This Week in Anime

OOPs, There it Goes

Chris
Lucas, I know that Steve and I talked a lot last week about a new show like Princession Orchestra that we couldn't officially watch over here. But as anime fans know, that tends to be more of an issue with older shows rather than newer ones these days. It's to the point that there are plenty of anime we've all heard people talk about, but just never got around to them because they weren't easily available! It really adds to the stress of everything else we have to deal with these days. To that, it's nice when someone like GKIDS says...

Can I offer you a nice egg in these trying times?

It's always egg time here at TWIA.

Birdy the Mighty as an odd poster child for this situation is visible in the sheer number of people who brought it up—and not just through reader response! Our very own Coop named the series when we were discussing this topic internally here at TWIA HQ!

The series' multigenerational status likely informs its broad notoriety. The original 1996 OVA was one of the first anime I got to watch that wasn't a network airing of a Pokémon or a Dragon Ball or something, and I even managed to get an ancient copy of the first DVD from when US Manga Corps released it. Birdy the Mighty: DECODE, meanwhile, has stood out for years to the modern streaming crowd. It's beloved both as an adaptation of the material and as a sakuga showcase, and, as those responses showed, a major example of the kind of series left in the lurch when Funimation lost the rights. No streaming anymore, and if you want a copy of its DVDs, uuuhhhhh...

And they said eggs were getting expensive.

That encapsulates the issue we're exploring with titles like this: letting someone know about a cool anime they might like, only to immediately follow up with the asterisk that you can't easily stream it or add it to your collection.

Though then there are asterisks on that asterisk. Because of course there are multiple less official ways to watch Birdy the Mighty if you want to. There are multiple uploads of it on YouTube at this very moment! That's pretty easy, even for your low-tech average Joe who wants to stream something, but it might still give some people pause about checking out the series that way before they cross it off their backlog. And that goes even for...mostly official options.

Revolutionary Girl Utena has been my shame of a series I've still not gotten to over my anime-watching career, not helped by its fancy disc release being pretty out of print. Yeah, I could still watch the whole series uploaded to Nozomi's YouTube channel, in a situation I suspect involves a media manager losing their passwords. But are those crusty old uploads like that really how I want to experience a seminal work like this?

Hey, it's fair enough when even the companies themselves indulge in it from time to time. Relevant to the genesis of this conversation, who can forget the time Tokyopop thought they could just...upload Angel's Egg to their YouTube channel.

No actual licensing involved, and they even monetized the video for themselves. That's so Disco Stu. If this was someone's first time watching Angel's Egg, I honestly salute them. This seems to be the fate of many of Nozomi's titles. Irresponsible Captain Tylor was also brought up in our conversations. It's also still up on YouTube. I can't forget that all the non-TV iterations of Dirty Pair are streaming there as well, despite the individual DVD releases being gone from the market to make way for the Kickstarted version that Crunchyroll inherited. That is...its own mess.

Suffice to say that with no retail version currently available on disc, Dirty Pair, especially its features and OVAs, falls into this situation as well. Which sucks for a beloved series that used to be really easy to point people at some accessible, frequently on-sale DVDs.

Getting Evangelion back in print over here was its own kind of minor miracle, and I can sort of handle the loss of "Fly Me To The Moon" to the music rights void; there's only so much you can do in that situation. I do agree it's less acceptable that they consigned that classic English dub to a "Bonus" that only came with the pricier, and now out-of-print, "Collector's Edition."

Definitely smelled of a sales tactic that just meant anybody who missed that original boat didn't get the full experience. Though once again, part of me wants to be grateful that we can actually get Eva here at all anymore, since that wasn't the case for so long. But I can see how having to "settle" for a less complete version might stymie a potential new viewer from checking out the series if they couldn't easily get the preferred version.

Samurai Flamenco is the series where you should be able to easily point someone at a stream and go "Just watch it. Don't look up anything else about it, just start watching it," so it's annoying when we can't do that anymore. It's also funny that you bring it up in the same breath as your point about buying a less-preferred version.

See, I love Samurai Flamenco so much that I bought the limited-edition Blu-ray set from Anime Limited...which is a Region 2 Blu-ray. No, I do not yet own a region-free Blu-ray player. But this was the only official English version of the show I could get, largely on account of Samurai Flamenco being locked in the infamous anime vault known to fans as "Aniplex Jail."

Ah, also known as the "Nero Claudius" problem.

Getting into anime like this is hard enough when it's out of print, and even harder when it seems the powers that be actively don't want you to find it easily. I mentioned Aniplex because they're the grand poobah of secreting away series that you missed, releasing them only on a giant, limited, expensive set. And that's when they don't actively seem to be trying to erase earlier series.

For whatever reason, it seems they really don't want you to be able to go and watch the 2003 adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist these days. Which is kinda wild, considering this anime wasn't just a seminal hit in its own time; its success actively informed how they approached the adaptation in the later Brotherhood version!

As with "Fly Me To The Moon," legal issues are always going to complicate releases like these, especially with all the shifts around companies like Funimation and the rights they lost that never got re-upped. Elements of this apply to series like the beloved Slayers, which I'm given to understand has some wild behind-the-scenes politicking that makes giving it another release or stream sound increasingly unlikely.

Gunsmith Cats, one of my all-timers, sounds like it's in a similar situation. It got its own Kickstarter release that came and went, but AnimEigo confirmed at a panel this year that they couldn't get the license again for a reprinted retail release like they did for Bubblegum Crisis and Riding Bean. Like you said, we'll probably never know what goes on behind closed doors with these persnickety rights holders, and that makes it more frustrating that someone I recommend Gunsmith Cats to has to carefully borrow my super-special Blu-ray set or participate in their own form of underground smuggling operation, if you get my drift.

If I was tacitly seeding the subject of Aniplex earlier for any reason, it was in service of bringing up Baccano! It's an incredibly unique series that I think is eminently recommendable to any number of people: young, old, familiar anime fans, newcomers to the genre...and it's been gone for ages. You can't stream it, you can't buy it, nada. As I've said in columns before, I guard my old DVDs with my life.

Baccano! will always be especially baffling because there aren't any weird legal questions with it. Aniplex has it; they just won't... release it. For a time, it seemed like it might be akin to the Fullmetal Alchemist situation, where they were favoring promotion of Ryohgo Narita's other series (and cheeky universe-sharer with Baccano!) Durarara!! But now even that one seems to be slowly disappearing from the internet, with only the first season still streaming on Hulu and discs drying up.

Thankfully, there's always some hope. Naoki Urasawa's Monster was another anime that always felt like it deserved a shot at the Netflix crowd, which it got a couple years ago. And now Discotek is bringing it back for a fresh Blu-ray release. This is an anime that, just a few years before, would have been sharing space with these others we've run down in out-of-print purgatory, and yet now here it is.

Hey, never say never. We've got OceanVeil now, there might actually be a streaming home for something like Interspecies Reviewers these days.

It shows how quickly things can change in this business. In gathering suggestions for this column, I was surprised to find out that my Blu-rays for series like Den-noh Coil and Armored Trooper VOTOMS had gone out of print, with the latter commanding pretty impressive sums on the secondary market.

The sheer amount of anime produced means it simply isn't possible or practical for everything to always be in print. Still, I think the examples we've gone over stand out with how they slipped through the cracks. Angel's Egg is a classic from certified legend Mamoru Oshii; it's wild to think it hadn't had a fresh release here until now. And there are a lot of others akin to it that peeps suggested to us; we'd be here all day if we listed them all.

Just like I was miffed when HiDive dropped Ruin Explorers, everyone's got a fave they loved to recommend to people, now kneecapped by a lack of availability.

Thankfully, a nice egg is still more affordable than buying Blu-rays, say, of Gundam in these trying times.

No worries, I'm sure Anime Limited will get those Macross Blu-rays out soon...just so long as they aren't stripped for parts by Crunchyroll the way Nozomi was before they could get theirs out.

Now I'm realizing we probably can find someone to blame for at least some of these shows being out of print...

I don't want to feel like we're always depending on them to license-rescue some of these favorites, but the team at Discotek will always be right about one thing when it comes to these kinds of anime enduring.