Industry panels, by their nature, are a boring thing. Industry folks sit on stage talking about the status of their old projects and announce newly acquired projects. At their best, they are informative and bearable to sit through. At their worst, they are a waste of the time and effort of the panelists and the people who attend the panels. Sadly, at Otakon 2007 there were more industry panels that fell to the latter category than the former. In fact, I’d put only one panel, held by Funimation, into the former category.
The Funimation panelists, even though they got off to a slow start by bragging about their market share and listing a bunch of titles I didn’t care about, did something that I was really impressed with, they kept me entertained. The interaction between Adam Sheehan, Lance Heiskell, Jonathan Brands, and Christopher Bevins was great to watch and was one of the two highlights of this panel. The other obvious highlight was their announcement that they acquired the rights to distribute Ouran High School Host Club which was met by cheers and applause so loud I could almost imagine myself at a football game.
These two highlights overshadowed the weaker parts of their panel, aside from the snorefest of the release schedule and cast listings of newly acquired titles there was the horrible announcement of Sasami Mahou Shoujo Club, a show I had never heard of until it was mentioned at the panel. And from the blank stares of the other attendees, I’m pretty sure no one else had heard of it either.
While the Funimation industry panel was entertaining, the Anime News Network panel, industry or not, was just flat out good. It was informative and while entertaining might be a stretch of the imagination, it was far from the usual droning that I had come to expect from fandom panels. In other words, it wasn’t amateur night with the panelists stumbling and bumbling around on stage, of course it helped that quite a bit of their panel was taken up by questions from the audience.
This is usually a concern at most industry panels since most of the questions asked by the attendees were hunting for information on unreleased titles, to which the usual response was “I can’t comment on that,” or some variation thereof. Instead, there were questions asking if the anime industry had hit a wall the US which were thoughtful and showed that people wanted to know more than when the next volume of a show was coming out. More importantly, the answers given by the ANN staff were meaningful, which is more than I can say about most of the answers given by industry panelists. One more note: Free stuff makes everything better. More companies should take a hint from the ANN panel.
Now for the bad news, sort of, Bandai Visual USA’s panel was pretty much your average panel with quite a bit of information about the company and their products with not much flair. Their Chief Executive Officer, Konno Tatsunori, gets good scores for being informative and knowledgeable about their products and what they want to do in the US market. Sadly it looks like by trying to hedge their bets by releasing both HD-DVD and Blu-ray versions of their releases, they’re going to take a hit on those HD-DVDs since the format war is essentially finished. On the other hand this panel reminded me of college lectures where the professor wasn’t very interested in the subject matter and it just seemed like Konno wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. I didn’t really mind because I probably would have felt the same way.
Another problem with this panel was that the trailers shown were less than spectacular. While I don’t like the trend of Hollywood trailers giving away the entire plot of the movie, they do a good job, at the very least, of being fun to watch. However, the trailers for the third volume of Freedom and Mobile Suit Gundam: MS IGLOO which were meant to show off Bandai Visual USA’s forays into 3D CGI left me unimpressed.
While Bandai Visual’s trailers left me unimpressed, ADV’s Sneak Peek panel left me bored to tears. David Williams and Matt Greenfield would have been bearable but they kept it simple and direct but they tried too hard to be funny and clever with their presentation which just made it worse. But their biggest gaffe was that they had pretty much no clue how to work the hardware in the room as it took an agonizingly long time to move from section to section during their presentation. Aside from their horrible presentation skills, the content they were presenting didn’t help much either, when your big licensing announcement is Moonlight Mile you know you have a problem with the titles you’ve picked up.
Finally there was Bandai Entertainment’s panel which was so bland, aside from one moment, that it barely left an impression on me. That moment was their announcement that they had acquired Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, one of the most overrated shows of the year. I was glad to see quite a few other people felt as I did since the announcement was met with cheers it was also met by quite a few blank stares.
All in all, the Otakon 2007 panels were a mixed bag which was to be expected and hopefully the panelists will have learned what worked and what needs to be improved and get it done for 2008.
|
