Item 1:

A week or so ago, ADV announced that they’d licensed the TV series Air as well as the movie. I don’t know if they licensed the Air Summer Special or not, but seeing how this was based on those “visual novel” (dating-sim) games, the conventional wisdom was that the series would never be licensed in the U.S. (niche audience, extreme licensing costs). So it is amazing that ADV would license both the TV series and the movie. If it does well for ADV, we might see Kanon (2006) licensed. While I really liked Air, Kanon would be the title I’d really want. Now, if only ADV would make full use of honorifics in their subtitles. ?

Item 2:

Well, looks like SciFi wants to get back into the anime game by having an anime block on their network for Monday nights (full story here). The thing is that only Manga Entertainment licensed (and possibly distributed) titles will be shown in the block. I laughed out loud at this quote, “The content comes from Manga, one of three major U.S. anime distributors…” Well, how do they come up with that? I would argue that FUNimation, ADV, Geneon, and Viz are bigger than Manga when it comes to titles.

As I look over the list of Manga titles, I see I only own one — Castle of Cagliostro. I’ve seen several others but to be honest, there’s not a lot there (and certainly nothing in the “hot and new” category). I’m surprised SciFi is apparently planning to air the OAVs and movies movies due to the constraints of the 30-minute TV block (baring being edited for time or the title clocking in at roughly 24-minutes). I remember that Cartoon Network used to air OAVs but quit because it messes up the scheduling blocks. It will be interesting to see how this goes.