A Sad Day for Anime

ADV films is gone. This is a sad day for me as I am a fan of anime and a loved what ADV did for anime in America. Well sort of. Okay this is kind of confusing so forgive me if it doesn't make that much sense. In 2007 ADV made a deal with Sojitz Corporation. The deal was that Sojitz would own 20% of ADV and ADV would own the rest. ADV would in return get loads of cash and then ADV and Sojitz set up the ARM corp., a company that would aquire the rights for anime that ADV would then release. Sounds sweet, right? Well not so much. For whatever reason they two companies couldn't get along. After only a year the deal fell apart. The relationship ended and ADV lost the rights to all the shows it had been releasing in the past year because those shows were licensed to the ARM corp. and not ADV. Well played Sojitz. Well played. But here's the bruiser. The crushing blow, if you will. Sojitz still owned 20% of ADV! So, I guess the only thing ADV felt they could do was to just break free. In the wake of all of this comes a plethora of new companies. SXION 23, AEsir, Seraphim Studios, and Valkyrie Media Partners have all shown up on the scene. And lets not forget the already established Sentai Filmworks. To make an absurly long winded blog short; I guess all that ADV is doing is moving everything to a few new companies they have set up to get away from the stranglehold of Sojitz. Maybe the ADV name is gone but everything else is still there. It still feels like the end of an era to me. I always hear people talk trash about ADV but they were by far my favorite publisher. They had a ton of good shows, great dubs, and the thinpak packaging was awesome. It just amazes me that you can be on top of the world and in just a couple years be gone. If Funimation didn't have Dragonball they would probably be in deep as well. I hate Funimation. Stupid name. Stupid logo. Ugh! In closing I hope all of this works out and we can get back to watching great anime from these new companies in the spirit of ADV.

Now go out and BUY some anime!
(Big up to ANN)

-Respect.