What happened to my Saturdays?
First Saturday that is not Superhero Saturday in the past 6 months was yesterday. It just felt so wrong and… not Saturday at all. It also feels really weird to not write an episode post on a Sunday. On the other hand, it’s not like this is over yet.
It couldn’t possibly end here
I’ve seen a lot of disappointed comments about continuation – whether movie, OVA series or S2 – didn’t get announced yet. You have to take into account that these things do take quite a lot of time, and even more so in the case of Tiger & Bunny. Japanese corporate bureaucracy can be pretty slow, and no one expected the series to be hit. If you take a franchise like Gundam or Sengoku BASARA as comparison, they have existing fanbases and are pretty much surefire sellers. The studio can plan for S2 even before the first episode of the first season has aired, and have things ready to roll the announcement out by the end of the series. Many staff&cast members may also have signed up for other projects – they can’t just sit around waiting and hoping for a continuation – so there’s the issue of scheduling. I think it was Nishida who mentioned in an interview the other week that when/if a continuation is made, the earliest a movie could be ready would be 2012, and the earliest S2 could be ready would be in 2013.
Satou Keiichi's Tiger & Bunny scripts
In the mean time, the series will start reruns on Japanese TV in October. The schedule was updated on the official site yesterday (sadly no Saturdays).
- Tokyo MX from Tuesday 10/4 at 23:00 JST
- BS11 from Friday 10/7 at 18:30 JST
- Animax on Mondays at 22:00 JST
No idea how good these time slots are because I don’t usually watch these channels. The BS11 time slot seems pretty primetime, though.
Stuff to tide us over
Chibi Arts Blue Rose
There’s plenty of stuff to keep us busy for the wait, although no doubt things will slow down a bit also here at This is Sternbild. We’re determined to do our best during the wait, and with two manga serializations, manga anthologies from three publishers, official books, BDs and their drama CDs, soundtracks and character songs, merchandise, figures… Well you get the picture, we’re not running out of material just yet!
The release dates list has been updated, too. There’s finally Katsura’s art book as regular edition available for preorder, and the Tiger & Bunny Character Song Album (name subject to change) is also available for preorder in some online stores. No word yet of what will be on the CD, and the only confirmed artists are Hirata as Wild Tiger and Morita as Barnaby. (Please let there be another duet!)
The end of September is going to be pretty busy with books, the first two manga anthologies from Asuka Comics are already out (mfw mine were supposed to ship already on the 22nd, but they didn’t get collected by Japan Post until the 24th). TIGER & BUNNY GO! GO!! 1 anthology from Movic should be out on the 30th. Both Roman Album and Hero Gossips are coming out next week. Hero Gossips has been really popular on preorders, by the way. It was sold out even on Amazon Japan when I checked a few days ago. I’m really looking forward to my copy, the contents look like it’s gonna be the most bang for the buck when it comes to information about the characters.
Information from the source books should start trickling in soon, so even though I’ll probably have to wait a week to get mine there’ll surely be tidbits to keep us busy until the mailman comes.
Until then, see ya!
This is Sternbild 
! Do you have a link or something to a higher quality of that video? The one I saw was terrible quality but I can’t view the original on Nico Nico.
Try this:
I’m optimistic with the the amount of merchandise generated, and the world wide response that we will see more of our favorite ojisan and bunny.
The merchandise mill doesn’t seem to slow down. There was a clear spike in the sales of the OST when I checked Amazon and CDJapan today after they had played the song sample from it on radio.
I’m all right with waiting a while. I’d rather have a S2 that took careful planning versus one that was rushed in a few months. Excited for the hero gossips though, we may already get info coming in a couple of hours, since in Japan its already 9/26.
We may also see some stuff coming in from across the pond, at least around next year, for dubs and BD/DVD releases over here.
Even though I’m dying for more, I want that more to be good quality so I’ll wait patiently.
I very rarely watch dubs, I’m just so used to the original voices I almost never change the audio track on my DVDs. There are only like 2-3 American VA’s I can even recognise just from voice.
Yuri Lowenthal.Sunrise had one of the weakest anime line-ups ever, they should be scrambbling to do something, and as fast as they could, with their only gem. Gundam AGE seems to be set to disappoint, and almost all of this season´s anime had a very weak following in Japan and around the world. It would be, economically, a disaster, if they don´t get anything ready on 2012. They should cancel or postpone other projects and work really hard on Tiger & Bunny.
Of course, it would happen in a perfect world. But, in Japan… they have so much trouble deciding things faster, they might just attain to their schedule. Unfortunately.
I’m going to check out all the new shows Sunrise has for the Fall season but it doesn’t look good when the most promising seems to be Phi Brain. AGE is aimed at kids and all Horizon trailers have been is tits in the face and FukuJun’s character doing a smug smile a few times. The Summer season wasn’t completely hopeless but T&B shot into its own category and left everything else struggling behind.
(There’s also the butt-hurt the execs at Sunrise are probably still feeling that the show they deemed as a total failure became a humongous success that probably slowed down things a bit. Namco Bandai have already marked T&B as one of their focus franchises so it’d look bad if Sunrise didn’t follow suit.)
The main money maker for anime is the merchandise. The anime sales are less important than the merchandise sales and the manga serializations seem to be planned to fill the wait for continuation and keep people interested in it – or in other words keep them buyfagging. At the current rate, it’ll take about a year for all the planned figures to come out, too.
I agree with you, the manga/merchandise will earn them money and fill the void, at least a bit. Speaking of it, I bought the Roman/Gossips and the mangas, but I´ll have to rely on your translations or from some scanlator group. I, and other non-japanese speakers, would be very grateful for it.
Unfortunately, I had to cut my spending on T & B because the exchange rate (extreme) hike killed all my planning. That means NO OST 1st press for me. D*mn…
We’ll see what will be translated once the books are out. In any case I’ll collect the anonymous translations that I find.