AnimeNation Anime News Blog

TOKYOPOP has officially announced that the GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka) anime TV series will premier on American DVD and VHS on March 19th. The first volume will contain episodes 1-4, including the 60 minute double episode first episode. Beginning with volume 2, each volume will contain 5 episodes.

Great Teacher Onizuka, is the racy story of Onizuka, a former motorcycle gang member who becomes a teacher to make a difference and… to meet girls? Using his street smarts to deal with colleagues, students and troublemakers, Onizuka finds that he too has many lessons to learn! The TV animation was a big success on Japanese television and the final episode of the live action television series holds the record of highest rated TV entertainment show in Japanese history.

Harmony Gold and Macromedia Flash have partnered to sponsor a contest to find the best fan produced Robotech Flash animation. The grand prize is a complete set of Robotech Masterpiece collection veritech toys valued at $400. Other prizes include Robotech toys and DVDs. For a full list of rules, visit the official Robotech.com website.

Source: Anime News Network

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held their 7th Annual Marc Davis Lecture on Animation on Wednesday, November 14. This year’s discussion was a panel focusing, for the first time, on Japanese animation. Production I.G producer Mitsuhisa Ishikawa (Ghost In The Shell, Blood: The Last Vampire) and BePapas producer and director Kunihiko Ikuhara (Utena) sat as the panel’s star guests. Akadot has published a brief but informative summary of the event specifically mentioning the vast gulf that still exists between American appetite for anime and American understanding of anime.

Article courtesy of Michiko Ito

Japanese satellite TV broadcaster WoWoW has reported its first financial loss in the companies several year old history. The network, which posted a 536 million yen profit in 2000, has reported a net loss of 2.32 billion yen (US$18.9 million) loss for the first half of its fiscal year preceding September 30th which has put the company in debt.

Since its inception in the late 1980s WoWoW has been a strong supporter of anime, known for its exclusive anime programing including NieA_7, Gatekeepers and Vandread. This financial loss is attributed to increasing costs in the competitive Japanese digital television broadcasting market.

Source: Anime News Service

TDK Mediactive has reconfirmed its original announcement from last May of plans to produce a new American Robotech console game for the GameCube with ports to other systems including the Playstation 2 and Xbox.

Source: GameSpot

According to Yahoo News, both Fox and NBC are searching for a children’s cartoon distributor to buy exclusive broadcast time rights to Fox & NBC’s respective entire Saturday morning cartoon time slots. Increasing competition from cable networks including The Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon have made Saturday morning cartoons less and less profitable, but the Saturday morning child audience is still too big for these channels to entirely do away with Saturday morning cartoons altogether. NBC is looking for $6 million to lease its Saturday morning broadcast time with Nickelodeon the current top contender. Fox is seeking $10 million for its 4 hours of Saturday morning air time.

Source: Anime News Service

Question:
What is the significance of fox masks in Japanese culture? I’ve seen them in Tekken, Rurouni Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho… Are there any retailers that sell the kitsune masks?

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Bandai Entertainment has confirmed, seemingly there was some uncertainty, that the recently announced DVD version of Ronin Warriors will indeed be the slightly edited version that was broadcast on American television. An uncut and unaltered Japanese language version will also be released but there’s been no word on whether these will be on the same discs or separate releases.

AnimEigo has announced that they anticipate beginning to ship their limited edition Superdimensional Fortress Macross TV series DVD boxed set to consumers on December 18th. It’s now too late to place an order for this limited edition, pre-order only set, but late-coming fans desperate to acquire this series may still be able to acquire a copy by calling AnimEigo directly.

Source: Anime on DVD

Hayao Miyazaki’s Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi will have its first screening outside of Japan on December 22 at the Nouvelles Images du Japon animation film festival in Paris, France. Guests will include Satoshi Kon, Yasuo Otsuka, Sunao Katabuchi, composer Kenji Kawai and Hayao Miyazaki himself. The festival will run from December 15 through December 23 at the Forum des Images in Paris and feature the French premiers of Rintaro’s Metropolis and Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon as well.

While achieving less than anticipated launch day sales in Japan, Nintendo claims that the North American launch of the GameCube has been the most successful video game console launch ever with sales exceeding 500,000 units in the first week. The Playstation 2 sold 500,000 units in its first week of release but then did not ship additional consoles to retails for several weeks thereafter. Nintendo already has 125,000 more units on the way to retailer shelves right now.

Furthermore, without citing exact figures, Nintendo claims that Luigi’s Mansion has already claimed the title of fastest selling launch game ever, surpassing even the exceptional launch sales of Mario 64.

Source: GameSpot

Question:
Why does Variable Geo only have three 15-20 minute episodes? And why does it end like that without telling you what happens? It completely killed the story! Did they cut stuff out?

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Bandai Entertainment has revealed that they will be distributing the long awaited American home video release of Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, broadcast on American television beginning in 1995 under the title Ronin Warriors. The series will be a DVD exclusive premier on April 23, 2002. Each disc will retail at $24.95 and include both the American “Ronin Warriors” episodes and the original, uncut Japanese language Yoroiden Samurai Troopers episodes.

First broadcast on Japanese television in 1988, the 39 episode Samurai Troopers TV series capitalized on the armor clad martial arts action popularized by St. Seiya, Dragonball and Shurato, developing a massive cult following in Japan and America.

Source: Anime on DVD

Article courtesy of Scott Green

Guardians of Order has announced that they will be changing gears to focus on their anime guide books. However, their “fan guides” to Serial Experiments Lain and Trigun have been delayed until February and May respectively. Future guides will focus on Fushigi Yuugi, Dual, NieA_7, and Armitage III. The guides will tie into their Big Eyes, Small Mouth RPG, but many of their other RPG licenses will expire at the end of the 2001 and will not be renewed.

As of next year, Guardians of Order will be discontinuing their Sailor Moon RPG and Resource Book and Sailormoon character diaries, and the Dominion Tank Police and Demon City Shinjuku RPG manuals.

Article courtesy of Scott Green

Following the corporate restructuring and the voluntary demotion of three top Squaresoft executives last February, current Squaresoft president and CEO Hisashi Suzuki has announced that he will resign his position in response to SquareSoft’s worst half-fiscal-year loss ever. Current Squaresoft chief operating officer Yuichi Wada will replace Suzuki as managing CEO on December 1st, but Suzuki will remain the company’s chairman.

SquareSoft reported a loss of 13.28 billion yen (about $107 million) for the six fiscal months that ended September 30th, and expect a fiscal year loss of 17.70 billion yen (about $143 million). Much of this loss is attributable to the poor performance of the Final Fantasy movie, which earned only a third of its anticipated revenue.

Source: GameSpot

Article courtesy of Darren A. Bills

Question:
While perusing through Chinatown here in New York, I saw an anime called “Neoranger” (I believe). My question is, what is the series about; how many episodes are there; is there a sequel? One more question, is it being licensed by any company?

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