The Star entertainment supplement Tonight wrote a piece on the five new channels in today’s newspaper, with Animax being touted as the “Big Drawcard”. The only bungle was that they showed a picture of Speed Grapher above the little blurb for the TV show Hex, but anyway.
Overall, the article is fairly complimentary of the new channels, and Animax specifically. Particularly interesting is Ross Hair’s (SPTI Senior Vice-President of International Networks) comments concerning local content. Clearly, he heard my silent plea: he states that indigenous content will be sought initially to act as bite-sized fillers between shows, featuring “local personalities”.
“So we would look at short-form programming, which we already do worldwide, whereby we look at the music and fashion of anime, for example, or the technology and gadgets that the 15- to 29-year-old anime-watching audience is interested in.”
While the technology and gadgets bit sounds a bit like consumer-whoring, these fillers also carry the potential to turn into half-hour or full-hour length shows in their own right, so that’s a bonus.
Having read a variety of posts and threads in other forums and blogs, the issue of poorly planned programming cropped up (something I have fortunately not yet encountered on the channel). One extreme example – Solty Rei – showed the first episode on day one of Animax’s launch, followed the next day by the last episode in the series. The wobble of training wheels as the new channel starts up, or indifference to the subject matter? I’m going with the former, but take it as you will. I also agree with the need to include the episode number as well as the title of each episode, as it makes things much easier for the average viewer to suss what they have and have not watched.
But the generally impression is very good, with many stating either how glad they are that the channel has finally arrived or that XYZ show is just, like, so cool.
I’ve included pictures of the printed article for your perusal.
