Reign: The Conqueror
Non-Movie
AnimeNewsNetwork Bayesian estimate: 3.507 (Not really good-.49), rank: #3460
One of the reasons it becomes easier to bury the video store is the nature of niche markets. With the death of the video store, seemingly the important nature of a niche market died with it. RedBox has basically killed renting a niche title on its own merits, only storing the newest of new movies in handy, ubiquitous vending machine form. Netflix has become the only hope for a fan of niche genres to get the things they desire easily.
On paper, this would be a problem for anyone who's a fan of niche series. In practice, you have a series like Reign.
As an anime fan for what seemed like a short period of time, only getting into the genre in college, it seems hard to remember the timing of series. Going from the early part of the decade, when anime and manga had began to come to the United States at a clip of huge amounts of new series, with popularity for the genre rising to an all-time level and it seemed like everything we could see was amazing- finally to all the companies getting too big for their own good, the economy collapsing, companies that import the series going the way of the dinosaur. By the time we're in 2010, the stream of anime has fallen dramatically, albeit with more episodes than we thought and generally decent quality. Despite this, it becomes interesting to see the series that go through this fall- with series like Reign, which, with its pedigree of the director of the anime movie Metropolis and the creator of Aeon Flux, managed to get enough of a buzz that it had made it to Adult Swim [then, as now, the pinnacle of an anime series, with its ability to turn pretty much anything into a smash hit]- end up in 2010 forgotten: Never given a re-release in a full-series pack, ending up another DVD on the liquidated shelves.
There are many reasons for this, but it seems like the best one involves the most simple idea: Reign is a piece of crap.
This series, intended to be an anime retelling of Alexander the Great's life, managed to do things that seemed impossible with Alexander the Great and making it far gayer than most things involved with Alexander's life: The many films of Alexander, the many stories of Alexander, and so on. Strangely, I believe that Reign managed to out-gay the all-male porn parody of Alexander the Great's life. When it's watched, it begins to see why many of the people who watched this seemingly sure-fire hit on AnimeNewsNetwork saw it as terrible, why it's slipped under the cracks and is forgotten about, and why it would end up forgotten. Indeed, it seems to say the problem with the anime industry as a whole: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much advertising you give a series, what network you get the series on, or any of those things. When it all boils down to it- if the series is good, people will love it. If the series is terrible, then no one will care.
Non-Movie
AnimeNewsNetwork Bayesian estimate: 3.507 (Not really good-.49), rank: #3460
One of the reasons it becomes easier to bury the video store is the nature of niche markets. With the death of the video store, seemingly the important nature of a niche market died with it. RedBox has basically killed renting a niche title on its own merits, only storing the newest of new movies in handy, ubiquitous vending machine form. Netflix has become the only hope for a fan of niche genres to get the things they desire easily.
On paper, this would be a problem for anyone who's a fan of niche series. In practice, you have a series like Reign.
As an anime fan for what seemed like a short period of time, only getting into the genre in college, it seems hard to remember the timing of series. Going from the early part of the decade, when anime and manga had began to come to the United States at a clip of huge amounts of new series, with popularity for the genre rising to an all-time level and it seemed like everything we could see was amazing- finally to all the companies getting too big for their own good, the economy collapsing, companies that import the series going the way of the dinosaur. By the time we're in 2010, the stream of anime has fallen dramatically, albeit with more episodes than we thought and generally decent quality. Despite this, it becomes interesting to see the series that go through this fall- with series like Reign, which, with its pedigree of the director of the anime movie Metropolis and the creator of Aeon Flux, managed to get enough of a buzz that it had made it to Adult Swim [then, as now, the pinnacle of an anime series, with its ability to turn pretty much anything into a smash hit]- end up in 2010 forgotten: Never given a re-release in a full-series pack, ending up another DVD on the liquidated shelves.
There are many reasons for this, but it seems like the best one involves the most simple idea: Reign is a piece of crap.
This series, intended to be an anime retelling of Alexander the Great's life, managed to do things that seemed impossible with Alexander the Great and making it far gayer than most things involved with Alexander's life: The many films of Alexander, the many stories of Alexander, and so on. Strangely, I believe that Reign managed to out-gay the all-male porn parody of Alexander the Great's life. When it's watched, it begins to see why many of the people who watched this seemingly sure-fire hit on AnimeNewsNetwork saw it as terrible, why it's slipped under the cracks and is forgotten about, and why it would end up forgotten. Indeed, it seems to say the problem with the anime industry as a whole: At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much advertising you give a series, what network you get the series on, or any of those things. When it all boils down to it- if the series is good, people will love it. If the series is terrible, then no one will care.
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