Sunday, April 9, 2006

Slam Dunk

Slam Dunk was a huge manga in the late 80s and early 90s. If Dragon Ball was the hit of the 80s, Slam Dunk was the next huge hit. I remember seeing it everywhere, and I remember that I was skeptical about how good a manga about a Japanese high school basketball team can be. One day, I was bored and decided to rent the first two mangas and I was hooked. I eventually bought the entire series and even years later, I still enjoy going back and reading it. The anime came out around 1993 and there were some early fansubs of a few episodes and the movies (which were disappointing). At the time there weren't any LDs of the TV series so all of the fansubs were based on fairly poor VCR recordings with mono sounds!

I haven't kept up with the later fansubs, but then the domestic rights were picked up by Geneon. This weekend I picked up the first two DVDs of Slam Dunk. The anime was done very well and was exceptionally faithful to the manga even down to the art. If you read the manga, you will recognize the scenes except now they are animated. The subtitles are like close captions since it even describe emotions (i.e. "shocked gasp") and overall there weren't much extra effort put in to the DVD. There are basically 5 episodes per DVD and no chapter stops within each episode. There are no extras, no trailers, nothing. Still, the anime itself is very enjoyable and the translation is good.

For such a huge hit that it was, I'm baffled as to why Geneon does not promote this series at all. There's absolutely no mention of it on their site other then a press release and it's not listed among their offerings. Have they decided to stop releasing beyond the 4 DVDs that's out there?

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