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It is currently 27 Apr 2024, 13:55
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 25 Mar 2024, 05:14
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| Interesting questions, and I can't answer them, but what I will say is that I don't think it's surprising the first Pokemon movie would get an LD while the show wouldn't. I don't know if the show exactly falls under the "kodomomuke" kids-show umbrella as the Japanese use the word, but it's still a long-running kids' show. The movie, on the other hand, was a movie. One disc, not dozens. When thinking about what ended up on LD, I would categorize it with other high-grossing kids' movies rather than the show it's based on. |
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| signofzeta |
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Posted: 25 Mar 2024, 10:41
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There aren’t really that many anime of the LD era that hit VHS and not LD. LD had lower tax associated with it so it was much cheaper than VHS and it was the main format for most people building a home video library. LD changed a bit as a format over the years. If you consider the show in question and the year there’s usually an explanation for what happened. If it hit VHS and not LD then the issue is that they knew they had a customer for rental but not necessarily for owning.
By the 90s with the release of then-new anime basically everything hits LD except long TV series. That took some time to establish though. When they were putting out “old shows”, shows that predated LD, publishers chose what was still popular years after the fact like Gatchman or Mazinger.
Sometimes a company may not have been in the best financial shape to put out their stuff when LD was the thing and some stuff gets lost in transitions between studios folding and such. Tezuka comes to mind here…his stuff is all over the place availability-wise…but we shouldn’t be surprised by that. He was always going under.
Mobile Suit Gundam TV didn’t hit LD until 1998! This is due to the unique situation with that show in that the compilation movies had long been considered the “real” Gundam 0079 and those all having multiple releases before 1998. 1998 was pretty much the last year for major box sets and such in Japan though so really it almost got missed. The very first home video release of Mobile Suit Gundam was almost DVD…even thought Z, ZZ, the movies and all those OVAs had come out earlier.
The shows that are famous but never saw an LD release are usually too dang long. Id love to have Kinnikuman on LD except that I probably wouldn’t. It’s very nostalgic for me but it’s also super low quality anime that would have been a super low quality transfer. At 140 eps (for the first series!) the box set would have been three times the size and cost of something like Macross, Gundam, whatever. Box sets of this size can’t do well, largely because of the large price. Kinnikuman would have had to had to have cost ¥100,000 or more. Who, the hell, exactly, is going to pay $1000+ in the 80s for an anime that stupid? The series was very successful, but it made its money on Jump weekly (¥280) or the compilation manga (¥360) and those little erasers dudes. You could easily buy a brand new car in 1990 for a million yen so think about now insane a ¥100,000 yet box set of a zero budget children’s anime is. Kids are priced waaaaaayy out so what affluent yet moronic adult exists to buy it?
Earlier in the LD era there some huge box sets for shows like Mighty Atom and Urusei Yatsura but the astonishing prices make these preorder only items with limited sales. After that they started selling smaller boxes and even individual volumes but then you just end up with people losing interest before they can finish the series.
Dragonball was the single most popular show of the LD era with it maxing in popularity at nearly the same year LD reached its peak yet has no TV release. Why? Well, it’s published by the same people as Kinnikuman and had exactly the same fans so it didn’t come out for the same reasons. Way too big, way too expensive. Shows like DBZ or Fist of the North Star never came out on video also because planning was difficult. Something like ZZ Gundam has a planned lifespan. Success or failure it was a year long show. It had an end. Shows like Saze-san are simply run as long as they possibly can. That manga to TV pipe, with merch and advertising, was the real goal.
Specifically the shows you mention…Pocket Monsters. Way way too long with no planned end. The movie came out for the same reason Dragonball and Ranger shows came out as movies; because those aren’t totally infeasible. Tonde Burin is more like…come on. You do realize you’re lucky anything exists at all here, right? This was not an Evangelion level hit. :)
Lastly, the box set train was still going when LD died so some shows still would have been released if DVD hadn’t come around. Big X came out really late and it’s from the 70s still. Those shows would have to wait for DVD. Eventually even Kinnikuman and Dragonball came out on DVD. |
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