Hello and welcome to another edition of Sunday News Bites! This week, we are joined in the studio by Ludwig of Meine Liebe, who, as long-time readers will know, is actually chained up in my basement in order to provide on-tap HARD GAY energy to power the blog.
Manga gets one step closer to world domination
Even an anime blog can skim the surface of politics, it seems, with the recent resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe putting self-proclaimed manga fan Tarō Asō in the running for the job. In the wake of this news, stocks in anime and manga related companies have duly been going up, although fans should take off their rose-tinted glasses and look at the man’s policies before getting too excited.Ludwig says: The political situation in Japan could use a few tips from those of us in Kuchen, where dissatisfaction with the ruling class is so low that we have uprisings only once per season.
Double your otaku power with Star Trek manga
Believe it or not, I was a Star Trek and other sci-fi fan long before I properly got into anime and manga, but even I am merely reporting this for the novelty value. In an effort to marry up two sets of fans and make more money, Tokyopop will be holding a series of events to promote the second volume of its Star Trek ‘global manga’, including the opportunity to get your copy signed by one of the creators, or Wil Wheaton of The Next Generation fame.
Ludwig says: Good luck to Tokyopop and their moneymaking scheme, but such things are beneath me.
More .hack?
The days of traditional grunties are gone, but still the monster that is .hack marches on, this time with an OVA adaptation of the .hack//GU games. The 85 minute OVA will be released in January 2008 on both Blu-Ray and DVD, and is surely a far cry from the days when the games, anime and manga were all separate entities without numerous moneymaking adaptations.
Ludwig says: The World:r2 displeases me, for it does not contain my preferred steed- the Noble Grunty. I also refuse to dress in such unbecoming outfits as those of Haseo and his allies.
UK fans get one more reason to stay in
Although I’m not terribly interested in anime on TV anymore, other fans living in the UK may well be interested to learn that a new Anime Central channel (Sky 199) started broadcasting on Thursday, filling evenings with the likes of Bleach, Planetes, FMA, GITS: SAC and Transformers: the Headmasters (all dubbed into English, but with the possibility of subbed broadcasts in the future). Meanwhile, Propeller TV will now be showing ADV titles nightly from 8-10 pm; it’s somewhat ironic that this time of plenty, which would have been a godsend in the days when I would assiduously record or even watch the 5am anime block on the Sci-Fi channel can no longer even tempt me to sample it.
Ludwig says: Television is a distraction from my beauty and bishiness; however, if I was in charge, I would broadcast both English and Japanese audio tracks simultaneously so that viewers could choose with that oft-referenced red button.
Ludwig has a point. 🙂 How hard would it be to broadcast both Japanese and English audios? I would happily watch some of that line up (had I not already bought and watched the DVDs…), and it’s certainly much much better than anything Propeller has been putting out, were it not for the English dub.
I’ve been wondering if your average TV watcher has a similar reaction to dubs? I remember back before I got into anime, a friend lent me the VHS of the Patlabor movie. Obviously it was dubbed, but all the same, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, rewatching it after two years of sub watching, it grates to the point that it makes me physically cover my ears. Is it possible to be spoiled by watching too much subbed anime? Does it actually lower our tolerance of dub performances? And other such wonderfully off-topic questions. Ahem.
All the same, it’s great that more and better anime is being shown on British TV. We’ve been without it so long, and now we’ve got two whole channels showing the stuff! A time of plenty indeed.
I admit I don’t know all the specifics about how much each airspace a channel gets to work with, but if the BBC can have “press the red button for audio commentary” or to switch between different matches at sporting events, it certainly can’t be impossible to broadcast two audio streams and some subtitles.
Don’t worry about the off-topicness; I’ve been thinking about exactly the same thing myself. Much as I hate to rake over the old dub vs sub argument again, I really cannot bear to listen to dubs now, whereas in the Sci-Fi channel days it didn’t bother me. I guess you can’t go back…
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