Anime DVDs: Popularity and Pricing

[SeijiSensei]

I just received a shipment from RightStuf the other day with the catalog included. (I wonder how many parents even know about the tear-out adult catalog in the back.) I started browsing around and discovered how wildly the pricing of shows can vary. Let me give you a few examples:

Title	Minutes	Price	Price/Hour
FLCL	200	$63	$18.90
Samurai Champloo	650	$180	$16.60
Black Lagoon (v. 1-2)	200	$54	$16.20
Ergo Proxy (v. 1-5)	500	$135	$16.20
Shakugan no Shana (v. 1-6)	600	$162	$16.20
Chobits	600	$128	$12.80
Noein (v.1-4)	528	$72	$8.18
Neon Genesis Evangelion	650	$81	$7.48
GITS:SAC	780	$90	$6.92
Azumanga Daioh	650	$63	$5.81
Scrapped Princess	650	$45	$4.15
Planetes	650	$45	$4.15
Kare Kano	780	$54	$4.15

Obviously age of the series matters some, with older shows like Kare Kano and Planetes costing about a fourth as much per hour as the newly-released Black Lagoon. Still there are some older shows that draw extremely high per-hour prices. Samurai Champloo was aired in 2004-2005, and FLCL was released in 2000-2001. To me these variations suggest that prices are determined as much, if not more, by the "demand side" as the "supply side." Certainly there will be variations in the per-hour production costs, but not, I suspect, as great as the observed variation in prices across shows.

I'm just glad my favorites tend to come from the less-popular, and thus less-expensive, end of the spectrum

[JKL]

It's the same case for me since I mostly prefer less popular shows. Although that can be expensive too at times.

[Avatar_notADV]

Keep in mind that you're comparing first-release prices with collection prices. Yeah, if you're a fan with infinite patience and a teeny tiny budget, you'll always get more show/hour out of repackaged collections rather than new shows. Duh. (Obviously not everyone can go this way, or the company concludes "these shows don't sell" and they don't license more of 'em...)

[Robotnik]

Isn't FLCL also an OVA that was released one episode per disk? That really skews the $ to runtime ratio. Samurai Champloo and Shana are also Geneon-licensed; Geneon's price per volume seems to stay much higher than ADV's or Bandai's even at rock-bottom sale prices.

[Vexx]

Heh... nice to see someone else who does the $$/hr-of-fun computation on entertainment activities. I always use that for amusement parks, movies, sports (like golf), and vacations.

I was about to say calibrate for collection versus first release sets but I just noted Avatar_notADV said something along those lines.

[problemedchild]

Just find RTS's sale. It's always a bargan. Just got the compete season of Chobits, Mahoromatic (both seasons), Last Exile, and Vandread for only 100 bucks. Works out to less than a dollar per hour.

[Aoie_Emesai]

I would say popularity is a major reason for price, and the other would be age. I mean this by how long it's been out, not rated M, XXX, C, stuff like that.