Motteke! Synergy-fuku

In a previous kvetch on anime’s future within the digital divide, one nuance I ever so gently grazed concerned the often ridiculously lengthy timeframe that exists for loosing an American anime DVD into the retail wilderness. This issue boomeranged, ruthlessly slamming into the back of my skull, while mulling over a recent news blip for Bandai Entertainment & Kodakawa Picture’s forthcoming title, Lucky Star.

For the oblivious, Lucky Star was Kyoto Animation’s immediate follow-up to the grossly popular, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi—while featuring an independent narrative, the show’s lighthearted satire channeled much of the momentum from its predecessor and in a sense prolonged the massive Haruhi-ism begun in 2006. Lucky Star itself aired from April to September of 2007 and in November of that same year was officially announced for the US, slated to breach sometime in 2008. Bandai and Kodakawa went on to speak nary a word of promotion until just last week, when a street date of 5/9/2008 was finally dropped for the first DVD.

Four silent months have already slipped since the initial US licensing communiqué, with roughly three more stretching-out before the eventual delivery of the inceptive disc. By that time, over a year will have lapsed from when the show originally began airing in Japan. Too put things another way, once Lucky Star does hit, it’ll be seriously old-hat for many a hardcore fan—ostensibly the show’s targeted audience—who in this marketing void might no longer care enough to buy the product.

What I then question are the circumstances that birthed this synergistic vacuum. The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi rode a tsunami of fan enthusiasm on its crash course with the United States, further swelled during a five month incubation period by Bandai Entertainment’s fabulous ASOS Brigade marketing campaign. Even though the show ended in July 2006, was announced for the US in late December, and didn’t see the first DVD release until May 2007, during that disc-less period where visions of the series’ elaborate box-set danced in fan’s heads, it never felt like the anime world was lacking in Melancholy awareness.

Lucky Star, in considerably humbler fashion, saw its US curtain raised by way of a DVD extra on the final Haruhi disc. This rather unceremonious reveal was all the pomp afforded prior to last week’s terse product dating.

I’m sure fan falloff is inherently expected by all companies releasing anime in the US, but Lucky Star isn’t exactly a one-to-one equivalent with its forbearer, either. Within the community, opposition towards the series was present amongst the most devout Suzumiya followers; this could be attributed to a simple truth: where Haruhi is easily accessible by even casual anime watchers, Lucky Star remains tightly cloistered for all but the aficionados of Japanese pop-culture. Cartoony visuals and comedic trappings belay a dizzying deluge of anime, manga, and cultural references providing both the show’s bread-&-butter and a perplexing impediment that’s already culled portions of the fanbase.

Potentially siphoning additional gas from the tank is the winding-down of Haruhi's hype. Unlike Japan, America hasn’t been graced with the product push—whether in the form of new light novels, manga, PVC figures, or video games—that has outlasted the spunky SOS Brigade’s animated adventures. While season #2 of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi might still be sometime in coming, there’s enough ancillary material bombarding Japanese consumers to keep them sated until those promised days of a second season are reality.

Conversly, Haruhi’s American fandom was propelled by fansubs and kept aloft on the show’s US marketing campaign; once the actual DVDs landed, the energy surrounding the series expediently drained and has bottomed-out in the absence of new domestically released products. In this current environment, May 9th is going to be a long ways off, enough so that Lucky Star might have to swim primarily on its own prowess.

Here’s a show made by the same production studio, features some of the same voice talent, and is plugged-in enough to make direct references to its slightly older animated cousin, yet Bandai and Kodakawa in their wisdom allowed a cavernous rift to form amidst the two works, when common sense would dictate overtly employing Haruhi to promote Lucky Star.

Sure, unavoidable issues will always prevent series from receiving faster releases, but it’s this manner of inconceivably boneheaded handling that hobbles shows before they’re ever placed inside a DVD player. During the waiting period, why not attempt to energize the fans, especially when an existing title’s popularity can be heavily leveraged to advertise a somewhat related but ultimately less exciting property? Instead, saying nothing almost guarantees the only consumers left once the DVD is available will be hobbyist collectors and dedicated followers of the show.

Seeing these types of lost opportunities, I can’t help but think it’s really mismanagement, as a whole, hurting the anime industry and not many of the other reasons often scapegoated for declining sales. Simply licensing and releasing products can not amount to a show’s total marketing. Looking at Lucky Star, I’m left hoping Bandai and Kodakawa get with it and start a late game effort to publicize this series beyond a few website banners and simply slapping a gold-foil sticker on the DVD package reading, “From the animation studio that brought you the smash hit, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi.”

[Note: this post’s title is a Romanized mishmash of the word “synergy” and Lucky Star's opening theme song, Motteke! Serafuku, which translates into something like “Bring it! Sailor Uniform.”]