SF / Anime Flea Market

[davemerrill]

It's time once again for the Friends of the Merril annual SF / Anime Flea Market, one-stop shopping for all of your genre needs. We'll have books, DVDs, games, costume supplies,collectibles, and more avaialble at bargain basement prices.

The Flea Market will be held on Saturday, September 10th, from 10 AM to 4 PM in the Beeton Auditorium at the Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street.

Admission is FREE!!

Shain and I will be there with a table full o' junk. Comics, books, LPs, VHS, DVD, ETC. Come on down and spend a few bucks and help us all clean out our closets.

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

I beg you, someone has ADV's Dunbine DVDs vol. 10, 11 and 12 and they're not insane in the membrane price, GRAB THEM!

grumble mumble Mike's 'sooper rare' DVD article at ANN anyway grumble. :)

Seriously, been waiting for like 6 years to see how this ends, altho I do know, like everybody dies, still. :)

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

what's the link to mike's article?

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

right HERE! :)

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-mike-toole-show/2011-08-28

I'm glad I don't have a login at ANN else I risk becoming 'that guy' on something like this.

I'd love to have added something about how it was thought retailers didn't want long volumes but the real problem was publishers just did jack shit promoting a title past the third volume and I could back it with catalogs from Video Business or some crap.

And then there was the whole "don't put volume numbers on a title that's DEATH" nonsense. That was big during the 1999/2000 shift from VHS to DVD.

ah well.

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

i actually have dunbine 10-12 (as well as the rest). i need to watch the show, i guess, but i dunno when i'll get around to it.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Well, it can be a slog at times, no doubt about it. It's much like Zeta Gundam in structure, lots of politics, cross and double cross towards the end. I wouldn't marathon it, honestly.

I don't have any problem with this at all, as it was the way I got into this whole mad world. I don't get bent out of shape and start throwing the 'oh noes filler!' nonsense around. It's a journey and everything has value.

So, I probably have done a poor selling job to encourage you to watch, sorry about that. I'm probably not an impartial judge having gotten Tomino's autograph on the LP and all. :)

[ferricide.livejournal.com]

i want to watch it, i just know it's going to be a heavy commitment. otherwise i would have sold off the discs by now...

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

There is a kind of pattern, a formula to the episodes that's fun, if you like that sort of thing. It's like Fist of the North Star, you wait for the music to come up and you know the hero is gonna kick some butt. :)

Cham Fau, the little sprite, gets really annoying after a time. I can only think she was a compromise to prevent having a 'viewer identification' kid imposed onto the show.

I know I'm one of a tiny handful who still love this stuff in the old school way. Dunbine, Overman King Gainer, Tekkaman Blade, Saint Seiya, love them all for what they are. I'd add Votoms to that list but I completely missed that one in the year that CPM had it out.

Man I wish Bandai had the balls to just say "to hell with market conditions, let's put EVERY Sunrise anime out in America at a cheap price and get SOME money out of the stuff!". never EVER gonna happen.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I honestly think putting Carl Macek's name up front and center on that project was a bad idea. Not a selling point for anime fans of the Dunbine era. When they came out I remember thinking that the show wouldn't sell well, and WTF, Carl Macek is dubbing it? What is this, 1985 all over again? Old shows are a tough sell in any case, and that factor didn't help.

Shows like that really didn't need to be dubbed, they could have saved the production cost, just put them out sub-only, and probably made the same amount of profit. If they made any profit at all.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Well, here's my thing. When ADV originally solicited the title to the trade, they were selling it as a 5 volume series, two discs per volume, 5 episodes per disc, $39.95 MSRP.

I've got all the UPC codes for each volume and all that and you don't just make up those things, you have to buy them and stuff. So this isn't some fantasy on my part, it was real.

I'm sure they got pushback from retailers on the price. I think $29.95 for 10 episodes would have been more helpful (and ADV knew price mattered otherwise they wouldn't have done the price cut they did for the single discs of Dunbine and St. Seiya) but regardless, putting out the show in 5 two-disc sets would have avoided just about ALL the problems the show ran into but no, no, no.

Bitch.

I agree, Macek's name was not really a selling point. I have a thought that it was mandated.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I would say the price point was way too high for anybody but serious Tomino-Dunbine fans to buy the show, but Ferricide bought the whole thing and hasn't even cracked it open, so I don't know what that says about price points. Maybe my sample size is too small, statistically.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

I can't disagree with you, but you know me, I thought even $19.99 for a single disc was too high for the way the market was trending in 2004 but everybody was so locked into that $29.99 MSRP model.

What Mediablasters did with Tekkaman Blade- $19.99 for 3-disc sets containing between 15-18 episodes- was the direction to go with 50+ episode series, I thought. That was a good 'money to episode' ratio that just might, with proper promotion, have gotten more eyeballs pointed at creaky old anime. maybe.

Too late now of course, so it's moot. And Hitler shouldn't have turned on Stalin when he did either. :)