Thursday, January 15, 2004
AnimeOnDVD's year in review begins...
If you have any interest in anime and what has been happening in the last couple of years, be sure to check out this page. AnimeOnDVD.com has been around for seven years now, so they have quite the perspective on things.
Check out the chart on that page. Things have gone from 6 releases in 1997, to 172 in 2000, to *750* in 2003! For all that people talk about sudden explosions, the chart shows that it has really been a steady expansion (of almost doubling each year). If you add all the years up, it is close to 2,000 anime DVD releases total now. While it is fair to argue that it won't keep doubling every year for ever, I certainly don't see it going away any time soon. Anime seems to have been there from the very beginning of DVDs and been following similar cycles (like price reductions on older titles as well as newer special editions sometimes).
Besides the general overview, there is going to be information on each individual studio (currently there is a page up for ADV, who put out almost 200 DVDs this year, as well as the new manga division and other stuff), as well as pages from individual AoD contributers (currenly one from the retail forum moderator on how retail stuff has evolved, and one from one of the disc reviewers on how he got into it). I'm guessing a manga mod will do one at some point, so I'll probably point that out when it happens for the more comic-minded people in the audience.
Many thanks to Chris Beveridge for keeping the site alive through all these years! I haven't been there the whole time, but it has been an amazing resource for all the time that I've visited it. I think it is fair to say that I wouldn't be writing this blog if it wasn't for that site getting me anime DVD reviews and news and eventually manga and then causing me to branch back out to American comics... :)
Check out the chart on that page. Things have gone from 6 releases in 1997, to 172 in 2000, to *750* in 2003! For all that people talk about sudden explosions, the chart shows that it has really been a steady expansion (of almost doubling each year). If you add all the years up, it is close to 2,000 anime DVD releases total now. While it is fair to argue that it won't keep doubling every year for ever, I certainly don't see it going away any time soon. Anime seems to have been there from the very beginning of DVDs and been following similar cycles (like price reductions on older titles as well as newer special editions sometimes).
Besides the general overview, there is going to be information on each individual studio (currently there is a page up for ADV, who put out almost 200 DVDs this year, as well as the new manga division and other stuff), as well as pages from individual AoD contributers (currenly one from the retail forum moderator on how retail stuff has evolved, and one from one of the disc reviewers on how he got into it). I'm guessing a manga mod will do one at some point, so I'll probably point that out when it happens for the more comic-minded people in the audience.
Many thanks to Chris Beveridge for keeping the site alive through all these years! I haven't been there the whole time, but it has been an amazing resource for all the time that I've visited it. I think it is fair to say that I wouldn't be writing this blog if it wasn't for that site getting me anime DVD reviews and news and eventually manga and then causing me to branch back out to American comics... :)
