Geneon USA

~ the last words ~

This one begins as a hardware problem. Pioneer had bet on LaserDisc and needed somebody in America to put things onto it, so in december 1985 it opened LaserDisc Corporation of America. The name changed to Pioneer LDCA in 1989 and to Pioneer Entertainment in 1993, which is the year that actually matters, because 1993 is when the anime division started and Tenchi Muyo went out on tape and disc into a US market that had barely been asked whether it wanted any.

For the rest of the nineties Pioneer was one of a very small number of companies deciding which Japanese shows would ever be spoken in English. Tenchi Muyo carried the early catalog and Serial Experiments Lain arrived at the other end of the register, a show about a girl dissolving into a network that Pioneer bought and released while most of America still had dial-up. Hellsing came later, and Trigun came through here too. None of these were safe purchases on the day somebody signed for them.

Dentsu, the Japanese advertising company, bought Pioneer LDC in july 2003, and on 1 october the American arm became Geneon Entertainment (USA), Inc. The word is a compression of generate and eon. Nobody who bought a disc with it on the spine ever needed to know that, and the rename mostly served to detach the operation from a consumer electronics brand that had stopped meaning anything to anime buyers.

By 2007 I was twenty-three, out of the internet cafe years, with a TTNet line at home fast enough to leave running overnight. What arrived on that line was fansubs: hardcoded English subtitles burned into a video file by volunteers who had no rights to anything, distributed for free, and usually available within a week of the Japanese broadcast. Geneon's entire product was the opposite of that. A licensed disc, region coded, in a plastic case, sold in an American store, eighteen months behind. From here the collapse of a company like this was invisible, because the shows kept arriving either way. That is roughly the whole problem, seen from the wrong end.

~ the record ~

~ the alliance that never happened ~

On 29 august 2007 Geneon announced a strategic alliance with ADV Films. ADV would take over sales and distribution from 1 october, and Geneon would keep licensing and production. On paper this was two struggling companies agreeing that only one of them needed a warehouse. In september the deal was canceled before a single disc moved under it, and neither side said anything beyond being unable to reach a mutual agreement.

There is no version of that sentence that means anything good. ADV was not rescuing anybody: Sojitz pulled its money back out of ADV in january 2008 and took dozens of licenses with it, and ADV itself ceased all operations on 1 september 2009. The alliance failed because two companies in the same collapse tried to hold each other up, and the market they were both in had stopped paying twenty-five dollars for four episodes on a disc.

~ how it actually ended ~

The announcement went out on 26 september 2007. Geneon would accept orders only for titles with a street date of 6 november or earlier, and DVD sales and distribution stopped on 28 september. The company kept a skeleton in Long Beach for another ten weeks to ship what had already been solicited, and on 3 december the doors closed. Wikipedia's infobox gives 27 september as the death, which is the announcement week rather than the day anyone actually left the building.

The damage landed on whatever was mid-release. Hellsing Ultimate stopped after four volumes with the story unfinished on American shelves. Rozen Maiden stopped. People who had been buying a series one disc at a time were left holding a partial set with no way to complete it, which for a collector-driven business is a particular kind of injury: the format punished exactly the customers who had spent the most.

~ what came after ~

On 3 july 2008 Funimation announced a deal to manufacture and sell a selection of Geneon titles, which is how Hellsing Ultimate eventually got finished in English. The rest scattered. Discotek Media and Nozomi Entertainment picked up pieces, some licenses reverted quietly, and a number of shows Geneon had paid for simply expired without ever coming out.

The name did not die. Geneon merged with Universal Pictures Japan in 2009 to become Geneon Universal, and that company is NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan now, still operating, still releasing anime in Japan. So the brand survived on the far side of the ocean and was buried on this one, which is the reverse of the usual arrangement for a Japanese company's American subsidiary.

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