#newtype usa

[annlarimer]

Newtype USA cost a bit, but its free DVD generally more than paid for the cover price - either directing you to series you needed or sparing you buying ones you didn't - and it was gorgeous. If you find a cache at a garage sale, grab it.

[anime-herald]

Looking Back on Newtype USA 15 Years Later

“Oh no! We’ve…we’ve just received word that this is the last issue of Newtype USA magazine. Good heavens!”, reads a small line of text tucked quietly to the bottom of the final page of Newtype USA’s February 2008 issue. “There was so much anime left to watch, so much manga to read…but no worries, for we hear that the same folks are launching a new, even better magazine real soon! Wahey! Oooh, and…

[theinternetisaweboflies]

[kerorowhump]

[keroinnie]

i have never felt so insane in my life until i physically flipped through this magazine like actually had to put it down and turn around hands on my head wanted to SCREAM these shoots are so fucking good yang jeongin is so INSANE i need to give jungwook mok and shin kim kisses on their lips bc of how insanely incredible yang jeongin's shoot is like i wanted to SCREAM ALSO FUCKING BAE DOONA ADDITION??? I DIDNT EVEN KNOW ???? THE BAE DOONA THEEEEE BAE DOONA IM SO SICK ALSO A LIM KIM INTERVIEW ?????????????????

[animepopheart]

Look what I dug up!

I used to be obsessed with Newtype USA, though I rarely bought the magazines because of the cost. At $9.95, they would be a steal nowadays.

This issue had Fooly Cooly postcards! The coolest character designs but I could never make it through the OVAs—a little too manic for me. :/

The cover story: .Hack stuff! Another series I never finished (.hack//Sign—I don't think I've watched or played anything else). The OP, art design, and whole "trapped-in-a-game" story (before SAO) were cool, though!

L: I'm pretty good with recognizing anime but this one is not in my memory bank at all. Anyone watch this series? Was it good?

R: Oh boy, look at all the dead companies here: Central Park Media, Suncoast, Fry's, and—my prediction—Best Buy eventually, too. That Ebert quote got a TON of play back in the day, too. I'm pretty sure I used it in more than one article.

More FLCL. Any fans out there?

And yet ANOTHER show I never finished. The colors and designs in Witch Hunter Robin were A+, but I got bored and dropped the series around maybe episode 15...

If y'all like these, I'll post some more photos another time. I only made it about 10% of the way through this Newtype USA issue!

[l-crimson-l]

If you can help it don’t buy gunpla from Amazon. It’ll almost always be at an inflated price if it’s not a brand new batch release.

Here’s some US based shops that I’ve found/used to help you avoid using Amazon:

-Newtype

-USA Gundam Store

-Mecha Warehouse

-Gundam Planet

-Gundam Place Store

-The Gunpla Hermits Shop

-Premium Bandai US

Extra! Lose/broke a part? Check out Plamo Kitbash to order individual parts from runners (I had to do this for my Kyrios)

I’ve ordered from all of these shops so I can confirm they’re all legit

Important thing to note here tho is that shipping for some of these shops is $10 flat rate shipping without another option. So save up a little and then make a bigger cart to make it worth it more. They also have frequent sales (USAGS has one like every week on something) so keep an eye out for that as well!

Now Physical stores is kind of a mixed bag. Barnes and Noble started carrying a few kits, so did Target and Hobby Lobby (I know how we feel about HL but they also put those kits on sale every other week 40% off). But if you’re lucky enough to live close to one Hobbytown USA always has a pretty great selection and you might even seen a Grandpa statue in there too. But of course always do some searching around you and see what local hobby shops are there. Always nice to not have to pay shipping and get it straight in your hands

[fma03anniversary]

Happy 20th anniversary FMA. Let's put some forgotten feathers back in your cap.

Melissa was the #1 anime theme song to wrap 2003, and peaked at #2 on the Oricon Singles Chart - Japan's music industry standard for charting CD singles. Melissa became the #34th top selling single for 2003 and was only on sale for two months of the year (Melissa went on sale Sept 26th and Oricon is tracked Dec 1 - Nov 30). Melissa ranked #66 in top Japanese singles for 2004 too. The song would be on the Oricon charts for 38 weeks! Melissa won Animage Magazine's 2004 Anime Grand Prix for Best Anime Song.

Ready Steady Go! was the 18th best selling single of 2004 and peaked at #1 on the Oricon Singles Chart, and would do so charting less than half the time of Melissa, 16 weeks.

FMA sweeps Animage Magazine's 26th Annual Anime Grand Prix held in June 2004 - winning best series, best male character (Ed), best female character (Riza), best voice performance (Romi Park), best song (Melissa @ #1, Kesenai Tsumi @ #2), and best episode (7).

FMA is on the cover of all 3 major Japanese animation magazines for July 2004 - Newtype, Animage, and Animedia.

July 31, 2004 L'arc~en~Ciel make their North American debut at Otakon. Prior to their concert held at the 1st Mariner Place (now CFG Bank Arena) in Baltimore, to a crowd of 12,000 the first episode of the upcoming FMA English dub is premiered.

Rewrite peaks at #4 on the Oricon charts and becomes the 63rd best selling single of 2004. Rewrite won Best Anime Theme Song at the American Anime Awards at New York City Comicon in 2007.

FMA gets the rare honour of going to reruns in Japan.

FMA debuts on Adult Swim and is on the cover of all 3 major North American anime magazines for November 2004 - Newtype USA, Anime Insider, and Animerica.

FMA pulls in a ton of new viewers to Adult Swim for December 2004.

TV Asahi ranks FMA the most popular animated TV series in Japan in fall 2005, a year after it finished airing.

FMA is the best selling anime series on DVD for 2005 in North America. Individual DVD volume sales are so strong they rank alongside anime movies.

Anime News Network crowns FMA the best series of 2005.

Link is the #4 anime song for 2005 and peaks at #2 on the Oricon chart.

Conqueror of Shamballa is the #7 anime movie and #47 movie overall in Japan for 2005.

Anime Expo 2006 celebrates FMA. AX teams up with FUNimation to premiere Conqueror of Shamballa at the convention, hosted by guests of honour: Seiji Mizushima (Series Director), Mike McFarland (EN Director), Masahiko Minami (President of Studio Bones), Romi Park (who unfortunately had to cancel last minute), and Vic Mignogna.

Conqueror of Shamballa set to screen in 40 North American theatres. In !!2006!!

In the first ever event to honour voice acting, direction, production, etc of English anime in North America, the American Anime Awards were held at New York City Comic Con in 2007, handing out awards for the Best Of 2006. Online fan voting selected the finalists and FMA led the nominations with 5. The series would lose Best Feature (CoS) to FFVII Advent Children, but win Best Long Series, Best DVD Packaging, Best Cast, and Best Theme Song (Rewrite). Source (1), (2), (3)

Over five years after its Japanese debut and four years after it's North American start, as Brotherhood begins airing in Japan FMA still ranks #7 for best selling anime series on DVD in North America for spring 2009!

[distress]

GET CURSED! Imagine hugging a boy and he turns into a cat. Wouldn't that be PURRfect?!

Fruits Basket Ad from November 2004 NewType USA, scanned from my collection.

[animehouse-moe]

The Animanga Find Of A Lifetime

Yeah, I haven't really been too active this week. I've been busy during the week with life and whatnot, but a good chunk of the end of this week has been about this pile of anime and manga magazines. It's no longer just a "pile" of Animerica Extra, but a bonafide Mt. Everest encroaching on 400 issues, so I have lot to explain with just this haul alone.

So, where to begin? An outline is probably best.

This haul is a total of about 311 issues (a little more because of a few duplicates and magazines that aren't strongly related to animanga). That huge number is split across 16 different magazines, 4 of which (combining for 37 issues) are Japanese language.

The full list, in alphabetical order, is: Animage (JP), Animerica, Animerica Extra, Anime USA, AX (JP), AX DVD (JP), Mangajin, Neo, Newtype (JP), NewtypeUSA, OtakuUSA, Pulp, Protoculture Addicts, Shoujo Beat, Super Manga Blast, and Yen+.

Protoculture Addicts and Animerica stand out in the bunch because they together combine for over 100 of the issues in the haul, which is good because they're by far the longest running in the lot.

Speaking of those, let me give a bit of broad history in regards to the magazines.

While the majority are English language, there's actually a pair of them that were created/published outside of the US.

Starting it off, Protoculture Addicts was created in Montreal, and was actually ran as a Robotech Fanzine for about a year or so before becoming a full fledged magazine.

And then there's Neo, the UK based magazine. It's arguably the most interesting ongoing magazine out of the lot (with Otaku/Anime USA being the only others). It's also the only monthly animanga magazine to be currently published in English as OtakuUSA is bimonthly, and AnimeUSA is quarterly.

But that's enough history, what about the insides? For the most part they're relatively standard, but there's not "as many" manga anthology issues in this mountain.

Super Manga Blast, Shoujo Beat (only 9 issues), Animerica Extra (which I now have extras of), Pulp (only 2 issues), and Yen+.

That last one is the most interesting to me purely because of an editorial/column penned by "The Otaku Pimp". Yeah, that's a real thing that appears in that magazine which is incredibly funny to me.

More on the interesting side though is Mangajin, a magazine focused on teaching Japanese through Japanese culture, which of course includes manga. This one is especially interesting because it oftentimes features the only instance of the manga inside being translated to English.

And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. There's an insane amount of information and history in the magazines, and an exciting amount of unknowns with the frankly incredible amount of promotional DVDs that remain attached to so many of these issues.

I just have to get through it all.... which will take a long time. Will certainly be recruiting friends and whoever to help out, so hopefully I won't be doing this for the rest of my life haha

[flojocabron]

11/20/24: Alrighty then! Here's the breakdown of my Wednesday fleamarket finds. First pic was all for $30 bucks: three blurays, three videogames, three Issues of Raijin comics 0, one Newtype USA magazine, and two Anime Expo program guides. Second pic got me for $14 bucks: one board game, a Ken Shamrock figure and four pre-teen novels and comics. Guitar Hero 3 and Devil's Rejects were a quarter each! And $4.00 got me a new unopened dvd series of Hatfields and McCoy's and an empty case for Xbox Conker Live and Reloaded. Last pic has a lot of movies and a wii game. They were $2 each, totaling $38 for everything. Some criterion collections, some 30s gangster flicks, and other cool random flicks. A great day!

[testure-1988]

Speaking of magazines, feast your eyeballs on this! It's a two page advertisement for the first DVD of Invader Zim, circa an anime magazine (Newtype USA) from 2004!

[ponett]

i'm literally ten minutes away from USA gundam store but i don't have a car with which to go there so i feel weird ordering from them and paying for shipping so instead i always end up buying my model kits from newtype on the opposite side of the country

[memesmadefullmetal]

Congratulations to you on reaching 3,000 followers! And thank you for running this fun tournament to celebrate! In Fullmetal Alchemist character popularity contests, Ed and Roy so often take the top two spots, and as much as I love those characters, it is refreshing to see their counterparts Al and Riza take the top two spots for a change. Also, although I voted for Riza, I think that Hiromu Arakawa would possibly be pleased by Al's win. When Newtype USA magazine interviewed her for an article in their January 2006 issue, she reportedly told them that she identified with Al.

Thank you so much! 🥹🫶🏻3️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣

We’re so, so glad you enjoyed the tournament! It really means the world to us <33

We didn’t anticipate this outcome at all, so we’re pleasantly surprised that both Roy’s and Ed’s counterparts were the ones taking the top spots this time around! Go Al and Riza! 🥰

(Mod Mustang is also always VERY happy to see Riza do well! 🤭)

It is the greatest honour to think that we might have also even pleased the great Arawaka 😍

- Mod Mustang & Mod Hawkeye 🔥🦅

[tinyozlion]

Addressing the Troubles: Part 2 / 3

A Brief History of Gundam in Japan and the USA:

Here is my go-to analogy: The Gundam franchise is to Japan what Star Trek is to America. And Gundam Wing is to the Gundam franchise what Deep Space 9 is to the rest of Star Trek.

Wing was part of an experimental phase in the franchise’s history; when they were intentionally trying to break away from the usual modus operandi. Wing, along with the earlier G Gundam, was intended to boost flagging viewership and sell model kits– like, expressly, openly, just to sell model kits. The plan was to start from a blank slate that would allow new viewers to hop on board, without having to be caught up on the sprawling canon of the UC timeline (Universal Century).

In Japan, audiences were already familiar with the general premise of A Gundam Show; rather than spend any extra time re-establishing details that an already Gundam-savvy audience would know, it skipped right to explaining on how this particular series was departing from the established material. In this case, the noteworthy information was that Wing takes place in the After Colony timeline, and is set wholly in its own universe– we have a different sinister organization with a ‘Z’ in its name, a different mysterious blond man who wears a mask, a different conflict between Earth and Space, and no mention of Newtypes. 

Perhaps the most significant difference between Wing and its predecessor was its tonal shift. In the original Mobile Suit Gundam (if seasoned fans will pardon my oversimplification), the good guys are a relatively wholesome bunch or reluctant civilian heroes coming together to survive, a found-family supporting each other and trying their best to protect the vulnerable. It’s just ONE Gundam, and a crew of overworked, under-supplied misfits. It’s still very much a complex narrative about the horrors of war, but like, there’s a goofy side-kick robot! Kids run around White Base causing shenanigans! The more the UC timeline progresses, the more complicated it gets, but the point is, it’s a different style of complicated. There's a relatable and familiar flavor to its protagonists and their struggles. 

Pan over to Wing, where we are served right away with the spiciest plate of the spiciest feral murder boys, possibly the LEAST reluctant people ever to get in a mecha and cause harm.

The protagonist pilots are remorseless teenagers who were robbed of their adolescence before the show even began, and thrown into the meatgrinder of revolutionary violence– not the most relatable bunch, and not one audience surrogate amongst them (that honor goes to Relena). None of them work together, everyone is morally ambiguous, and they’re all hyper-competent elite soldiers from the get-go. In MS Gundam, Amuro spends his first fight in the Gundam trying to learn to walk and shoot using a manual. 

Some Gundam fans were quite put off by this change, but in the USA, we had no basis for comparison. Gundam Wing was the only Gundam show we had, and furthermore, it was one of the first “serious” “cartoons” introduced to mainstream television. And it blew. Our. Fucking. Minds.

--I cannot stress enough how influential that early 2000’s Toonami programming block was in introducing anime to American audiences, and by extension, American television producers and toy companies. I recommend checking out this IGN article about the history of GW’s debut on Cartoon Network, and the effect it had on the industry at large: How Gundam Wing Found Its Home On Toonami 20 Years Ago Today . For another take on the phenomenon check out: Found in Translation: How Gundam Wing Became A Global Phenomenon (Opinions are those of the article writer, not mine.) 

For those of you who are of that Toonami-block generation who never encountered the original series: MS Gundam is truly gripping and powerful, and if you’re not already a Gundam fan but found that Wing tickled your fancy, the original line up of shows will probably be right up your alley too. Be prepared for a very different overall experience from Wing though– for one thing, you may be surprised to discover that the original series, with its earlier animation style and dated anime tropes, is absolutely fucking brutal.

Fundamentally, the original Gundam is a series that is steeped to its core in a very somber, distinctly post-war Japanese melancholy that Wing, for all its lofty philosophizing, lacks. I don’t mean to make that a criticism of Wing– it had a much, much shorter run to make its point, and it was intentionally trying to do something different from its parent series.

Gundam Wing may at one point had a reputation for being Gundam’s dark, broody, edgy cousin, but Wing is also as chaste as a Victorian romance novel, and obscures most of its violence in clean, bloodless explosions. In the first episode of MS Gundam you will be treated to first-hand mass civilian death. In the movie and at various points of the shows there are scenes deliberately and uncomfortably reminiscent of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Zeta Gundam, you'll get to explore a wide selection of Horrible Ways To Die In Space that I suspect would have the same effect on a child as accidentally watching Watership Down (1978) thinking it was a Disney movie. (That's right: It makes you a more interesting person with good taste!) There's also like, nudity. And adults, with messy, adult relationship problems.

The U.C. timeline is just a lot more, I want to say, earthy as a rule. The characters are normal people and they have a wide range of interests and relationships to each other. Even when it’s reaching those philosophical high-notes, the focus is closer to the ground level; you see the day to day struggles of the crew, of civilians, of couples, you see their private lives, watch them evolve over the course of many years, how they fall in love, eat burgers, hook up, make friends, and make bad decisions. It’s a rich, diverse world filled with believable, complex people; the world building has more time to fill out, with its roots firmly in the soil of classic science fiction writing and space exploration; and it does what it sets out to do, which is deliver a gut-punch of an anti-war story.

If you take anything away from this, it’s that developing a tolerance for older mediums and long-term relationships with particular stories will give you access to some of the most rewarding experiences possible. And that’s true of many things, but especially of stories that have had lasting cultural impact and serve as time capsules for the struggles of their era. It’s true of The Iliad, it’s true of Lord of the Rings, it’s true of Akira, it’s true of Gundam. 

“Just Make Us Five Gundams” – Wing’s Famously Troubled Production & Why You Should Read Episode Zero

Gundam Wing was created flying by the seat of its pants from start to finish. 

Hideyuki Tomioka, executive producer on Wing, was still early in his career when he was cut loose on a new Gundam series with minimal oversight.

“Just make us a show with FIVE new Gundams”, Bandai said. “It’ll sell model kits!”, they said. “It’ll be fun!”, they said. And they laughed, and laughed. 

But Tomioka agreed, and set out to assemble his creative team– notably, Masashi Ikeda (series director), Katsuyuki Sumisawa (series composition / head scriptwriter), and Shuko Murase (character designer). Many of his chosen production crew had never worked on a Gundam show before, but everyone knew their stuff, and had been selected for their outstanding work or for showing promise in their respective fields. 

--Please, pour one out for them now.

The production schedule for Wing was apparently one of the roughest in Sunrise’s history. In a 2017 interview, producer Tomioka explains: “With Wing, we delivered the episodes to the TV network a week early. All of them. I was told by the producers at the network that there would be hell to pay if this next Gundam wasn’t delivered a week early like clockwork, and I said sure. I also told Mr. Ikeda and the company that we would maintain a one-week-before-air delivery schedule, and we delivered every single episode a week before air.” 

Head scriptwriter Sumisawa recalls camping in the Sunrise studio and working all night without sleeping in order to turn in scripts on time (something I vividly recall doing with my senior thesis). 

Despite the entire staff being burnt out from the continuous workflow, the team apparently met every single deadline, and still consider Gundam Wing to be some of their best work. 

However, Wing’s trouble didn’t end with just the frantic schedule.

Significant, under-the-table leadership changes at the studio level made a bad situation worse. Just before the production of Wing, parent company Sunrise had sold the Gundam franchise to Bandai, apparently in secret, leaving their creatives and producers like Tomioka in a lurch. The sudden change in sponsors led to an attitude change that would filter through the company, causing significant friction and splintering within the organization.

In fact, creative control of the series was tossed in the air at multiple levels:

 When series director Masashi Ikeda was hired for Wing, he was coming off a few rocky dismissals / resignations from earlier projects due to his disagreements with sponsors. He was new to Gundam, but was known for being a talented, if contentious, storyboard artist / director. Right away he took Wing in an unexpected direction, apparently derailing the series from its original trajectory after only 10 episodes. Signing off on these provocative decisions may have painted a target on his back, but it certainly made Wing stand out from its predecessors! Perhaps predictably, Ikeda either “abruptly resigned” or was fired from the project after Episode 29, and was substituted by Gundam franchise veteran, Shinji Takamatsu. Takamatsu would ultimately finish directing the remaining half of the series, though he was left uncredited.

Sumisawa too withdrew as a the lead scenario writer. He reports having to cope with curve balls thrown in the script by different writers who hadn’t run their decisions by him first, leaving him to struggle with reworking episodes at the last minute in order to accommodate the unsupervised changes. 

All the crunch and chaos, the impossibly tight schedules, the directorial and creative control changing hands mid-series, led to many of the important plot points and connective tissue that had been slated for reveal at the midpoint of the series being severely truncated, or scrapped entirely.

--And this, friends, is why there are so many instances in the early episodes of Wing where characters make reference to events and concepts that simply never show up in the series– the material got cut for time, and the unexplained anecdotes were left to dangle. 

This includes by far the most unfortunate omission in the series: the pilot backstories. In the postscript of “Gundam Wing: Episode Zero”, the manga prequel released seven years after the series first aired– scriptwriter Sumisawa makes this plea:

“[...] I would like to make a request of those who have read this book. I would like you to watch the entire TV series and Endless Waltz again. By so doing, I think you will be able to fully appreciate the work, Gundam Wing. This series of stories of the past was requested of me by Director Ikeda, and it was supposed to appear in the to the p20the TV series after episode 27. However, it was pigeonholed roduction schedule being the worst ever, and the fact that I withdrew ws scenarist. When I returned to the show, there was no chance to fit in the past, and we had no choice but to table it indefinitely (though we did try in episode 31, The Glass Kingdom). It was able to become a graphic novel through the kindness of the editors at Anime V Magazine and Mr. Kanbe's (artist) cooperation. As one of the co-creators, I am extremely grateful, and this has become a very emotional work.”

In one interview, Sumisawa laments: “Nobody wants to write recap episodes. Episodes 27 and 28 were recap episodes.” Producer Tomioka notes that “Everybody worked some serious miracles for part two. We never would have been able to do part two [of the series] if we hadn’t put in those recap episodes. It really was rough.” 

--This Is why I recommend that people read Episode Zero around the time they get to the mid-series point in the anime, where the backstories were always meant to go. Many, MANY questions and frustrations that I hear from first-time watchers will be cleared up.

It’s a damn good collection of stories, too! As you can see, my own copy is nearing a level of decrepitude that ought to make it Nursery Real at this point. I took it everywhere with me in my school bag as a comfort item.

–A link to the manga can be found in the Bookshelf section!