Examining depictions of athletics, games, and competition
The popularity of high-profile sports anime has grown in recent years and generated more interest in the sports those series portray. In an attempt to get in on this boom, Shufu to Seikatsusha has published two issues of Spo-Ani!, a “sports animation magazine”, so far in the past 6 months. I received my copies of issues one & two today from Amazon Japan and had some time to flip through them.
The second quarter of 2015 in Region 1 home video releases just got two more sports anime additions as FUNimation announced today it plans to put out Ping Pong the Animation and Wanna Be The Strongest in the World! this June in Blu-ray/DVD combo packs featuring English & Japanese voice tracks.
Those two bring the total number of sports series with home video released currently scheduled in the next three months to five:
April 28th: Free! Season 1 DVD (sub-only; Discotek)
May 12nd: Slam Dunk DVD set 1 (dub & sub; Cinedigm)
June 2nd: Haikyu!! Blu-ray Collection 1, DVD Collection 1 (sub-only; Sentai Filmworks)
June 2nd: Wanna be the Strongest in the World! Blu-Ray/DVD Combo set (dub & sub; FUNimation)
June 23rd: Ping Pong the Animation Blu-ray/DVD Combo set (dub & sub; FUNimation)
There are a couple of sports anime series that have North American disc releases scheduled in coming months: Slam Dunk on May 12th and Haikyu!! on June 2nd.
Cinedigm’s first Slam Dunk DVD set was originally scheduled to come out last December but that month passed with no updates about a revised date until recently when the current May date appeared on Rightstuf and other retail sites. The set is listed with 14 episodes and English & Japanese language tracks; the English dub to be included is suspected to be the same as what was previously released in the mid-2000’s by Toei.
The first subtitled-only DVD and Blu-ray collections for Haikyu!! were included in Sentai Filmworks’ June 2015 releases announcement in late Februrary and will have the first 13 episodes of season 1. The other season 1 set would presumably have the remaining 12 episodes (14 through 25). A second season of the high school volleyball series has been green-lit.
Hello and welcome to the tentatively-titled Sports Anime Blog. (The name and design will likely change over the coming weeks.)
You may know me as @calaggie on Twitter or as the writer of Nigorimasen!, a mostly anime blog. So why create another blog/website all of a sudden? I have a passion for sports in general along with anime & manga (and sometimes crossovers) and I’ve been paying more attention to sports-focused titles over the last few years as new and popular ones have aired and been simulcast. During that time, I began to explore the variety of older and more recent anime and manga series and even presented a few panels about sports manga in 2012 (Fanime & Otakon) and 2014 (Fanime). I recently noticed that the domain sportsanime.com became available, decided to grab it and now this is my initial attempt to make something of it and fulfill one of my blogging goals for the year.
What I plan to do here is write about sports-related anime (and manga) series, instances of sporting events in appearing outside of “genre” (like volleyball in the Lucky Star OVA), upcoming events & promotions around the world, and other smaller things I might not have felt comfortable making into a post on my regular blog.
I’ve already started a page where I am attempting to compile a list of sports-related panels that people have presented at conventions. If you know of any I should include on that page, please let me know on Twitter or through a suggestion box that I hope to add soon.