Rant: Gurren Lagann on SciFi Channel and Tokyopop
Don't worry, this isn't a dub-rant.
Sci-fi Channel
This past Monday the SciFi channel finished up Gurren Lagann by showing the last 3 episodes. I thought the dub was a pretty good dub; some characters like Leeron where better and some like Kamina where worse but overall you can tell they tried. My problem, instead, was that episode 26 had 1.5 - 2 minutes worth of material edited out when it was broadcasted. This made one of most important parts of the show nearly incomprehensible to first-time viewers. I realize American tv has more commercials then their Japanese counterparts but if they weren’t going to be able to fit everything in they should have forgone the opening song instead. That’s a fairly standard thing to do, especially during important episodes and should have been thought of. Makes you wonder if the people in charge, actually care about the show or about convincing people to buy the DVDs.
Tokyopop
My little brother wanted to know when the next volume of Kingdom Hearts manga was coming out so I head on over to the tokyopop website to find out. I eventually found the answer was December 30 but tokyopop did there best so I couldn’t figure that out. The site as a whole makes my 6.0 Mbps DSL look like dial-up, I can’t imagine how slow this site would be if I actually still had dial-up. Time-warping my internet experience back a decade wouldn’t have been such a problem if when I searched for kingdom hearts I could find the relevant page quickly but nothing in the search results helped. I then thought to browse by series but for some reason tokyopop thought it was a good idea to list every single volume of a series, instead of listing the series themselves - so there was dozens of slow-loading pages to thumb through. Not wanting to do this, I tried to find if they had a release calendar for the future and was able to find their release calendar for may-oct 2008. This was useless for what I wanted and rather pointless - if a title is already out, why do I care when it was released? Finally, I tried to search their store and was able to find the volume in question. I think, all told, I spent 20 minutes trying to find this information. They really should take the time to think about the actual customer when designing a website.
Posted in anime, anime rants/views
