Quickie: ‘Haruhi’ Season 2 Begins Slow Info Roll-Out
Anime, Gossip, JP News, News May 9th, 2008Tags: staff lists, suzumiya haruhi no shoushitsu, tatsuya ishihara, yasuhiro takemoto
The official website for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime has updated, and it now features Yuki on the front page instead of Haruhi (’cause she disappeared. GET IT?). The only new info is that director Tatsuya Ishihara and assistant director Yasuhiro Takemoto are returning.
On a tangential note, I’ve often wondered how many people got into Haruhi at least in part because of its novelty (the out of order episodes, the “Hare Hare Yukai” dance and its billion iterations, the memes, the character CDs for characters that don’t even have names, etc)? I wonder how Ishihara’ll keep things fresh in the second season?
On another tangent, information is coming out now, so it’s time to speculate on when we might actually see the show! Since it sounds like most of the info will come in the July issue of Newtype (on sale in June), I think it might be a little late for a summer/July start– although with Haruhi, the rules go out the window, so it’s possible. Though KyoAni has the Lucky Star OVA and Clannad After Story on their plates as well, so I’m inclined to think fall might be more likely.
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May 9th, 2008 at 9:16 am
In my opinion, Haruhi wins because of the characters. For some reason, they are just so damn lovable, and the way that they interact with each other is so entertaining. Those novelties are just little sprinkles of genius added to an already fantastic show. So I think we’re still going to have a good second season even without any novelties.
Lucky Star, on the other hand, only lives off of the fumes of Haruhi’s novelty. It’s not even creative enough to make its own gimmicks… (>_>)
Wow, I comment on this blog way too much.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:24 am
@Scott: No such thing as commenting too much!
That said, Lucky Star does have its own gimmicks– and for it, too, it’s all in the characters. You have to remember that the Lucky Star manga had *nothing* to do with Haruhi, really. They were both owned by Kadokawa before, but it’s KyoAni that really united them, by incorporating the seiyuu and adding in all the references. (I’m not even sure if Konata’s cosplay cafe is Haruhi-based in the manga, though it might be.)
May 9th, 2008 at 10:09 am
@Gia: No it was definitely Kadokawa that united them. They’ve been making most of the marketing decisions on their own properties from the get go. Kadokawa WANTS both properties united to reach as much of the majority fanbase as possible to make the most money.
And Haruhi isn’t exactly all that genius, they just really knew how to reach out to otaku with it. The genius (heck I wouldn’t even use that word, it’s more like method) is purely in how it was marketed, not the writing or characters who are pretty much just moe archetypes with minimal development. Kadokawa is really aggressive in it’s marketing.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:30 am
@Kaioshin_Sama: Mm, I guess the who’s-responsible bit might be shared, but the unison still came in the anime, not so much the original manga. (And the manga was popular enough prior to the anime– its first release sold out so fast Kadokawa had to do a quickie reprint.)
As for the “genius” of Haruhi, etc…it’s so easy these days to just be all cynical and put all the credit on marketing, but as someone who’s worked in marketing, I feel pretty comfortable saying that all the genius marketing in the *world* won’t make a bad product sell well.
Haruhi’s sales and popularity come from, yes, the masterful marketing– AND from the fact that the series is highly entertaining to a lot of people. (I won’t get into the debate over the quality of the writing and characters, seeing as it’s purely subjective anyway.)
May 9th, 2008 at 10:30 am
[...] Webconferencia wrote an interesting post today on A Geek by Any Other Name: Quickie: ‘Haruhi’ Season 2 Begins Slow…Here’s a quick excerptThe official website for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime has updated, and it now features Yuki on the front page instead of Haruhi (’cause [...]
May 9th, 2008 at 10:43 am
The thing that made me love Haruhi was that, at some point during its airing, I was trying to condense the show’s concept into one single line; that’s when I realized how ridiculous it sounds to say “sci-fi high school romance comedy metafictional show”. And how nicely Haruhi worked as such.
I loved the novelties (the dance, the out of order broadcast), but that’s not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about what made me love the show. I just love when a work shows how a (seemingly) ridiculous premise, when done well, can actually work.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I’ve been thinking for a while that it’ll premiere on July 7th…
May 9th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I got into Haruhi because I asked my friend to recommend me a good series that was airing at the time. I checked it out and at first was laughing because of the purposely bad first episode. I’ve had that video for school thing before and it was pretty bad. What sold me afterward was how the story was told through Kyon’s perspective. The cliches that were present in this anime just happen to be awesomely told through his ppoint of view and so that was cool.