Saturday, December 4, 2021

My Life In Fandom: "G Gundam" Available At GundamInfo

GundamInfo has put up a playlist for Mobile Fighter G Gundam, with English subtitles, for an indeterminate period of time. As of this post, only 10 episodes are up, but I would not be surprised if the entire series shows up before they turn the list private and unavailable.

These offerings by GundamInfo follow two patterns. The first is that there is some form of anniversary event or similar occassion that Bandai deems a useful excuse to re-release the series for free because they're pushing something related, like a new merchandise release or an announcement of something new in that franchise. The second is to act as literally free advertising because the series isn't under some exclusivity deal (e.g. Amazon, Netflix) and YouTube is sufficiently global that putting up there reaches the target audience.

I am unaware of there being a new Blu-Ray release (just the existing one), and the only new merchandise is a new model kit for the God/Shining Gundam, so I think it's a blend; they're using the new Gunpla kit to justify putting it up on the YouTube channel for a while, hopefully to turn into merchandise sales via one or another outlet.

That said, I think going forward we'll see not only more obvious patterns of uploads and privatizations but other properties will finally follow suit. Toei is already doing this, especially with its tokukatsu backlog, and it looks like Macross is going to follow sooner than later though no announcements have been made yet. (Seriously, put the original up now that Harmony Gold is out of the way as soon as your exclusivity deal with Amazon ends.)

This is not the business environment that once was, and the younger corporate officers realize this. As the turnover hits in Japan, expect more changes embracing this reality to come forth.

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