Updates - November 17th, 2006

The holiday season volume has started to ramp up, and we're buckling down and getting ready for the onslaught that is only a few days away. Bring in on!

:-)

Seriously though, this year the studios are going to use the holidays to clear out inventory more so than any other time in the past, so sellouts and stock limitations will rule the day towards the latter part of December. If you have any critical gift items that you need to pickup then don't chance it, order as early as possible to help us make sure you get everything you need on time.

To encourage some of you would be 'late' shoppers to get your orders in early, we've discounted our entire figure and toy section 15%. In addition to getting a great deal, you'll have first dibs on all of our in stock toys and figures before they start selling out later this month. I'm going to be consolidating a list of all our sales and special offers here on the blog throughout the holidays, and I'm going to be offering some exclusive coupons here later this month, so be sure to check in often to keep up with the latest store happenings, product status reports, and special deals. Here's what we have currently:

• Pre-Holiday Rush 15% Off Figure Sale
• Geneon Fall Bargain Basement $5 DVD Sale
• Give the Gift of Music $5 Holiday Soundtrack Promotion
• Great Deals and UMD Closeout Sale
• Discontinued Items at Closeout Prices Up to 75% off Retail

You know it's going to be a bad evening when you get home and your broadband connection doesn't work, and that's what I ran into Friday evening. I have a pretty high end business class ADSL connection at home, but I use an older 3-Com 812 ADSL router for the connection.

My network closet at home. No I don't tie up my NIC cables like I'm supposed to. Linksys Wireless-G access point gives me secure wireless for my laptop computer, everything else is hardwired Cat 5e. My 3-Com 812 spare is sitting on top of my regular 812 (mounted to my dumb hub), which turned out to be working pefectly.

I like it better than some of the newer plug and play routers (like a Speed Stream or a D-Link) because it allows you to manually setup just about every setting there is for an IP connection, and it supports VPN and a whole bunch of other features. Last night I came home and my connection was suddenly unavailable, and it took 3 calls, an onsite visit, and about 2 hours of phone time for us to figure out the problem and get it fixed. Our carrier, Frontier, uses PPPoA (PPP over ATM) for the connection, and this requires that an account name and PW authorization be built into the router configuration. Turns out that in my setup, the login domain was changed on their end from citlink.net to frontiernet.net (as part of some network wide upgrade process), and my old router could not be automatically updated remotely. One interesting thing is that since I'm pretty savvy on this sort of stuff, I had to get to a level 2 tech before we were even able to discuss probable cause - all the level 1's just have a check list they go through, most of which I had already done before calling in. The onsite tech that came out told me the router was bad, but I had a hot spare and that didn't work either. The level 2 support guy zero'd in on the problem right away, where it had eluded two level 1 techs. Apparently, they were not aware of their own network changes in progress. Anyway, it's fixed now and thus this post is now up.

Speaking of internet connections, after a 2 month wait Verizon finally hooked up the facilites for our T1 (which is actually though Quest) out at the new office, and we have weaned off a less than optimal WiFi connection we had setup as an inbetweener. The T1 is incredible, speed tests give us rock solid 1.46Mb down-stream and 1.41Mb up-stream. We are running an internal server, VoIP for the phone and fax lines, and VPN out to my house so I can access the office server from home. The VOiP sound quality over it is excellent, and it provides our phone lines for about 40% of the cost of regular business landlines (not to mention it eliminates having a long distance carrier) which paid for the extra cost of the T. Best thing about it is that it's about as close to 100% reliable as you can get, I even picked up a spare Cisco 2524 router with T1/FT1 module for about $30 (those routers were around 2 grand years ago, but can be had for nothing now and still works great for a T). The WiFi connection we had was really terrible. It was a 1mb 'burst' level connection that had a terrible latency and was only up about 91% of the time - which means it would be down off and on about 90 minutes a day. Glad we're off of that!

OK, I'm rambling, back to business... -_^

Peter Paine put up some images on his side blog (that he obtained from this guy) that show some of the real places that can be seen in the Onegai Twins anime. Visiting the real places that are shown in an Anime series is considered a very 'Otaku' thing to do in Japan, but I think it's extremely cool and just had to post a few of the images here for you to see:

Not too much going on in the news this week. We did get the word from Funimation that the new Initial D Box set has been put on indefinite hold, so we've taken it off the site and unfortunately we've had to cancel any pre-orders for it. Hopefully this item will make a reappearance sometime next year. Funimation did finally make the big announcement about the re-issuing of the entire DBZ series (by saga!) in High Def format, with the Vegeta saga being the first set released in February. This announcement also means that Fun will not be repressing any of the original version DBZ DVD's, and we have placed the entire lot on 'stock on hand' status to be safe.

We've been working hard this week to keep the site updated not only with new arrivals (as they hit the dock), but also getting all the great upcoming item announcements built on the site. We've added tons of upcoming titles like Coyote Ragtime Show, Utawarerumono, Tales of Phantasia, Gakuen Heaven, Solty Rei, Best Student Council, and many others. Be sure to keep an eye on the upcoming releases page as we're updating it daily as the announcements come in.

We were a bit surprised, but none-the-less very pleased, to see several December DVD titles arrive this week including Pani Poni Dash! and Bleach. With the holiday rush coming, the sooner the studios get them out the better. We received the elusive 2nd Raid boxed sets and promptly sold out of them, but I was able to call in a few favors and get them restocked, though only a few. We also saw the arrival of the 3rd Tenchi Ryo-Ohki DVD in a beautiful limited edition Tin art box. This box is limited to the first pressing, so I'm sure they will run out quickly. And the Jubei-Chan box came after we had almost given up hope. Bandai had to delay it's release a couple months due to a license renewal, but they are here now and ready for your enjoyment!

We have yet another excellent manga and book update for you including new volumes from Cheeky Angel and Red River, plus a new title called Punch (that Jamie says is excellent!).

We also received a new figure shipment that contained several overdue favorites including the sexy Chitose Nambu, Burst Angel Jo, and the kneeling Kan-u Unchou. Pre orders are shipping now, and we won't have many left once they are processed. And finally we have some new Gundam Seed kits for those of you who like to model. Stay tuned for even more great new items arriving daily!

Ok, enough of my blabber-mouthing, I've gotta get back to work! -_^

Updates - November 10th, 2006

Well the elections are behind us - which means no more awful campaign adds on TV and radio. And we look forward to serving our new Democratic overlords.

This Saturday is Veterans day, and I want to say Thank You to all of our wonderful service men and women. It's a privilege to be able to help so many of you with your Anime needs while you serve our country, and I want to personally thank each one of you for your support, and your dedication.

In the past, I've taken some heat from some Anime fans for supporting our troops openly here at the Anime Corner, and it may have even cost us some business from people (especially from some of our overseas customers) who felt my comments in support of our troops were, well, inappropriate. I still have a few e-mails archived that I keep to remind me of how judgmental people can be. The fact remains that I proudly served in Army National Guard (1/170th 29th Div Lt ARNG) for 6 years back during the first Gulf War, and I got out a short time before my unit was deployed to Bosnia for a year as part of the NATO peacekeeping force. In 1990 I won the division soldier of the year award and had the opportunity to go to the 29th Division Reunion that year in Carlisle, PA and meet some of the men who stormed the beach on D-Day at Normandy in 1944. Hearing them tell their stories (and drinking to the 29th with those men) was a surreal experience that effected me very deeply, and one that I will never forget. All of the wonderful people in our military that put themselves in harms way now, and in the past, will always be my brothers and sisters, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for them - you see I understand why they do what they do, and the sacrifices they make - and personally I don't care if other people do or not.

With that in mind and in honor of Veterans day in the US, here is a wonderful music video by Australian Beccy Cole. She supports her troops regardless of her fans' opinions - and so do we. To all of our brave men and women in the military on your day, this is for you:

We're currently in the process of reworking our sale and specials section in a more friendly tabular format. We've also updated the specials and closeout sections and have added several dozen more series to the list (not to mention we dropped prices on some of these to as much as 75% off retail!). Here's a summary of what we've got so far:

• Geneon Fall Bargain Basement $5 DVD Sale

  Give the Gift of Music $5 Holiday Soundtrack Promotion

  Great Deals and UMD Closeout Sale

  Discontinued Items at Closeout Prices Up to 75% off Retail

In the news over the last couple of weeks have been a lot of the inevitable major product delays we always see around the holidays. First, ADV has delayed the release of the 10th Anniversary Edition Eva boxed set indefinitely. If the pre-order numbers were too low, well, I would guess that not a lot of fans are ready to plunk down another $250 for yet another version of Eva. I say release the box for $89.98 and give people an opportunity to buy the jacket separately. In any case, we have had to cancel all pre-orders for the sets on this announcement, and I apologize that we won't be able to get these out to you guys that did want a copy.

Synch-Point announced that the FLCL Ultimate box will be delayed from 11-21 to 12-27. Basically, Synch-Point didn't think they could get it out by Christmas and didn't want to foster that hope so they set the new date post holidays. Media Blasters also told us that they are going to miss the street date of 11-7 on the Ah My Goddess TV Series box. They said their replicator is waiting for replenishment on some of the individual volumes before they can assemble the box set, and that they are hoping to have delivery to retailers within a few weeks - which leaves the question open ended as to whether they will be able to get this box out for the holidays. We'll just have to wait and see.

Speaking of Ah My Goddess, we also got the disappointing announcement this week that because of the cost, Media Blasters was forced to pass on the 2nd Season of AMG. This does not mean that it won't be released, and I'm sure another studio will pick it up, but it keeps the title in limbo for awhile longer. Check the news section for some comments from John Serabella (the owner of Media Blasters).

Production I.G has updated its Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society interview series, this time with scriptwriter Shotaro Suga. Their interview with producer Tomohisa Nishimura is still available here.

We currently have another review in the works from Flash Gordon, but I could not get the editing done in time for this weeks newsletter, so it will appear in next weeks issue. To keep you busy while your waiting, here is an interesting test to see how compatible you are with Rei Ayanami (and you KNOW you want to take it!).

We finally sorted out several late titles this week with the arrival of One Piece 5, Trinity Blood 2 Limited, Kaliedo Star New Wings 6, Megaman 11, and Tactics 2. Most of these were just late ships, but a couple were studio mess-ups that we had to jump through some hoops to get in. I think I made a couple people down at Funimation mad this week, but they'll just have to live with it because I don't like having to fix other people problems (especially when it effects our customers) - and I don't mind telling them so (that means you Larry)! -_^

Yet another really nice new manga update this week with 7 new series including Rose Hip Zero which after the first volume looks very promising! Hey - Ron just popped in and told me that the long awaited first volume of FMP 2nd RAID just arrived and is currently getting allocated to pre-orders. As I said previously the Art Box sold out a couple weeks ago at the wholesale level, but the good news is that we received our entire order and should have a few left over after all the pre-books are filled. Anyone who wants a copy should get in your order now before our remaining stock vaporizes.

[UPDATE]: It turns out we had only 22 copies of the 2nd RAID box left after filling all the pre-orders. I doubt they'll last the weekend unless I can scope some more from somewhere else.

[UPDATE #2]: I have so far been able to turn up 30 more boxes from my 'extensive' list of resources (i.e. - calling in some favors). They will be here on Tuesday. It's a good thing, because the original remaining 22 we're sold out before Midnight on Friday... The search continues...

The CD sale continues go well and several soundtracks have already sold out. I'm going to keep that sale up until all of that sale stock is gone. Finally, I put our entire UMD section on sale this week. UMD never came up to the expectations we had for it, but at the sale prices these volumes are still great deals and would make excellent gifts for any PSP owner.

As always, all sale stock will be allocated first come first served. I'm sure you wouldn't want it any differently...

Updates - November 3rd, 2006

Halloween (and our move) is behind us, and we're getting nicely settled into the new space. We're already seeing improvements in several areas, and I'm looking forward to being able to get through this years holiday season sales rush without the constraints that we had to deal with at the old warehouse. It will be quite a change! :-)

Speaking of the holidays, Nov 1st officially kicks off the start of the holiday shopping season for us. That means that it's time for me to give the obligatory annual speech about stock outs and early shopping. This year, in particular, with the number of products we are offering I expect hot items to sell out well prior to Christmas, and many may not be immediately available for re-order. This especially applies to imported items like CD's, figures, calendars, and other merchandise (and perhaps anything from Bandai -_^). So if possible, be sure to pickup your holiday items as early as possible to avoid the 'rush'. We are expecting this year to be the best holiday season for Anime ever!

We've now posted our holiday shipping schedule, so be sure to consult it this season for critical Anime Corner shipping dates and cut-offs.

In the news this week, we heard from Bandai that the Magical Meow Meow Collection is now delayed, and no new date is set, so we are not going to post it for pre-order until we have a good release date. ADV announced that they have licensed Le Chevalier D'Eon and Viz announced they will have the upcoming Claymore Anime series. I'm a big fan of the Claymore manga, so I'm really looking forward to that! AAA Anime has issued a bootleg warning regarding the multiple illegal versions of the Ikki Tousen: Kanu Unchou 1/6 Scale (Crouching version with Spear) PVC Figure that have shown up on the market recently. More info can be found here.

These sorts of bootlegs and knock offs are getting more and more prevalent in our market as Anime's popularity continues to grow. Of course, you never have to worry about this sorta thing when you order from us! :-) Finally, Geneon has gotten their Hellsing Ultimate page up and they've posted a short trailer for the upcoming series (see the news section link below). So far Hellsing Ultimate pre-orders have been good but a little lighter than expected, and based on the number of inquires we are getting about it there seems to be a lot of confusion about what it is. Ultimate is NOT a re-release of the original Hellsing series, it's a brand new series based more closely on the Hellsing manga and will be a must see for any Hellsing fan. You can find more info about it over on our news page or at the offical site here.

The Anime Emperor is our 2006 Pumpkin contest winner! Congratulations, and thanks to everyone who submitted an entry!

The new arrivals kept coming this week, and we've been busting our butts to get all the new stuff up on the site as quickly as possible. Along with several great early DVD arrivals like The FMA Limited Movie, Trinity Blood 2, My-Hime 5, and UFO Ultramaiden we posted a huge new manga and book update. Among the 57 new manga's we posted are new volumes from Evangelion: Angelic Days, Genshiken, and Full Moon plus several new series like Penguin Revolution and La Corda d'Oro. We have also posted a large new Yaoi manga update (over in the adults only section) that includes almost a dozen new arrivals. The character merchandise section got a lot of attention this week with lots of new hats, bags, wallets, plush toys, and trading figures. We have a fantastic new figure of Miharu from Girls Bravo in stock that will just take your breath away! This one is from Eye Scream, a new company that we've recently picked up, and the detail and quality is just excellent. We also received a wonderful set of Girls Bravo trading figures from them, so be sure to checkout the whole line-up.

Finally, we kicked off our holiday soundtrack sale this week by putting over 50 licensed Geneon Anime soundtracks on sale for only $5 bucks each (more info below)! CD's make great gifts, and you can use this sale to really stock up, but quanties are limited (we only have 10 or 15 copies of some in stock) and we'll be taking down the sale prices as our sale stock sells out, so of course, don't wait to take advantage of these great deals!

Updates - October 27th, 2006

Happy Halloween everyone! :-)

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since the last newsletter, and a lot has happened since then. Let me explain..., no there is no time for that, let me sum up... :-)

After closing for part of last week, the final phase of or move was successful and we have begun operations out of our new facility as of Oct 23rd. We all pretty much worked 18-20 hour days right through the weekend to get everything up and running, and aside from a few small glitches we are just about back to a regular shipping schedule. Store updates started again on the 25th,and we should have the store completely updated by early next week. This very necessary move has been in the works for about 1 year and our new facility is just awesome! We finally have room to move around again!

One of the glitches we ran into this week was a problem with the integration between the new shipping terminals and our order status system, which resulted in a few days without e-mailed order confirmations or status updates, even though orders are shipping out on time. I apologize for this, and we should have the problem resolved by Monday. In the mean time, Jamie (bless her heart) is in the process of sending out all the confirmations from this week by hand, so order status's should be completely up to date by close of business on Friday.

The new place is about 3 times larger than our old facility in Ranson, and the move to Winchester VA puts us within 2 miles of a large regional postal facility and a regional FedEx office which means we have much later drop off times for your parcels, and will be able to put them directly into the system which should reduce 'in transit' times to some areas. There are also many more benefits that will help us to serve you even better in the months ahead.

We want to thank all of you for having extra patience with us while this process took place. We are looking forward to being able to provide everyone with even better service from our new location!

OK, back to the Anime...

In the news over the past couple of weeks are several notable items that I thought you'd like to know about. First Funimation let us know last week that the Fullmetal Panic 2nd Raid DVD #1 w/ Limited Art Box is already sold out in pre-order at the wholesale level. We still have some room left in our allocation, but I recommend you order early to ensure one will be available for you when they come in.

Geneon announced a couple of new release delays:

Shana Vol #2 DVD 11-7-06 to 11-14-06
Disgaea Vol #1 DVD 12-19-06 to 1-9-07 (also, the Art Box version has been cancelled)

Central Park Media announced a few discontinued titles this week effective immediately, probably due to license expirations:

Legend of the Dragon Kings
Birdy the Mighty
Virgin Fleet
Harlock Saga (Sold Out)
Agent Aika (Sold Out)
Labyrinth of the Flames
Hyper Speed Grandol

A couple of these have not been repressed for several months, so the 'announcements' are coming a bit late. We've placed all these CPM titles on 'stock left on hand' status. CPM also announced they moved their offices, apparently someone is still alive and kicking over there - a good sign! :-)

Flash Gordon has just completed what has to be one of the most comprehensive reviews I've ever seen on a fan-favorite classic 'mecha' series. Don't miss this one!

The folks at Media Blasters have made a Demo of new Bible Black game available at the Kitty Media site. Remember though, it's strictly an Adults Only affair so no one under 18 is allowed:

Our annual Noemi-O-Lantern Pumpkin Contest is almost over, and we've already gotten several excellent entries. There is still time to get yours in - all you have to do is carve your Noemi-O-Lantern and send us pictures (or video) of it on display. Entries with video posted to You Tube will get special consideration, just include the link with your entry. The winner will be awarded a $100 Anime Corner gift certificate! Full details of the contest can be found here. One enterprising pumpkin carver has already shot a short video of his creation and posted it to You Tube!

This week has been catch up week for posting new releases that have arrived since the Oct 16th update. Getting inbound shipments re-routed to our new location has delayed the arrival of a few titles, but that will clear itselfup in short order. Lots of new DVD's and manga have been posted to the site, including a record 14 new DVD boxed sets! We also have a large shonen-Ai and Yaoi manga update that is currently in progress, and we'll be working on getting all the new items and the rest of the Dec and Jan pre-book items posted over the weekend (I might even have time to update the front page - finally!). We also received a large figure shipment that included Amy from Burst Angel and Carmen99 ('99' for her bust size in cm) from Gun X Sword which is one of my favorites. There was not nearly enough room to highlight all the new arrivals here in the newsletter, so make sure to checkout the Geneon $5 sale is coming to an end shortly, so please make you final selections from whatever we have left in stock:

Finally, I want to thank everyone again for your patience during our move. In return, I've included a sale coupon that should help makeup for any delays or bumps that we might have experienced over the past couple of weeks! Just use one of the following coupon codes when you place your order:

To save 4% off any order over $101, use the following coupon code during checkout:

relocation101

Or, to save 7% off any order over $301, use the following coupon code during checkout:

relocation301

Coupons are valid ONLY for NEW orders, and good through Tuesday, October 31st only, so don't wait!

Now, we're all going to finally be able to get some sleep! Well, at least a little... -_^

Move Update [Updated]

Since I have not posted recently I just wanted to give everyone a quick update on how the move is going. It's been all 14 hours days since Oct 2nd. Now it's 18 hour days.

The new place is going to be great though. :-)

We closed up Wednesday afternoon after shipping out the regular orders for that day. Then the big trucks starting lining up outside. I'm happy to report that we are right on schedule, and all of our primary stock is now at the new location (just not all put out yet). We've moved approx. 14,000 manga volumes, 3,000 figures and just about 870 '30 count' cases of DVD's over the past 48 hours.

We started at 7am on Thursday morning and worked until midnight, and the next 2 days look like it will be more of the same. Our IT cutover is happening on Sunday so we will be ready to start processing orders again first thing Monday morning. Needless to say I will be out of touch until Monday, but send me your e-mail inquires anyway and I'll work through them next week. I expect we should be settled in an caught up again with regular business and store updates by Friday the 27th.

Please see my Oct 6th post for the whole schedule, which has gone off pretty well. I attribute that to all the planning and preparation we did ahead of time. The only SNAFU that we've run into so far has been with Verizon. We won't have phones for another week or two. It's my fault, I didn't order the lines until the end if August.... Verizon is without a doubt the worst run company in the United States. And yeah, I'm taking Central Park Media into consideration there. -_^

Friday morning our entire crew will be getting together for breakfast before we start putting out the DVD's at the new place. If you are getting breakfast in Winchester tomorrow morning and see a bunch of very poorly dressed hoodlums making a lot of noise about Anime, that's probably us. :-)

I'm off to bed. We'll talk next week.

[UPDATE]: Friday Oct 20th, 8:40pm - We started early and made good progress today. We ended up a bit ahead of schedule late in the day, so we broke off about 6:30PM so everyone could go home and have an evening with their families. First time in several days for some of us. I took a few pictures today to share so you can see how things are coming along.

Items from the DVD section at the old warehouse are loaded into '30 count' cartons and tagged for transport.

Boxed DVD's are loaded onto special racks at the new place for off loading.

Racks of DVD cases move through one of the loading docks on their way to their area of the warehouse.

Trading figures as they start to be put out early Friday morning.

Racks of DVD's after they are put out at the new warehouse.

A good shot down one of the DVD isles at the new warehouse (note the GITS SAC special edition boxes to the right AND left). We cartonize or bin a lot of the products for pulling, but we actually hand stack all the DVD's in their designated area so that every DVD gets inspected prior to being put out on the racks. This process really helps us keep defectives to a minimum.

Updates - October 6th, 2006

Our move has commenced, is going very smoothly (so far), and is on schedule (so far). Between October 2nd and October 18th we will be moving into our new warehouse facility in Winchester, VA. During this time orders will continue to be processed and shipped daily from our old facility in Ranson, however, shipping of some orders will be delayed a few days as we begin to increasingly split our inventory up between the two sites, so please allow a little extra time for your order to ship and your e-mails to be answered during this period.

We will be closed from Noon on October 18th through October 22nd for the final phase of the move. Orders placed during this period will resume shipping on October 23rd from our new location in Winchester, VA. We've devised this schedule to cause the least disruption to our daily order processing operations, however, some shipping delays will be inevitable and we greatly appreciate your patience and understanding during our move. :-)

The shipping area of the new building being stocked up with supplies in preparation for operations later this month.

Right now here is what the move schedule looks like:

Oct 2nd
Administrative Office Furniture Area

Oct 4th
Art Book section
Apparel Section

Oct 6th
How to Draw Book Section
Plush Section
Urban Gear Section
Import Magazine Section

Oct 10th
Overstock DVD Section
Blank CD & DVD Media Section
Model Kit Section

Oct 12th
PolyResin Statue Section
Wall Scroll & Poster Section
Figure & Toy Pre-Pack Section #1

Oct 13th
Trading Figure Section
Figure & Toy Pre-Pack Section #2

Oct 16th
Snack and Food Section
Character Merchandise Section

Oct 18th-22nd (store closed)
Primary DVD Stock Section (28,000 DVD's)
Primary Manga Section (14,000 Manga Volumes)
Remaining Figure Inventory
All Remaining Racking and Fixtures

Oct 23rd: Orders Begin Shipping from the New Facility

So far, so good. Wish us luck!

This week in the news we got word of a number of release delays from Bandai and Geneon. Bandai sighted ongoing issues with their replicator for this round of delays, and we've been no stranger to those problems over the last couple of months.

Here's the list of delays:

Betterman DVD Complete Collection - 10/10/06 to 10/17/06
Fantastic Children DVD 4 - 10/10/06 to 10/17/06
Geneshaft DVD Complete Collection - 10/10/06 to 10/17/06
IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix DVD 5 - 10/10/06 to 10/17/06
Shakugan no Shana DVD 2 - 11/7/06 to 11/14/06

Due to popular demand, we dropped the pre-order price of the upcoming GITS SAC DVD Boxed Set down to $59.98 (from $69.98), which means we're offering it for pre-order at 40% off the retail price! And no worries, if you already have a pre-order in for it your price will automatically be adjusted down.

It's October and our Third Annual 'Noemi-O-Lantern' pumpkin carving contest is off and running! Everyone has carved a 'Jack O' Lantern', but have any of you ever made a 'Noemi O' Lantern'? Well, here's your chance! Bosatsu has used our logo model Noemi and painstakingly created a comprehensive guide to carving your own personal Anime Corner pumpkin, just in time for Halloween! E-Mail us photo's of your finished Noemi O' Lantern on display and win a $100.00 Anime Corner Store merchandise certificate! We will evaluate each entry and pick the best Anime Corner carved Halloween pumpkin, then we'll announce the winner in an Anime Corner Newsletter in early November. Good Luck!

Jamie begins to put out and organize the art book section at the new warehouse.

This week has been excellent for both new Anime and Manga arrivals. Of note we received Negima Vol #3, of which most people have been ordering the limited edition version and Vol #1 of Full Moon, of which the Box version has been the most popular. After well over a year in the making, we also received the 2nd volume of the Tenchi Ryo-Ohki OVA, and I was very excited to get to see the continuation of that series! On the Manga front we have 26 new volumes from series like Ai Yori Aoshi, Platinum Garden, and one of my favorites Tramps Like Us. We also received a ton of new character goods and some more figures as well including the Revoltech Eva Unit 03's and the first of the new Macross Valkyrie from Toynami.

Finally, I wanted to mention again about the big figure sale that we have going on through the weekend. I decided earlier this week that we could save a lot of effort during the move if we could clear out some of our figure inventory, so I put every figure on the store on sale for 20% the regular price. RACS fans have responded, and we have sold 5 full racks of figures so far, and we've been able to sell out and delete over 20 different figures off the site pre-move. We appreciate the help from everyone that has taken advantage of the sale so far, and I also want to let everyone one else know that there is still time to grab a few at the sale prices before the sale ends and we start moving the figures to the new place on Tuesday the 10th!

Updates - September 29th, 2006

Hey guys and gals! We're knee deep in the move for the next two weeks, so I'm going to have to make this a brief update.

This week we heard that the new Robotech production 'Shadow Chronicles' was named the Best Animated Sci-Fi Feature at the 2006 International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, but unfortunately the DVD release that was originally scheduled for November has been pushed to Spring of 2007. Figures. We received some more of the Voltron tins so it finally came off pre-order status as I think we have enough now to say that's it's in stock. The Shana DVD/CD combo pack experienced a last minute delay from Geneon (they missed the street date of 9/26), but we've confirmed that they are now on the way and we should have them in a day or two.

I've noticed lately that Funimation's limited edition boxes REALLY ARE limited, and that we have been unable to go back to them for restocks (on the popular ones) after our initial shipment. Because of this we're ramping up our initial orders for these types of items to make sure we can keep them in stock longer. A couple of recent releases that come to mind are the Negima Limited box #1, and especially the new Trinity Blood DVD box, both of which are sold out at Funimation's level and are getting in short supply in our warehouse. We have also run out of the Samurai 7 collectors art boxes and Funimation will not be pressing anymore. With this in mind, my advice for everyone out there that wants a new Funimation limited release is to go ahead and pre-order it so that your place in line for one is secured.

We have been working on some site enhancements that you have requested, along with upgrading some of our backend functions. We changed the software that monitors site statistics, and as a result went ahead and reset our counter back to 10 Million from 12 Million unique visits. The new software keeps track of visitors more accurately, and I felt the reset was probably indicative of the margin of error with the old software. We are also changing the layout for our upcoming releases page to make it more manageable. We're also experimenting with features that will allow that list to be sorted by date and title. I'll let you know in a few weeks how that's coming along.

A few new DVD releases in this week, most notably Speedgrapher #3 and the final volume of Ichigo Mashimarof, and a lite manga update that included Berserk #13 and a new series 'Line' which looks really good. We received another nice new figure shipment including two Ex figures of Rei and Asuka, and a truly lovely figure of Asa Shigure from Shuffle, plus several others. By the way, Sega is calling the Rei figure 'Rei Matsuri', and several people have written in thinking that's a typo. Matsuri just means 'festival', so Rei Matsuri basically translates to 'festival version Rei'. We do indeed know her last name is Ayanami. -_^ Finally, our cheap-skate of the week is devoted Anime fan John S., who by way of our e-mail conversations this week is taking both 'Frugal' and 'Perfect Condition' to a new level. Are you reading this John??!! We love you man! -_^ Actually a lot of you guys have written in recently about financial strains and such (the biggest reason we participated in the Geneon sale), so I did a coupon for our newsletter subscribers this week that should help ease the pain a little. :-)

Updates - September 22nd, 2006

Wow! What a week! To the left you can see Ron (at the old warehouse) during a 200+ order pull cycle earlier this week. No, he really is smiling...

In the news segment this week, I want to confirm the we have received our first batch of Voltron tins, however as expected we did not get our full shipment and I don't feel we have enough to make it 'available' yet, so it will stay on 'pre-order' status a little while longer. I'm sure other stores won't hesitate to show it in stock, and then promptly backorder units for customers when they run out, but we don't do things that way.

Just when you thought you had seen everything, someone in Japan has decided to make a 'Ramen Hamburger'. Looks delicious doesn't it? -_^ (thanks to Jerry for sending that over)

Geneon hit us up this week that Sherlock Hound is going out of print, so whatever DVD's we still have in stock will be first come first served and will not be replaced once they are sold out. We also got word this week that the company that owned Manga Entertainment has changed hands yet again,which is maybe the third or forth time that Manga Entertainment has been sold. Aside from GITS SAC, Manga hasn't published any titles of note in several years, but the word is that the new owners may put some more funding towards licensing and production so we might see some good titles start coming out of Manga's studio again - which is always a good thing!

Can you believe it, I have no DVD delays to report this week!? I must not have read this weeks new release mailers very well. -_^

Flash Gordon has offered up another fantastic review of a Studio Ghibli title, and he also discusses the legacy of the late Yoshifumi Kondo in the studio's productions.

I've been asked a few times recently why some of the street dates we show for new manga don't jive with the publishers release dates. There are several good reasons for this, one of which is that we regularly get e-mails like this one that came this morning:

'Broccoli Books apologizes, but due to a slight delay with printing KAMUI v5 has been pushed back 2 weeks to 10/25/06'

We had already set the street date for KAMUI v5 on the store at 10/31/06, and it's not because we're psychic. It's been my experience that manga street dates set by the studios are more guidelines than hard fast dates that they actually try to meet. Any particular manga volume can come in as much as a month early or a month late (or more) to the actual release date that was set by the publisher - with late being the case more often than not. We just tend to set the street dates we show on the store by our actual experience with that publisher as opposed to always showing the exact date they have set for it - you know, the one they probably won't meet anyway. That's why some of our street dates that show on the site are set 2 or 3 weeks after what the publisher originally announced. We're probably the only store around to think about it this way, and I'm sure it causes some consternation among fans that want a particular volume out as soon as humanly possible. If a release comes in early, great, we go ahead and post it to the site, but otherwise we try to keep our dates for manga set a little more, um, realistic. :-)

The Geneon sale is now about 10 days old, and we have sold over 50% of our total sale stock, and have already sold out of about 30 titles. We'll continue to run the sale until all our current sale stock is gone. I think the guys over here that package your orders will be glad when the rest is gone! Props to them for the great job they have done this week, they have been busting their butts!

New arrivals this week include the previously late My Hime #4 DVD and the 'rescheduled' early arrival of Seed Destiny #4. We also received Inu Yasha #46 early, along with several more new boxed sets and thin-paks. We received a more manageable manga shipment this week that included two notable new releases from DarkHorse: 'Satsuma Gishiden' for samurai action lovers and 'Banya' which can be put in a category all it's own! We also received a new batch of imported figures (and have yet another batch inbound) including the highly anticipated battle 'damaged' version of Ryofu Housen (which is incredible), and two large and gorgeous swimsuit versions of Rin and Sakura from Fate/Hollow Ataraxia. Finally we received a new batch of import books with several new artbooks including Murata's Robot 5, and two artwork anthologies by one of my favorites Toshihiro Kawamoto - they are keepers!

Updates - September 15th, 2006

Rome was not built in a day, and nor is our new facility. We've been working very hard recently getting both our new place ready for business as well and keeping up with your regular orders, and it's been quite a challenge!

This week we started the fall Geneon sale a little sooner than we had anticipated as Geneon shipped us our sale inventory a bit early. Order volumes since the sales started have been huge, and I had to call all the folks in that were working on the new place back to HQ to help process the extra orders. Also this week we've seen a dramatic increase in the amount of e-mail inquiries that have been coming in and we've had to par our immediate responses down to mostly store business only. Still, we're making good progress and should be ready to start moving our actual inventory and operations during the first week of October. Several folks have asked about new addresses for mail in payments and such, however nothing is going to change right now and we'll let everyone know when the time comes in a few weeks.

In the news is another group of date changes and a few other interesting tid-bits. First, here are the changes we've been able to confirm so far:

Changed From 9-12 to 9-26
Gundam Seed Destiny 4 DVD

Changed From 9-12 to 11-14
Clockwork Fighters 1 DVD

Changed From 10-17 to 10-24
Elemental Gelade 3 DVD

In addition to these changes, most of Bandai's 9-12 titles are shipping late and are not expected to arrive until early next week. This includes My-Hime Vol #4 which a very large number of you have on pre-order, in many cases holding up other items to ship complete. Rest assured we'll get these shipped as soon as our copies arrive.

Racking is first Pre Assembled in the receiving area and then is lifted up to the mezzanine level for installation in the warehousing area at our new fulfillment center. Our custom installed steel mezzanine from EquipTo was installed by my good friend Robert Lebeck and virtually doubles the floor space available for our pick pull area and allows 85% of all our products to be stocked and pulled without step stool or ladder assistance. This enables orders to be pulled more quickly and accurately.

Geneon let us know that all Toei partner products (Air Master and Slam Dunk) have now been officially discontinued and won't be repressed. For anyone interested we have sale stock on all the Air Master and Slam Dunk DVD volumes that were released last year before the Geneon/Toei distribution deal fell apart.

After comments by me and some other key retailers were published two weeks ago, TokyoPop has announced that they are going to relent a bit on their direct marketing plans for certain manga titles. This is good news as there was also a great deal of fan backlash to their plans and I'm glad to see that they have taken some of that to heart. See the news blurb below for more details. We're not sure yet how the new plans will shape up and TokyoPop still has a long way to go to fix their problems, but this latest development is at least encouraging.

I want to welcome aboard our newest recruit, Jennifer Judd, who joins the pick and order preparation team in the warehouse under Ron's tutelage. Jennifer comes to us with an great background in order fulfillment, retail, and warehouse operations, she's a lot of fun to have around, and we look forward to 'indoctrinating' her into the 'way of the Anime Corner'... :-)

Part of the shipping production area being built out at our new location. The new loose fill dispensers will hold 120 cubic feet of packing material each which means refilling them less often. Less time spent refilling means more orders shipped.

From the IT Desk: We will be conducting platform upgrades on Monday evening 9/18 from 11:00pm to 3:00am (EST). You've probably noticed that the store has been running a bit slow on an intermittent basis recently, especially after the high traffic increase due to the Geneon sale. One of the things that will be worked on will be improved server load balancing that should take care of these recent issues. You will still be able to place orders as normal on our front end during this period, however Gift Certificates and Coupons will not work while the upgrade is in progress.

I'm sure you are all aware of our Geneon Fall sale by now as there is scant an Anime web log or blog that has not picked up on it in the last couple of days. In addition to the sale we actually have had a pretty lite week in terms of new releases, though we did get in two key new titles in Trinity Blood and the final GIT's 2nd Gig DVD. The Limited version of Trinity Blood includes a really neat 'split opening' art box and a set a tarot cards, and the final volume of 2nd Gig is available with a Gorgeous tin art box that we were not expecting considering the original box art Manga video sent us. Ellcia is back out on DVD again after being off the market for over a year. Only a handful of new manga and books this week which actually is a welcome relief) the most notable being the 5th Vampire Hunter D novel and the 2nd Ghost in the Shell SAC book. We have another pretty large figure shipment inbound, but we did already receive the new Hajime Sorayama Silver Bobbed Replicant figure which is pretty expensive but absolutely gorgeous in both size and detail - plus she comes in a sumptuous collectors box to keep her safe.

And you can't imagine how long I've waited to use the word 'sumptuous' here! :-) Have a nice weekend everyone!

Updates - September 8th, 2006

Between us coming off the long holiday weekend and working out at the new place it's been a very short week for us and the whole crew has really been busting butt to get everyone's order filled. I think we are finally caught up filling new orders today. Phew!!

I wanted to mention again that while we are trying to make the move process as transparent as possible, there may be some delays filling a few orders here and there as we will be giving special attention to making sure orders go out complete this month in order to cause us fewer backlogs. This is complicated further when companies like Bandai do not print enough of new items like the .Hack//Sign DVD boxed sets and we have to hold some orders for a few days until we can make arrangements for copies from somewhere else to fill the gap in the interim.

So please be patient with us during this period of time as we will have the move completed in the next 3 to 4 weeks.

Speaking of companies not printing enough copies, my comments on TokyoPop last week seem to have created quite a stir. I'm not sure what the folks at TokyoPop are thinking about, but making some titles direct only and moving to an 'on demand' model for reprinting manga is probably the worst idea anyone in this industry has ever come up with. For folks in the direct market like us it means we will have to take deeper stock of non returnable new releases (which raises our overall cost on TokyoPop's line), and fans will see a higher number of blackout periods on manga volumes that are backordered because they are in reprint. Of course, what this boils down to is that direct sales only = no competition, scarcity = higher demand, and increasing retailer costs to carry a product = lower margins...

...which all will equal higher prices for fans and that IMHO sucks. I bite my thumb at anyone who says differently. -_^

In the news this week we've received word of several release date changes, which is very typical for the fall Anime season. I would expect this to be the norm for the next 2 or 3 months.

Here are the changes we've been able to confirm so far:

Changed From 8-29/9-6 to 9-26
Green Green 2 DVD
GaoGaiGar 1 DVD
GaoGaiGar 1 DVD w Art Box
Trinity Blood 1 DVD
Trinity Blood 1 DVD Limited

Changed From 9-26 to 10-3
Basilisk 2 DVD
Basilisk 2 DVD Limited

Changed From 10-3 to 10-10
Hare + Guu 5 DVD

Changed From 9-26 to 11-14
Fullmetal Alchemist Movie Limited

[UPDATE] As fate has it, we received Green Green Vol #2 in a late afternoon shipment arrival on Friday 9-8, so they will begin shipping on Monday 9-11. As to if it's actually arriving late or early, I'll let you guys decide... -_^

We have LOTS of preorders booked for the FMA Movie Limited edition - in fact about 75% of youpre-ordered the limited version of the movie, and many of those orders include other items that are holding for it's release, so if anyone has one on order and would like to change it just drop us an -mail (include your order number please) and we'll take care of it. It seems that the Zatch Bell movie got on a solicitation spreadsheet by mistake and is not even on Viz's 2007 schedule yet, so we have removed it from the site and cancelled any prebook orders for it that were placed during the short time it was up. Finally, Brocolli has let us know that they are sold out of all copies of the old pressing of the three FLCL DVD's, and that it will not be repressed as it is being replaced with a new edition in November (we'll have that up for pre-order shortly). We still have a few copies of the old FLCL DVD's for anyone who doesn't want to wait.

After some feedback on my search terms posting, we did a little experiment recently regarding who buys Yaoi titles, and the results might surprise you.

Not directly related to Anime, but Sony announced a couple days ago that they were delaying the launch of the PS3 game console in Europe from Nov 2006 to March 2007 in order to have enough units available for the Nov 2006 launch in Japan and North America, though they only expect to have 2 Million Units available for shipment in 2006 rather than the 4 Million they originally estimated would ship by years end. The problem is mainly that there will not be enough Blue Ray drives to go around because Sony has fallen way behind on their original manufacturing estimates. This does not bode well for the near future of the Blue Ray DVD format, as a serious shortage of components will limit the number of players available over the next few months and will keep the price high.

I've never been fond of Sony's predatory business practices which date all the way back to the 80's, so if this helps HD get a leg up on Blue Ray, that's fine with me. The sooner a single common standard is adopted, the better it will be for future high def Anime releases.

Even though it was a short week there was no lack of new early item arrivals. Some of the new volumes that came in on the manga side were not slated for release until October, which offsets the August Infinity titles that finally arrived 3 or 4 weeks late. This kinda stuff drives us nuts you know! :-) We also received the first part of a nice new figure shipment that included the absolutely gorgeous Yoakemaeyori Ruriirona Feena statue that is even bigger than I originally thought - so you know where the first one of her went! Finally, sorry we haven't updated the front page for a couple of weeks - that will be done next week for Sept along with adding about 80 new prebook items for November and December that have been accumulating in my inbox. Also I'm currently finalizing our choices for 2007 import calendars, so look for those to start going up on the site soon for pre-order. There is some great stuff coming later this fall, and I'll let you know the whole scoop on it right here over the next few weeks.

Who Buys Yaoi?

As a follow up to my recent post about our top search terms, specialK was wondering about the demographic split for Yaoi titles - recently the word is the 4th most searched for term on our site - even more than 'hentai'. We've always had a general feeling that the audience for Yaoi is mostly female, but we've never done any kind of formal analysis on it and specialK's comment raised my curiosity, so we pulled the data for the last 200 orders that contained at least 1 'Yaoi' or boy love manga item and did some database sorts.




First, we simply counted the number of female vs. male names (obviously there will be some margin of error as some are more ambiguous than others), and we found that buyers were:

67% Female
33% Male

Then, using the same name data we sorted the list in terms of Shonen Ai vs. Yaoi titles. Around the office we refer to these titles two different ways: titles for audiences 13 and up is classified as 'Shonen Ai' (boy love), and for 18+ only audiences as 'Yaoi' (explicit content). Here's how that turned out:

Shonen Ai

79% Female
21% Male

Yaoi:

56% Female
44% Male

(Customers that ordered both Shonen Ai and Yaoi on the same order were counted in both categories.)

So you can see that the audience changes a bit when we break the titles out by age rating, with guys buying more of the explicit titles while the gals are favoring the romantic stories that leave more to the imagination. Of course these stats are not scientific, and the data would be more accurate if we choose a larger sample, say 1,000 or even 10,000 orders, or if we had included DVD data, or sorted the list better - but we just didn't want to stay up all night trying to figure out if 'Jordan' or 'Taylor' is a guy or gal.

In the end, I really don't think it matters much anyway.... :-)

Updates - September 1st, 2006

Our Ranson, WV order processing center will be closed on Monday, September 4th for the labor day holiday, and again for part of Thursday September 7th for relocation activities. We will be spending most of the long weekend working out at the new facility, and will be moving some of our infrastructure to the new warehouse on Thursday the 7th. Since our facilities are far to large to relocate in one or two days, we will be moving our operations to the new location in stages over the next several weeks, and we are going to structure the move to cause the least disruption to our shipping operations as possible.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it! -_^

Saturday, Sept 2nd: Jamie can be seen helping to assemble the upper tiers of some of the pick/pull
shelving units at the new facility. She's such a trooper!

It's going to be a wet weekend for us as the remains of tropical storm Ernesto passes through our area today and tomorrow. It's already raining heavily and the wind is really picking up outside, and the guys in the know say we might get 5 or 6 inches of rain over the next 24 hours. Sounds like a good time to kick back and catch up on a few Anime flicks that are in the backlog pile!

A couple of new release tid bits this week. First, rumor has it that the Limited Edition version of the Fullmetal Alchemist movie has been delayed until November. I should have confirmation on that next week from Funimation, and I hope this is not going to be the case as this would be a really big deal, as about 75% of the folks that pre-ordered the movie ordered the limited version, so we'll try to get some definite word on that as soon as we can. We also received a retailer recall notice today from Geneon for the Trigun Remix Vol #2 DVD, though they did not indicate why - I've inquired as to what the actual problem is with the disk, but they are closed today and Monday for the holiday so we won't know until next week.

[Update: The rumor has been confirmed, release date for the limited edition version of the Fullmetal Alchemist movie has indeed been bumped to November 14th. That info comes right from our guy at Funimation.]

TokyoPop announced this week a rather half baked plan to go direct with certain manga titles, including One, Neck and Neck, Heaven Above Heaven, Sorcerer Hunters, Soul to Seoul, Dragon Head, Dragon Voice, and Arm of Kannon (for starters). Chip Meyers, who is the VP of marketing over there explains that the move is to drive fan traffic to their website so that it can become a 'fan portal' per say and allow them to sell more advertising.

ICV2 recently published 'MY' personal opinion of the move by TokyoPop. You can read it here.

Here on the RACS side Blog, I recently posted the top 50 search terms for the store over the last 30 days. It may be a bit of a surprise what some folks are looking for.

Gordon gives us his latest review this week, and reminds us that Fans of anime are always fans of Hayao Miyazaki however, fans of Hayao Miyazaki [and other Studio Ghibli productions] are not always fans of anime.

Good updates all around this week with the Alchemist movie and the IY Season 3 boxed set arriving early. Another really huge manga update this week - we put in a lot of extra hours getting all those new volumes posted to the site, especially considering there were 13 brand new series mixed in there. A couple new shipments of statues and figures arrived and I must say for the price both the Bome figures (Kiddy Grade and Jingai Makyo) are really excellent. The paint scheme used on the Kiddy Grade set is exceptional and I was a little surprised at just how nice they are. We also received an extremely cool figure of Hikaru from Peace at Pieces which I immediately took home for my own collection! :-) We also have lots of new character merchandise in this week including new hats, patches, posters, keychains, and more.

There is something for everyone, so make sure to check it all out while you are lounging around this weekend!

Top 50 Search Terms for August 2006

Steven DenBeste over at Chizumatic recently asked the question 'Why the hell are so many people over at Wikipedia looking at an article for a certain kind of Jellyfish?'

I always find it fascinating to watch how people use our site, and thought it would be fun to share our list with you. The following list contains the top 50 search terms that folks have plugged into the search feature of the store site in the past 30 days, along with the number of times that word has been searched:

2,021 naruto
1,286 sailor moon
1,178 inuyasha
1,178 yaoi
1,004 hentai
998 fruits basket
959 fullmetal alchemist
759 bleach
705 evangelion
682 dragonball z
621 final fantasy
564 adult
540 sex
491 hellsing
490 ghost in the shell
480 trigun
451 love hina
426 full metal panic
421 gundam
410 cowboy bebop
404 negima
387 berserk
356 macross
347 chobits
346 rurouni kenshin
298 samurai champloo
294 thinpak
284 one piece
267 slayers
263 kingdom hearts
260 romance
259 full metal alchemist
256 inu yasha
255 initial d
251 complete collection dvd boxset
247 dragonball
238 gundam seed
237 yugioh
236 tenchi
234 ikki tousen
233 saiyuki
230 umd
227 ranma
226 dragon ball z
224 comedy
222 bible black
221 hack
220 burst angel
211 please teacher
210 gravitation

This is about what I would expect, and gives you a good idea of what Anime fans are looking for on our site, but it's also fun to note that the word 'hentai' is the 5th most popular search term, and that people were looking for 'sex' about twice as often as a 'dvd boxed set', though only about 25% as often as 'Naruto'.

It's also interesting to note that we don't actually sell 'sex' - at least not as far I know... -_^

Note: There were 6,239 total terms searched on the Anime Corner Store during the month of August, 2006, and 96,714 different terms searched in the past year. We exclude any terms from our stats that are only searched once. The phrases virgin auction and sexy pictures of mizuho are included in these figures as they were both searched for 7 times in the past 30 days.

Updates - August 25th, 2006

Our Ranson, WV order processing center will be closed on Friday, August 25th. All orders placed (or e-mail inquiries sent) after 10am (EST) on Thursday August 24th will be processed when we return on Monday, August 28th. We will be spending the day moving some of our infrastructure to the new warehouse facility in Winchester, VA. Since our facilities are far to large to relocate in one or two days, we will be moving our operations to the new location in stages over the next several weeks.

Like we didn't have enough to do already... -_^

Couple of tid-bits this week. First, Media Blasters has informed us that the first batch of Voltron Tins might be allocated and in short supply as they expect longer than normal leads times from the presser, so they may have to ship retailer's initial orders in batches for several weeks after the release date. I recommend you pre-order early to secure your place in line. ADV has delayed the release of the Evangelion 10th Anniversary until November. I don't want to make any assumptions as to why, but I suspect that the $250 retail price has resulted in lower than expected pre-orders and they wanted to give fans a larger window of time to warm up to the prospect of yet another Evangelion boxed set. Also, Funimation let us know that the new DBZ movie (Wrath of the Dragon) will be delayed until Sept 12th.

Quentin wrote to me this week and asked:

"With the HD format wars starting up is there any news of Anime releases in HD either HDDVD or BlueRay? If so which of the two formats and will you carry them?"

We will definitely be carrying whatever Anime morphs into the high def formats, however, at this stage of the game it's too early to know how HD will effect the Anime market. I've talked in depth about the subject to insiders at a couple of the major Anime studios recently, and the prevailing wisdom is that the industry is in a wait and see mode. We may see some test releases in Blue-Ray and HDDVD late this year or in the first quarter of 2007, but the studios are probably going to wait until one or the other format gains traction in the home video market before committing. One studio has plans to begin with a few disks that are standard format on one side and one of the HD formats on he other so that the DVD's will be compatible with both regular and HD DVD players. From what I'm hearing, HDDVD is the favored format at the moment, but only slightly. I have speculated about the nature of releases, since I feel that many of the $30 TV series boxed sets being released now are really the end of the line for 're-releasing' these titles in the traditional DVD format. I think that HD will give the studios another opportunity to revive older catalog titles by releasing an entire TV series on a single disk. How that would look though, and what the price would be, is anyone's guess at this point - so you may want to think twice about grabbing an HD player now and wait until the HD market has a chance to define itself, especially in the Anime sector.

Bandai this week released a very strong worded message to fan subbers about their properties. They have sunk a lot of money into the release of the GITS Solid State Society movie and have warned fan subbers to stay away from it at their own peril. Ken Iyadomi, who is the president of Bandai, also eluded to the point that fan subbing is detrimental to their business as a whole and that they now consider the practice incompatible with the future survival of commercial Anime releases [that's MY slant on what he said by the way].This is not a new stand from Bandai, but this announcement heralds the end to the days where studios pretty much turned a blind eye to fan subbing and free Anime downloading activities. My hope is that they will also crack down on retailers carrying those Hong Kong bootlegs, as it seems every new online Anime store that has opened in the past 3 years or so has needed to subsidize their sales of legit releases with the illegal imports.

Here is a little tid-bit of Anime Corner inside info. When we process pre-orders for DVD's, it is always done in two separate batches. The first batch we process are the 'stand alone tickets', which are the orders that were placed entirely for the pre-order item shipping. The second batch will be what we call the 'pre-book logs',which are generated from a previous order that had a mix of regular and pre-book items on it. These are the orders that created more than one total shipment for us (some of these orders can create 20 separate shipments). Now most times the two batches are processed in the same day, so this is transparent to you. But sometimes when it's a big new release or when we are swamped with regular orders, we will process the batches on different days. In this case, the first prebooks to ship are the stand alone tickets, as they are a bit easier for us to process since we do not have to generate a new shipment order from an old one. The only exception to this is when a new release is allocated and there are not enough copies for everyone. In that case, we merge the batches and process them in the order that they were placed until the supply of the product runs out. Just a little insight into how we do things. :-)

Can you believe we didn't receive any new boxed sets this week? It's sorta surreal. We did get in a few new key DVD releases early including Jinki Extend and Shana. We also received a huge new manga shipment totaling about 48 new volumes. Getting all those on the site early was job! The missing Demon bane figures finally arrived, and we also received the new Lain statue from Organic. I thought the price on this was a little high, but as a Lain fan I thought the 'diorama' look was extremely cool, so I brought in a few anyway. Several new art books (I hand pick these) also. Finally, this will be the last week of the Urban Gear sale, so if there is anything you want grab it before the sales prices are gone!

Ohayo Kangofu and the 'Camel Toe' Dilemma

I do about 100 different things in the course of a day, as it has always fallen to me to be the one who wears all hats in the business. From finance to customer service to marketing to web design to warehouse management, I'm always the end of the line for every decision - and no matter how much I pencil and paper something, when the rubber meets the road I always have to be ready for the unexpected.

[UPDATE: As of Aug 14th, 2006 the remaining text and graphics of this post have been voluntarily removed by me at the request of the Editor of NewType USA. A final edit may be in order, I haven't decided yet.]

Witch Hunter Robin - Better In Japanese

Jamie and I were rewatching Witch Hunter Robin recently (among other things), and this time we decided to try it in Japanese rather than the dub. I usually prefer to enjoy Anime in English, but that's not a generalization. I tend to get around to watching series that I like in both languages eventually, and it's more accurate to say that I find many dubs to be as enjoyable as the Japanese dialog - though some companies do better dubs than others. For instance, ADV tends to use the same voice actors over and over and over and over and over again (and they tend to employ actors that have a rather narrow acting range at that) so after you've seen several ADV dubs you start to get a little weary of the same voice potrayal showing up time after time after time on different characters. Of course, it's cheaper for them to do it that way, and if anyone has become cheaper than a nickle when producing Anime...but I digress.

Witch Hunter Robin is much better in Japanese than in English. In English, you loose many plot subtleties, like the fact that Robin has trouble sometimes speaking good fluent Japanese. The Japanese voice acting is also much better, so much so that it creates a different atmosphere for the drama.

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD]

The creators of WHR obviously set out to make one of the most stylish Anime series ever seen in the 'goth' genre, and certainly achieved their goal (though in my mind nothing will ever out-do Vampire Hunter D). Unfortunately, the story they created is a little lite on real drama, a little too heavy in seriousness, and a little short on substance. Pacing is also a major problem, but this does not mean it cannot be an enjoyable experience. The series is usually categorized as Action/ Horror genre, but I think 'Supernatural Drama' offers a better characterization. The ending, while not a train wreck, was not how I would have wanted to see it wrapped up, and (in classic Anime style) leaves a great deal of loose ends. The eluded too (and hoped for) chemistry between Robin and Amon does not materialize, nor does the ending satisfy many of your 'who, what, where, and why' questions created in the earlier episodes.

Bottom line is that if you have previously only seen the series edited on Adult Swim, it's still worth a look uncut on DVD, but make sure you view it subtitled in the original Japanese dialog if you want to see WHR give you the best it has to offer.

Note: I have not intention of wasting anyone’s time (or my own) blogging out Anime reviews here - there are about a 100 million better writers out there than me (like Flash Gordon) to have at that. If this post resembles one in any way, it's purely a coincidence. :-)

Figure Otaku

Among other things, I'm a figure Otaku, and I don't even mind using that word when describing myself. I always think of 'Otaku' as meaning more or less just 'nerd' when it's applied to me - an Otaku doesn't have to be a 'freeter' - and figure collecting is defiintely 'geek chic' in my book. Someone once said that rule #2 is 'don't get high on your own supply' (I think rule #1 was 'never underestimate the other guys greed...'). Rule #2, is of course, impossible to follow when so many cool figures keep coming in for the store.

The trouble with being an Anime 'anything' collector is that ever present problem of space. Where do you put all those DVD's? Where do you find another shelf for manga? Where am I going to find more wall space to hang that new cel? Where the hell am I going to put all these new figures...

...sooner or later your going to be headed out to buy yet another bookcase, DVD rack, curio cabinet, whatever. Then it's not too long after that you discover you need to move your collection into a larger room. Once that is no longer an option, you'll just need a bigger house...

So, I bet you didn't know that it's Anime collectors that really drive today's real estate market. :-)

We had a new house built in 2003 (a whole separate story - trust me, never have a house built), and one of the things that I made sure I had in the new house was a manly library where I could warehouse my ever growing collection of Anime figures and books. I have several barrister bookcases (you know - the ones that have glass doors that fold up and slide in), and they are laid out with every other shelf being books and manga, and the other 50 percent set aside for figures. I even added halogen under counter lights to the figure shelves so that the displays look impressive.

Before my Mom passed away in 1998, one of her most treasured possessions was a beautiful antique turtlewood desk that used to be in her living room. I inherited that desk, and it now resides in my library, and ends up being the holding coral for the new figures that have come in (see above) - until I find the time to categorize them and set them up the way I want to in my bookcases. I have a rather odd system in setting them up that goes by size, color, series, and of course, the characters importance in the Anime (prominent characters tend to go towards the front, where characters with supporting roles might be further back).

I simply cannot keep the collection from growing, and every time I say this is the last figure something else comes in that I just must have - which is just about everything. Right now I collect both polystone resin and polyvinyl figures (PVC figures have really increased in quality over the past few years), and I probably have maybe 600 figures total - so many in fact that relocating them from our last house became a real problem, and back then I only had maybe half as many. Check this out: I even have a rider on my HO insurance for them (and my cel collection). With about 8-10 new additions a month, I figure I'm good space wise for maybe 2 more years. After that, I suppose this house will have to go on the market too...

...and I'd probably have to hire a crew of people just to come pack them up for the move... -_^