Ragnarok.Yatenkou said:
»You know that always bugs me with Sunrise (And a lot of Japanese gaming companies who don't ship overseas) Gundam has always been a huge hit globally, people will buy Japanese copies just to be able to play their games.
Would it -kill- Bandai/Sunrise/Namco whoever to just make the text English and leave the voice actors as is? I mean come now that's not asking for much, and they can make HUGE profits from the anime geeks overseas, there's a huge market for it but they don't want to act on it.....why?
Because they *** up marketing it the first time and think the failure was due to lack of interest rather than them hamhanding it. After Wing and G aired on Toonami, they went straight back to First Gundam. As much as I love 0079, that's a massive drop in animation quality, so it's not surprising kids didn't take to it like they did with W and G (which were pretty top-tier animation at the time). Not to mention the merchandise... Kids wanted Burning Gundam and Shining Gundam, but shops only ever got ***like Mandala Gundam in stock. Soccer moms threw hissyfits over Deathscythe Hell's name and stores actually listened to their hysterics because reasons and pulled them from the shelves.
Then SEED got screwed by censoring it to hell and back (seriously, giant robots with giant rifles are fine, but handguns have to be censored to look like 50's sci-fi lasers?). Destiny and 00 got shitty timeslots, and then they just stopped trying to air Gundam at all.
It doesn't help that Sunrise has a HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE policy when it comes to licensing Gundam in the US. If someone wants to bring one Gundam show over now, Sunrise wants them to do them all, and nobody is willing to take such a big risk. There was talk about Funimation looking into it last year, but I haven't heard anything on that front in months now.
But like I said; the models are selling really well and that is what Bandai cares about. The shows, the comics, the games, the novels are all just advertising for the models, so if the models are selling well already, Bandai are going to eventually make another try at pushing Gundam.
Build Fighters would be the perfect gateway series to get it going again, but would need heavy editing due to stupid product placement laws.