Few things in anime are as sad as telling someone about a beloved series or film ... only to find in the time since you discovered it the item in question is now out of print.
This happens with depressing regularity. Anime titles aren't licensed forever, and the companies that license them sometimes also have short lifespans. Consequently, there's a growing body of anime titles from a variety of distributers -- some still active, some defunct -- that deserve to be rescued and republished for new generations of fans.
What happens when an anime title falls out of print? First, all existing copies of the anime wend their way out to distributors and retailers, where they eventually get sold off. They're not replaced by a new printing, and so access to the title is available to whatever copies are left on hand.
Second, depending on the title, prices on those few used copies can go through the roof. Grave of the Fireflies, one of the best of the titles in this article, is currently changing hands for $50 and up. That's not unusual: I've seen some out-of-print DVDs going for $200 to $300 on Amazon, or soaring into the four-digit stratosphere on eBay.
Third, bootlegging of that title also tends to go up, whether in the form of physical copies knocked off in Taiwan or China or illicit digital downloads.
With many of these lost or vanishing titles, the news isn't all dire. For one, everything covered in this article has been issued on DVD, which means any copies you find are likely to have held up well. Back in the days of VHS and LaserDisc, it was all too common to find sole copies of a title, only to discover it was unplayable. (VHS tapes would get eaten by their players; LaserDiscs sometimes rotted due to poor manufacture.)
Another bit of good news: many of them have enough used or remaindered copies sitting around that most people curious about them can pick up a copy without breaking the bank. They're just not being actively reprinted anymore.
Above and beyond the titles on this list, though, are many that may have vanished for keeps. Many shows from the '90s that were produced to fill video-rental shelves in Japan are all but gone. The companies that made them no longer exist; the owners of the copyright may be hard to track down; and the master copies of the anime itself -- the film reels or videotape -- may be moldering away, unlabeled, in a locked file cabinet somewhere. Don't laugh: when a film like Lawrence of Arabia can end up literally rotting away in a corner of a warehouse, it's all too easy for an anime title to follow suit.
So how do anime titles come back to life? Most commonly via a "license rescue" -- having some other company (or even the same company, if they're still around) pony up the cash to bring the show back into print. Another way some of these titles can be rescued is, of course, via streaming. Still, it's not a trivial thing to make a title available via streaming: it has to be licensed properly through its copyright holders, and a master copy of appropriate quality (especially for an HD stream) needs to be tracked down. In either case, though, the company doing the rescuing has to be convinced that show will be profitable for them, or they won't bother. That's often the biggest hurdle, especially given anime's niche status in the home video market.
Check out our list of the best out-of-print anime, and be sure to drop in your own suggestions as well.
Image: Hakkenden: Legend of the Dog Warriors. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.
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