News: Turn A Gundam Western Release Cancelled
Posted on : 04-01-2012 | By : Cacophanus | In : News, Videos
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Welcoming in the new year, Bandai Entertainment in the US let this drop on our doorstep. Followed by a pretty insightful interview, what’s effectively happened is that we are no longer getting a Western release for the rather special Turn A Gundam. If you remember, this was something we were pretty happy about when it was announced way back in 2010. The fact that Bandai Entertainment is effectively pulling out of selling and distributing anime outside of Japan is definitely a hammer blow for people who enjoy the medium abroad though and Turn A Gundam is just a deeply unfortunate casualty of that.
Spoiler
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Pull out of sales entirely? So, not only will we not get AGE, but the rest of Unicorn and the 0079 2nd set too?
GG Bandai… way to disappoint the world…
Supposedly we’ll get the last volume of the subbed MSG, which is very good, but not UC since vol 5 isn’t even produced yet.
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/bandai_downsizing_ken_iyadomi_interview
And not getting Age is a good thing. That show is garbage. Of course all of Bandai’s titles are available for other companies to license but…with what they want for fees, it isn’t likely.
I think AGE is finally starting to get interesting now, but that’s beside the point.
As you can probably guess from my posting name, Turn A is my favorite of the Gundam series, and news of a domestic release made me feel fantastic. This news sucks, yes, but if you read the articles, you can note that they may still try to license the show to another publisher, like Funimation, or… um… uh… who else again?
This is very depressing, but not completely devastating. There is at least some flicker of hope. That’s more than we had a year ago.
Oh, one more thing, they already showed the cases for the second half of MSG’s Anime Legends box set, so that still seems to be coming. And Sunrise seems a bit more directly responsible for Unicorn, so we should still get the remainder of that, too.
My mistake, English Blu-Rays will still be made available for Unicorn, you just have to import them…
Ugh, more hoops to jump through.
It would make sense of Bandai Ent just sold JP disks on the US Amazon store. Other than the price I think they are identical anyway.
Well, it’s a good thing I was waiting for the whole of UC to be finished before buying ANY of it… though, I did happen to see a regular DVD release of it, which is what I’d prefer, as I don’t own my own Blu-Ray player yet (read PS3)
Oh, man I am so torqued! It would have been fine f it never happened. I love it, but I know its a weird series. But to tempt us and then pull the rug out from under us? Ugh…
I won’t be able to forget this hatred even if I die and get reborn a million times over!
The way they explain the decision, that it makes more financial sense to sell fans in America Blu-Rays in Japan with English subtitles directly, seems shortsighted to me because it will only ever cater to a shrinking market. I think we all know that people who were interested in seeing Turn A Gundam in English have already seen it, but simply haven’t been given the chance to BUY it in English. There’s not much chance of anyone completely new to Gundam finding a boxset on Amazon and being willing to take a risk on it for Japanese prices, plus shipping, when everything else they can spend their entertainment budget on is going to be at least one-fourth the price.
The market situation in Japan is far different from that of the US, and I can understand what they’re doing here: they want to protect the market in Japan first, and expand into the West second. They don’t want to take a risk in America by lowering their prices to American levels and then have Japanese otaku re-import the American DVDs for less cost. And if they can survive as a Japan-only industry, as they have been doing, then they can stay in business. But it will eventually get to the point where no new fans will be being produced for their series, and the ones they currently have will start to lose interest, and then their market in America will be dead–and ready for the pickings by some other company with a different business model.
I’m going to say that 90% of the people who are Gundam fans now in America are only Gundam fans because they were introduced to it by Gundam Wing on Toonami, and all the subsequent showings of other shows on Cartoon Network; what their current course of action is doing is preventing a breakout hit from ever occurring again.
And I think this apllies not only to anime series, but to video games and other kind of related merchandise too. Don’t you think so?
I think the idea of selling Americans JP product is FRIGGN AWESOME and its what I’ve wanted from them for over 20 years but its only now become possible. Before they never bothered to subtitle Laserdiscs, and DVDs were region locked, but they’ve already basically been doing it with the Unicorn BRs, so they know it can work. The only thing that really sucks is that price might be really really bad, but if they come up with some way to sell it directly on the US Amazon it shouldn’t be too bad. I’m fine with paying $1 for 100円 but this +37 percent plus shipping, plus distributor mark-up business like with most import BRs is out of the question. I can’t be paying $320 for the first half of a 49 episode series.
As stupid as Bandai’s practices were in the US market (ie: very stupid) I think they are tired of trying like hell to sell something people obviously don’t want it at 1/16 the price of what Japanese fans are willing to pay. As long as they keep the quality up, I want it, and as much as I hate overpaying for stuff, I hate being forced to subsidize the dub industry a LOT more.
Its true that only people who have already seen Turn A want it on video…but isn’t that true of basically all Gundam anywhere in the world? I mean, I’m a pretty old school fan but not even I was watching 0079 off Japanese television back in the day, neither were most Japanese fans. Stuff just…gets around, the fame builds, and the stuff continues to sell.
looks like we won’t be seeing Gundam ZZ and X get licensed, I wish Bandai Ent would licensed old Gundam shows than newer shows, since am a old school fan
any word on how this will affect the UK and the rest of europe? All bandai shows come through an additional distributor here (beez). I know that they use the US translation for the english but I’m not sure about the other languages (the dvds usually have french and german on disk but sometimes polish subtitles as well). If they’re actually independent of Bandai we may still get them, but if not and they’re just an additional middle man then…
is there any word on how this will affect the UK and the rest of europe? All bandai shows come through an additional distributor here (beez). I know that they use the US translation for the english but I’m not sure about the other languages (the dvds usually have french and german on disk but sometimes polish subtitles as well). If they’re actually independent of Bandai we may still get them, but if not and they’re just an additional middle man then…
apologies for the dupe comment. it wasnt showing up even after a refresh so i had thought the comment hadn’t gone through 🙁
There will still be a few releases of DVDs in America from a different company called Studio D. They have releases planned for 00, 0079 pt2 and the UC series’. What did happen with happen seems like they just went tits-up in the water.
There will still be a few releases of DVDs in America from a different company called Studio D. They have releases planned for 00, 0079 pt2 and the UC series’. What did happen with bandai? seems like they just went tits-up in the water.
I’m still mad about this >=[
[…] elated at the news. Unfortunately it was not to be, as Bandai pulled out of the Western market and cancelled the release of Turn A […]