until it happens to you. Or, Poor baby. (Article)
Big name studios get all boo-hoo over DVD profit margins being too low, after forcing prices into the crapper in the first place. It is simply amazing but not at all unexpected that every American industry under the sun which has a publicly traded company or two in it, is now banging on the door of the U.S. Government with their hands out asking for bailout money. Enter the elephant in the room of the movie business into the equation: Movies don’t make the same amount of money as they used to.

• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that all of cinema from America and the world hit the market almost all at once in such a new format, meaning sales of DVD titles were never going to even sustain a plateau at such levels.
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that this massive dumping of movies and TV into the market would force prices to stabilize at an incredibly low level. Only to be jacked up at whiplash speed thanks to price minimums.
  
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on the fact that Hollywood movies suck, and now have to compete with TV and world cinema at the exact same price.
• Rather than rightfully placing the blame for this on a distribution and retail system gone wildly out of control.

The industry has hired a bunch of professional winers analysts to tell government and the news media, that it’s the fault of Netflix and you the consumer. Yes, the same flawed logic that lead our primitive ancestors to believe the earth was flat, is being employed to bolster the notion that every time Netflix rents a movie, it’s a lost DVD sale for a studio. Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking only renting the special extended edition of Critters 2... now what am I going to put on my DVD shelf? What makes the situation worse for the industry is actually Blue Ray. This format hit just a bit too early, trying to capitalize on DVD momentum, but instead ended up on stage right when the market’s collective buyer’s remorse started kicking in. Not only has this new format created some resentment amongst consumers by creating the feeling that now they have to buy the same movies again on this format, but lack of affordable players have caused a slow down with many consumers simply telling themselves “I’ll buy it when I get a Blu Ray machine” about currently released standard DVDs. Finally, add to this the fact that international markets don’t sell crap compared to the U.S., and the studios have no way to maintain the massive upshot of sales with the hookers and blow at the yearly sales conferences and all that (actually I never saw hookers and blow at these things but I did once drink moonshine out of a jar and eat pulled pork in the shape of Dumbo at a show in Nashville once). These corporations have to realize that such a level of sales are never sustainable, and the correct business strategy is to plan for such things, not to plan on such things.

There are imaginable but not yet attainable ways out of this, one of the most impending of which seems that in the future, the studios will cut out the middleman. That’s right, Circuit City was just the beginning, and soon even Best Buy and the biggest of the big DVD sellers Wal Mart will eventually no longer bump up DVD prices to twice of what they really should be, while at the same time putting studios in danger of financial ruin from the dreaded “return.” It’s not there yet, but eventually movies will be sold directly by the studios to the customers. Welcome this, for it is your new god.

Now I’d be in favor of a government bailout if it meant it spread in such a way as to go into development of an infrastructure for digital film delivery or direct studio to consumer sales, and also go into funding of original films (no remakes, franchises, or otherwise shitty regurgitations), not because of some artistic integrity bullcrap, but so that the bailout money doesn’t just get funneled back into the same broken system that says it needs bailing out in the first place.

However, since the first industry to get a bailout was also the first to ruin it for everyone else by giving out billions in bonuses and trying to sneak $70million corporate jets through the back door, I doubt the U.S. congress (some members of which actually believe the earth is only 6,000 years old) is going to feel like bailing out Hollywood producer types like the Weinsteins or Eisners. So better grab that copy of “Critters 2” on DVD, since like the Hummer and the no money down McMansion, it’s going extinct.


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Failed Experiments.

Will VIZ lead us out of that dark night to a new era of anime?


Or are we in for another roller coaster ride down into a media famine? Well, I love this video. Aside from the obvious cuteness factor and art imitating life intelligence of this video, there’s a specific point which the video almost perfectly (and completely unintentionally) illustrates a point that I’ve made quite often and hopefully does it in a way that even the most hard core anti-business anime otaku out there. The case of the hard work that went into getting the little ball, became a wasted investment when the big ball was brought to the scene first. In the case of anime, the actual commercial licensed product is the little ball, made totally worthless by the larger more proliferated digital fansubs which are always first to the party. The license has to have value in order for anime to be a commercial success, and anime has to be a commercial success if more is going to be made. And I shall say once again, sans massive explanation why, that watching fansubs is NOT the same as being a TV audience, and fansubs are NOT simply stepping in to fill a gap left by an absence of anime on American television networks.

The reaction by the industry was at first the same as our little pigtailed preschooler with the political ambitions... to kill it. Kill the big blue ball and then your problems will go away. Well if killing it were at all possible then that might seem like the correct course, at least in some sort of blunt mathematical sense. But as surely as Anonymous has taught Scientology that which is born of the internet can not be killed by anything (other than its own inward desire to die), the big blue ball of digital fansubs delivered on the internet can not be stopped through confrontation but only by changing the environment to make them useless. Personally, I like having high quality video, with correct translations and not losing an entire collection should I have a hard drive failure. Sadly, your average 13 year old weebo not only doesn’t have the money that I have, but they also have no ability to comprehend how their sense of free entitlement and consumption habits are hurting an industry who’s product is very expensive to produce. Oranges grow on trees and you don’t get them for free most of the time, so anime is definitely going to have to fall under that same law of economics.

So this big blue ball won’t die, and the obvious way to keep the business alive, was for simultaneous delivery in both markets, which would make licenses commercially viable again and make broadcast of those anime programs truly profitable since there’d be no fansub out 6 months out before airing. Obvious tho’ this solution was, it was and remains not well loved. In addition what was no so obvious but essential, was how to figure out how to do any of that in a cost effective and sustainable way. Well VIZ has decided to take the first baby step, and considering who’s left in the schoolyard, if they had not started doing this, no one was going to.

The short of it is that VIZ is going to begin publishing manga in 2 languages at once in two markets (although I'd reccomed prepairing to ship gobs of the new English mag over to the E.U. and U.K. as well, with such a strong GBP and Euro that could really help keep the ship up). Should this work, we may see some interest in VIZ’s Japanese parent co. in delivering animation to both markets the same way and reaping the benefits directly by collecting the advertising revenue and not just selling a broadcast license (better to own the goose than a single golden egg). By the way if anyone from VIZ is reading this, I have over 12 years experience as an executive in consumer media, distribution, and licensing, I speak Japanese and I love to travel.

As someone who currently has the task of representing several series here in the U.S. (one of them is even from Production IG), I can tell you that it’s not an easy sell anymore. There is an immense cost and large amount of time needed to get something out there that will please American media distribution (notice I didn’t say the fans. You have to make a distributor be it home media or a TV company, want it first before you get a chance to make the fans want it). Time and money are things media companies that try to make a sustainable business out of Japanese animation simply do not have when it comes to competing with free fansubs. Manga being print media seems to have avoided the kind of fatal blow that scanlations could have been and may be a very good place to start this new world order of anime business. Because if anime stops being a business, then pretty soon all titles will be thought of as “old school.”

This is Not New

It seems to have reached a crisis level, and is the talk of the world of American anime economics, the notion that there is an impending collapse of the anime market in the U.S. in general, because of very poor DVD sales.

So fansubs can be seen to hurt a license, but also help it by creating brand awareness. “Brand awareness” however, is totally worthless if it can not be translated into sales of consumer goods of any kind. In many cases the ability of a property to make money in other fields of licensing is killed by fansub proliferation. It is a form of “bootlegging” in a way, not quite different from another segment of Asian entertainment that went through something similar over two decades ago in the 1980’s; Kung Fu.

One of the most pirated genres out there is the martial arts film. Now what’s important to realize that the audiences for anime and for martial arts films have only the slightest bit of overlapping (Fred Perry), and are mostly made up of groups that have nothing to do with each other. However a comparison of historical context is still worth something.

Like a combination of Adult Swim titles, Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon set off a huge explosion in interest in martial arts both as an activity/sport and as entertainment. There was also a new technology coming out at that time as well, one that the industry said would ruin the viability of all video entertainment, and that was the brand spanking newfangled contraption known as the VCR. At the point that martial arts became popular, the primary delivery method for such media was shifting from the cinema to the home. By the early 80’s there are back rooms in small shops pumping out bootleg versions of every Gordon Liu and Chan Seng chop saki basher to be sold on the street, in mail order catalogues, or at conventions.

The result of this was a large market for such material, but a market with standards which would make legitimate operation of media companies almost impossible based on the levels of pricing and sales would support. At the same time, there was a little known phenomenon that got around the language barrier, and that was Hong Kong colonial law. It stated that any cinematic media made in Hong Kong had to have an English version made as well. This is why all those old English dubs of kung fu flicks are done by drunken Australian sailors. Without this, the spread of kung fu in America would have been seriously hampered by a need for subtitling and a general audience not ready to accept anything in a subtitled form. That, coupled with the ethics of a martial arts movie consumer making fansubbers look like media boy scouts, brought a rapid growth of material with an underdeveloped legitimate infrastructure.

After a while of legit and bootlegs warring with each other on the video shelves things seemed to collapse when production could no longer be sustained due to the inability of the money generated in the U.S. make it back to the studios to finance ever more expensive productions. Throw in a change in tastes in the domestic audience, and you have a dark age for the genre. We are now out of that dark age as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon has become the Akira of a new era of martial arts as entertainment, but one that still has quite visible scars.

Now what does this remind you of? Let’s run down the list:
• Entertainment from Asia in high demand.
• New Technology circumventing the industrial infrastructure.
• Language barrier overcome without use of commercial means.
• Production of more original content stymied by lack of revenue.

The main difference is that the unlicensed copies of media in anime are being distributed for free, even further damaging the market since the information gathered about the market based on taking a free product is almost worthless and can not help companies make plans for the future.

The recent developments over at ADV are sending ripples throughout the industry and the questions about the future that are being raised now, are very different than those from just 6 months ago. Some questions are bleaker than before, others smack of the denial and ignorance running throughout fandom which simply serves to feed the burning anger and frustration of guys like me.

Like Ancient Rome, American fandom has sucked in the resources from the producers and have built a massive city, all without producing a single thing in return to help further that production. Simply “liking it” does not mean a thing if it operates outside the areas which provide economic subsistence. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America is surrounded on all sides and has no way to pay its own army. Like Ancient Rome, anime in America may see a long dark age before technology or a new method of international collaboration bring us into the light. We have seen it with martial-arts an era ago, and history may be about to repeat itself.

T.A.O.

PS:
AWO used this incident in their latest episode in their news section, very cool. I can now declare victory, in that I have been mentioned twice in a row on AWO and not once has Daryl uttered "Apollo Smile" not even once, as my bluetooth deception master plan is finally complete!