With the convention starting tomorrow, tonight brings us Preview night at the San Diego Comic Con.

The past few days has brought us a wealth of news on what to expect at the convention. I will try to summarize some of the highlights that have been revealed thus far in this post.

Check back for updates. We will have one SDCC post a day, highlighting all the news, revelations and happenings of this pop culture mecca. These posts (including this one) will be updated throughout the day as we have new information to add.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Anime on DVD reports that Bandai has acquired the rights to the live action Cutie Honey movie. This movie by Hideaki Anno of Evangelion fame is a live action version of the popular comic and manga. It’s an over the top action/comedy/drama movie that’s hard to compare to anything else but is certainly worth checking out.

Thanks to Dave for the heads up.

The first wave of Revoltech figures has finally hit retail and I was able to get my hands on a Shin Getter 1 figure a couple weeks ago. I have taken a number of pictures of the figure and posted them in a gallery available here.

Continue reading for a review of the figure.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Good news for French Canadian Anime fans! We could be seeing the return of some of our favourite old school Anime shows.

Le journal de Montréal has this article discussing plans for 2 new Canadian TV stations “Teletoon Retro” to debut in English in Spring 2007 and “Télétoon Rétro”, the French equivalent, in French in Fall 2007.

The channel will be featuring animation dating from 10 years back and older. It’s mentioned that they are attempting to secure the rights to old classic Anime such as Albator and Goldorak.

Albator is the French dub of Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock (or Herlock as the Japanese insist on calling him). It came in 2 series. Albator 78 is a 42 episode series translated from the 1978 series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock”. “Albator 84” is a 22 episode series translated from “Endless Orbit SSX” from 1983. The numbers denote the year of their French dub rather than their Japanese release.

Goldorak is the French version of Grandizer (Grendizer to the Japanese) and aired starting in 1975.

Both shows were wildly popular among French Canadians in the late 70s and early 80s.

It needs to be mentioned that Teletoon in both it’s English and French incarnations is notorious for horrible programming due mainly to the fact that they’re incapable of affording to pay for anything the least bit desireable. They generally get the scraps that better channels like Comedy and YTV don’t want. Whether or not this goes through really depends on the financial feasability of securing the rights to these shows.

Anime News Network mentioned this story on Friday but claimed the rights to the series had already been optained. This confusion was probably just lost in translation.

Thanks to Powet antagonist Dave aka Soundowaivu for finding this article.

A new MegaMan game is on its way for the NintendoDS to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the franchise. Scheduled to be released on December 17th in Japan, the game will make use of both screens. The announcement was posted on the Capcom site.

Japanese TV gets about as much US animation as we get Japanese animatiton. And just like on our shores they have to translate it, and sometimes cut new opening sequences.

And just like our imports, I think its safe to say Japanese fans probably complain about bad translations and oddball changes as much as those in the west do. Enjoy.

New Adventures of Batman, X-Men 1 and 2, Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races, Transformers, Transformers 2010, and Beast Wars

and some native Japanese stuff for fun:
Spider-Man
GO Lion (Voltron)

Vinnk and TheOrange play a little Famicom and then use Phil Bond‘s method of transfering your Wifi Settings from one DS to another.

*note: will come to iTunes in 2 parts on Sunday June 11.

Slashdot.org is currently linking to a story on Mainichi going over the past 10 years since Neon Genesis Evangelion turned the manga and anime markets on their side. Its covers Hideako Anno’s past projects to his development of Evangelion and then delves into the show itself headfirst. A good read for any fan of the series.