News from around the world – all in Baltimore!

Otakon tends to be one of the two places (beside Anime Expo) where the anime industry makes the majority of their announcements in the United States. Sometimes, there are announcements that are world firsts, being made here in the states before they are even made in Japan. Otakon had a mixture of those this year, and we’re going to review some of the highlights below!

FUNimation stole the show, it seems, with their announcement of acquisition to the rights of Cowboy Bebop, which will be getting a blu-ray release later next year. They’ve also rescued several of Bandai’s titles, including Witch Hunter Robin, and Banner of the Stars. This to back up an already impressive line-up going into the Fall means fans of both FUNimation and several of these older titles will be very excited for the next several months to come.

Somewhat overshadowed by this announcement, just an hour prior Viz announced that they were going to be redistributing the entire television series for Ranma ½, another old fan farvorite that has not seen print or production in sometime. While further details weren’t available from Viz, it should go without saying that this resurgence of interest in older shows or lapsed liscenses means that the industry is doing well and fans can look forward to the future with more releases of older works in the future.

Speaking of Cowboy Bebop – series director Shinichiro Watanabe announced his new show exclusively at Otakon, called Space Dandy. It basically takes all the elements of Cowboy Bebop that fans know and injects a significant amount of humor into them. To give you one example, the female lead in the show is a waitress at a Hooters-like restaurant in space that is simply called Boobies. And the hero, Dandy, is a Hawaii otaku, is obsessed with Hawaii, even though he has never actually been there. And the villain of this entire thing? An intelligent, articulate gorilla that wears a powdered wig. Pretty awesome, yeah?

While not a lot of details were revealed, it was very clear that this show is an attempt at a more lighthearted experience for the audience, but it will still come with the masterful direction of Watanabe. Each episode is going to feature new and unique alien designs as well, and Watanabe said “We have a different designer designing each different alien in the show.” This is attributed to Watanabe’s desire to have the designs be unique and interesting, and he believes that if a single designer did all of the designs for the aliens that they would be in some ways repetitious of each other.  Watanabe said his only orders to the designers were “Show me something nobody has ever come up with before.”

Moving over to the manga world for a bit, Ed Chavez of Vertical Inc. had some new announcements for attendees of his panel, dressed in Gunam cosplay to boot. Along with continuing series such as Gundam: The Origin, Flowers of Evil, and Chi’s Sweet Home, Vertical announced some new titles as well. Wolfsmund is a series that was likened to Berserk in a number of ways and the preview pages from the book show it to be very similar in setting – certainly high on my watch list in the coming months. There was announcements regarding shoujo manga as well. Along with the sequel to Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight, The Twin Knights, Vertical will also be releasing Pink – Love and Crocodiles as well as Helter Skelter. They will also be publishing the manga for hit film Summer Wars.

This wraps up Part 1 of my Industry Panel coverage – check out Part 2 going up soon!