Bandai Entertainment

» see bandai-ent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1998 I was fourteen and getting online at 33.6k for the first time. Bandai Entertainment was a small office in Cypress, California, putting out its first discs under a label named after a shopping site, AnimeVillage.com, and by 1999 it had put its own name on the spine instead. The parent company made toys. The parent company also owned Sunrise, which meant it owned Gundam, and that single fact set the terms for everything that happened next.

Most American anime licensors of that era lived or died on auctions. They flew to Tokyo, bid against each other for whatever was hot, and hoped the advance came back. Bandai Entertainment did not have to play that game for its most valuable property, because the rights holder was upstairs. What it did with that advantage was build a catalog nobody else could have assembled at the price. Gundam came in nearly every incarnation. Around it sat Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star, then Escaflowne, then later Code Geass and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The whole business was a plastic disc on a shelf in an American mall. That was the customer: somebody who would pay thirty dollars for four episodes in a box, and then do it again five times to finish the series. Suncoast and Sam Goody, both of them graves on this site already, were where that transaction happened. It is a specific retail economy in a specific country, and I was never standing in it.

What reached Turkey was the shows, not the company. A licensor's name is invisible from the outside unless you go looking for it, and the version of these series that circulated here did not have Bandai Entertainment's logo on the front. I knew Cowboy Bebop years before I knew who had paid for the English track on it.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The 2000s were good. Cartoon Network was running Gundam Wing and Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim, which did more for the American anime market than any amount of catalog work, and Bandai Entertainment was sitting on the discs for both. In 2008 Namco Bandai folded Bandai Visual USA into it, which put the premium import operation and the mass-market operation in the same building.

By then the ground was already moving. The 2000s disc boom had been built on people who would buy sight unseen, and that habit was ending everywhere at once. Legal streaming arrived and reset what an episode was worth to roughly nothing per view. The people who had paid thirty dollars a volume did not stop liking anime, they stopped needing the object.

~ the fall ~

Kenichi Iyadomi, who ran the American company, said afterward that the North American physical market had shrunk badly over the previous five years with no sign of coming back, and that the prices Western buyers would accept had fallen to a level Japanese licensors did not want to hear about. Boxed sets at a reasonable number were the only thing moving. That is a hard conversation to have with a parent whose accounting is in yen.

The decision was not made in California. In october 2011 the content unit of Namco Bandai Holdings in Tokyo, freshly merged with Sunrise and Bandai Visual, concluded that the American home video operation was not worth running. The office in Cypress was down to five people by then. Three of them were let go along with most of the contractors.

~ what got buried with it ~

The announcement came on 2 january 2012. No new discs and no new manga after february. The catalog kept shipping while stock and licenses lasted, with the final delivery to retailers on 30 november 2012. On 1 march 2013 the company stopped operating.

Then came the part that hurt the audience more than the closure did. Bandai Entertainment held rights to shows nobody else could license without going through Bandai, and for a stretch after 2013 a lot of it was simply unavailable in English at any price. Funimation took some. Discotek and Nozomi took others over the following years, with Sentai and Aniplex picking through what was left, and Right Stuf eventually brought Gundam back properly. It came back in pieces, on somebody else's schedule, which is how a catalog dies even when the shows do not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »