I mentioned this elsewhere, but what hurts a lot about this is that it makes it so much harder for *kids* to watch these shows. Adults and teens will know to pirate or quickly download it, but kids won't. They won't get to find these shows or grow up on them, and a lot of these creators made these *for their kids* and kids like them. Especially when you look at something like Sesame Street, which was originally created for kids with limited educational resources. It's horrifying.
@@morley364 I will make sure to show my kidy all my favorite childhood shows, honestly growing up in the 0s/10s was great for me because a lot of the great stuff was still around on TV, most of my fav childhood cartoons/shows were from the 20th century and I will absolutely make sure that my children watch this sort of stuff rather than whatever bullcrap the american media machine decides to shit out next. We should all make sure to do this
@@notagoodanimator1352 This guy with the tight business model for artists. Just e-beg man. Go to patreon. Don't even bother trying to get actual money to live. Just beg your fans for cash directly
I do genuinely believe that as a society we need to get serious about media preservation. Peer to peer does help but I think we need to find ways to preserve art long term because ironically, technological advancement as made art more difficult to preserve just because of how we store it.
After the hbo max fiasco blew up on tumblr, posts circulated explaining how to burn videos on DVDs. It's important that this information gets shared because my generation, who grew up with the internet, knows jack shit about preserving media in a physical form.
Libraries. You are thinking of libraries. Please support your local library and tell them that certain cartoons are not available on streaming anymore. Most of them will try to purchase the dvds and make them available to library users.
Honestly pretty interesting how it works. On the one hand the internet and the ease at which backed up data can be copied makes it easier to preserve media. No more lost or rotten tapes or damaged films. On the other hand modern DRM makes it harder and harder to copy stuff which means that when a company decides to pull something off the internet it’s just lost if that DRM has never been circumvented. I think it kinda goes both ways Like I don’t really see how a burned dvd or blu-Ray is any better than a digital copy on a hard drive. Yeah a hard drive can crash but dvd’s can get scratched up too and burned ones actually tend to fail given a long enough time too. I think what’s most important is that there’s enough backups and that they’re verifiably, think of something like redump for games. Though that’s much harder for media like films or music.
I think you mean IPFS which filecoin is based on top of? I think all filecoin does is give users an incentive by actually allowing them to make a (reaaaaally) small amount of money by renting hard drive storage for peer to peer distribution. On the other hand cryptocurrencies are pretty horrible for the environment so I don’t know how to feel about using that for that purpose.
As one of the many that have followed Infinity Train since the pilot first-aired, seeing it struggle for years all for it to end in such a disrespectful way, almost hurts. Can only imagine how it feels for those who have actually worked on it
I was halfway through the last season when the just took it away without warning. It’s really disappointing. I hope they’ll give it a 5th season at some point for Amelia’s storyline.
So David Zaslav can get rid of cartoons like Infinity train but a nut job like Ezra Miller gets to stay at the company this doesn't make any sense at all and quite frankly I'm upset by this
The craziest part of this is that literally EVERYONE on the Warner Bros and Cartoon Network side of the merger thinks that this was a bad idea and was actively telling the Discovery half that doing this was going to cause problems. Their new CEO just wants to pump out more mediocre non-scripted series that the Discovery audience loves so much and to do so he's taking every decent relationship his comapny has with animators and is tossing them out the window.
discovery is losing billions already, they could lose another 25 billion by the end of this year this merger is going to end up like the aol merger a big huge waste of money that will be look upon by in years ahead
Funny thing is that I cancelled HBO Max early in the year because of Infinity Train's cancellation and because I just wasn't using it enough to justify still paying for it. But I just took it as normal short sighted business nonsense, and moved on. But I had no idea how correct I was to do so because this is just morally wrong and offends me in a way I didn't even think they were capable of doing.
Infinity Train was one of their most popular and highest rated animated shows, even after its cancellation. It constantly trended on social media like every month. They also removed OK KO, Summercamp Island, Mao Mao and Mighty Magisword, plus a bunch of shows and movies that were either cancelled or had a second season or sequel still in production plus 200 episodes of fucking Sesame Street. This is like if Crunchyroll just out of nowhere decided to remove a bunch of shows that only got one season, a couple that had a second season on the way and then one of the shows removed was on the scale of popularity on their platform like, say, Naruto Shippuden. And on top of that, they decided to remove like 200 random episodes of One Piece. This is basically what WB/Discovery did to HBO Max.
OK KO had a crossover with Sonic The Hedgehog. Not only was that the kind of brand synergy wet dream the suits at Warner Brothers would stain their pants for, it was a connection from older animation fans to newer animation fans. I saw old Sonic SatAM fans tune into a show they had less than zero interest in because it had a fun crossover with something they liked. Imagine binning that just to save a couple bucks on tax. I don't know if kt makes good business sense, but it doesn't feel like a great long term strategy.
@@ragnarockerbunny It has gotten so bad that investors are losing their shit, WB's stocks have lowered in value by like 20 billion dollars and most of the animation industry is beyond pissed. This is by far one of the quickest I've seen a corporation basically commit seppuku. It's amazing.
@@mr.goblin6039 The fact even the investors were not pleased is beyond refreshing, most of the time you hear a bad decision being taken for them, the fact they're going crazy over this too is important
Infinity Train is a cult hit at best, just because something trends on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s organic. Unless we start paying these cartoonists salaries and healthcare I’m not going to complain about David doing his job, get rid of anything that doesn’t make Discovery money
@@christianmathew398 WTF? How are you gonna come here, spew nonsense that isn't true, pretend to give a shit about animators... and then dick ride the greedy business man literally removing shows and firing people so he DOESN'T pay residuals that go into those people's healthcare? Are you mentally ill? What is wrong with you?
The posts from the show creators on social media about this are heartbreaking. Execs really don't care at all about the media they own and seem to be especially dismissive of animation.
Apparently cartoon network execs warned about how much good will was built between the network and animation crews would be burnt by any move like this especially doing so without warning the creators.
1:27-1:31 Yes, Owl House, Infinity Train and Amphibia should absolutely have their own video. I think it’ll be worth noting how those stories all exploring the “other world” concept in their own distinctive ways while also having endings and not being infected by the clickbait title curse most Isekai originating from the Narou site have.
Going back a bit further there’s star vs the forces of evil as a reverse isekai, (or isekai adjacent depending on how you want to classify it,) and over the garden wall which is a clear western isekai ahead the curve. Lastly with the amulet graphic novels rights getting bought by Dream works makes me suspect we may get yet another great western isekai with that. I think going over the history of the western isekai and especially the 3 you mentioned would be an extremely interesting video.
@@ThePreciseClimber as a fan of both I literally don't see the connection between the two at all other than the fact that they're about witches that draw glyphs 💀 completely different story and tone
@@alannahhegarty1482 Ok, do two things have to be exactly the same for you people to be able to compare them? It's not like I'm comparing an apple pie to the theory of relativity. :P Both WHA & TOH have the same basic premise - a magic-loving, non-magical girl wants to learn magic, she gets taken in by a recluse mentor and discovers the concept of magic glyphs. There are other, smaller similarities, too - there's a female bully character with family issues that quickly warms up to the protagonist, the mentor with a troubled past who lives far away from the core magic education facility, a major antagonist hides his identity by wearing a mask, one character has a curse that turns them into a wild quadruped, etc. But the differences are what makes Witch Hat Atelier GOOD. It has way better story structure and way better world building (the author didn't just slap a high school in the middle of her setting, for one). Character arcs are more organic, too.
@@ThePreciseClimber you're right I hadn't thought of some of the other similarities on the spot actually haha but I still stand by the fact that they both achieve what they set out to do. Yes Toh is flawed in some aspects but it's still incredibly charming, it's funny, quirky, has lovable characters,is emotional when needs be, and I thought the story was really compelling (especially the second half of season 2 ofc) + lumity solos :p I agree that the school is unnecessary tho, it allows for some fun stuff to happen but I do agree it was kinda shoehorned in and it basically disappears for most of season 2 anyways. As for the pacing, as I'm sure you're aware of its mostly down to the fact that Disney cut it short, meaning they had to drastically speed up the pacing for s2pt2 if they wanted to cover everything that needed to be covered. So I think with the short notice and just how much material was left to cover in a few 20 min episodes they did an incredibly good job for what it's worth
Hearing that Summer Island Camp had completely finished production on their final season and was ready to go, but may very well never be seen at all is heartbreaking. Even worse if like other shows, no one on the crew gets even a digital copy of the finished episodes.
It drives me insane how short-sighted modern businesses are. One of the biggest problems of modern businesses is how little stake executives have in the long-term health of a company.
I've seen this at companies that I've worked at as well. They make stupid decisions that will very obviously hurt the company in a few years for the slightest of balance sheet improvements. Then a couple of years later the old CEO is gone and the new one blames the old one for their short-sightedness while making new stupid short-term decisions. The worst is that most people are buy and hold investors that just want a company to do well long term. But the hedge funds, VC, corporate raider-types are all looking for quarterly returns and they hold the most sway as large active investors.
Why would they? It literally doesn’t affect their own lives or wealth in any meaningful way if the company goes underwater. Even if Zaslav gets fired tomorrow it’s not like he’s going to be starving in the street.
The great ONGOING HBOMax purge: Batman The Caped Crusader, the Gumball movie, tons of Looney Tunes projects, not *necessarily* cancelled but all sold off because WB are desperate to continue tanking their own stocks, I guess.
Sadly after seeing the news of house of dragon on hbo max getting almost 10 million viewers I honestly doubt they'd be seeing a loss in profit from removing animated shows and if ceos of other companies with streaming services see this mistreatment as incosequential and follow suit then that would lead into a really dark time for animation that I hope we never get to see.
I mean, all that means is that a lot of their pre-existing customers decided to watch the heavily advertised new thing based on one of the most popular series of the 2010s. Squid Game and Stranger Things' incredible success didn't nullify Netflix's issues (even ignoring that House of Dragon's immediate success might not stick around as long).
When streaming platforms remove content, it erodes consumer trust in the longevity of the content on that platform, and streaming platforms as a whole. I have started collecting hardcopies of my favorite shows, because I no longer have any confidence that they will be available long term.
THIS. The damage done to the bottom line in the immediate is negligible. The damage Zaslav has done to _consumer trust_ is _incalculable._ It would be like McDonald's announcing that in the interest of savings _some_ of their Happy Meals going forward _might_ be _slightly radioactive._ It doesn't matter how few, doesn't matter what the numbers are! You have _crossed the line._
I bought a physical copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion because I had a gut feeling that Netflix might remove it for other shows, like they usually do every once and a while, ironically enough that was before Netflix began removing their content due to low viewership.
@@mesiagamer5217 True, they usually give a month advance but I think Netflix fars better cos, most likely, they'll bring a show back to test the waters again. They try to weed out genres to make it easier for newcomers to catch a series, so you often have to rotate things to have more clarity BUT HBOMax can rot!...
Cancel your HBOMax yes, but more importantly cancel your Discovery+ if you have it. Because part of Zaslav's plan is to merge HBOMax under Discovery+. Zaslav is doing this because he doesn't care about HBOMax and has every intention of getting rid of it.
WB isn't hated by people, it's Discovery who's to blame and rightfully hated. Everyone on the WB has been letting everyone know that they're even angrier than the fans and been protesting as much as possible without losing their jobs, like the Uncle Grandpa creator tweeting fanart of UG with a gun in his mouth about to pull the trigger. It's the execs on the discovery side who did this, they're the ones with control over the companies and they're the middle aged dumbass boomers without any remote awareness of what they're doing responsible.
If by "everyone" you mean "cringeworthy autistic people on Twitter who obsess over the trainwreck that is the North American Animation Industry"? Then yes, be my guest. But most people don't give a fuck about North American animations because the vast majority is raw, uncut SHIT!
The anime pope decrees that pirating is no longer sinful. This speaks volumes on the state of animation and how disrespected it is by businessmen. Support creators!
David Zaslav is really putting a big ass bulls-eye on his head by pulling this move. Animation is just as, or even, important than any other genre in the business
His shareholders will want his head as well. Warner Discovery stock has lost half its value in the past four months. It was worth $26 on April 8th and as of today, it’s worth $13.22.
@@PeachWookiee Genuinely I don't understand how this combined with the Batgirl fiasco isn't ringing alarm bells with the people high up at WBD, surely by this point they've lost infinitely more money than they would have supposedly gained from cancelling Batgirl and all these shows getting delisted
Incredibly well put video. I think a lot of people need to see this to understand the magnitude of Zaslav's stupidity and disrespect. As for me, I'll be sharing it everywhere I can. Here's to all of us sending a strong message to those clueless executives 🤞🏻
From a cold, cynical business perspective, I understand why WB is doing this. But any intern can point to the fact that the public is beyond fickle, and the larger the bomb, the bigger the crater.
I don't watch discovery+ and I already stopped watching HBO max before this... Honestly it sucks like crazy especially after Disney is trying to make people pay to watch advertisements
Warner Bros isn't doing this by choice, Discovery is making them & really this Murder I mean Merger only happened because people didn't support Warner Bros nearly enough the past several years & desperate for money they let themselves be bought by people who made terrible decisions that we all regret. Cancelling HBO Max won't do anything at this point, although Discovery + needs to be boycotted. This is a war between Discovery & Warner Bros & we must make sure that the Warner Bros stuff is profiting while Discovery isn't so that we can send a clear message. Also we should spam tons of emails to Discovery so that we can be sure they know the message!
This whole situation has felt so devastating and depressing for me, and I already have a crap ton of bad things going on in my life. Animation is something that I love so much and yet to see the disrespect that it receives really makes me sick. Saying girls "graduate out of animation" and removing so many great and amazing animations from HBO max has just left me so hurt. I can only hope that these shows aren't lost forever and relegated to the boundaries that is piracy.
Okay, having the whole situation laid out like this, I can finally see the scope of what's going on here. They are doing exactly the thing that's been done to much of retail, like Sears and Kmart, where the execs by out a store, drain it for all the profit its worth, and drop its body on the side of the road to die while they reap the rewards the stock market generates doing a dramatic collapse of a major company like this. This is corporate vampirism. These individual shows are just the first victims: they're trying to murder WarnerMedia itself, and all its subsidiaries like HBO and Discovery. One of the oldest media producers that still makes things: that's an exceptionally dramatic death. They took all those shows off HBOMax *because* it would cause people to cancel their subscriptions in droves; they're cancelling finished movies *because* they'd be able to make their money back; they're doubling down on the Flash *because* people have already decided they're not going to watch it. Because a bunch of rich twats are watching on the sideline, betting on how long it's gonna take for the beast to go down.
Isn't it just wonderful that the stock market basically works by rewarding people for running businesses in worse ways intentionally? Oh, what was that thing about capitalism driving efficiency and innovation again...? I seem to have heard that one a lot.
I know Geoff's poked fun at RWBY before (and I'm not looking for a fight if you don't like it), but I'm honestly terrified that it, and Rooster Teeth as a whole, might be next on WB's chopping list. It's a passion project in memory of its late creator that's gotten 8 seasons of steadily increasing quality, and I *really* hope it doesn't get canceled for a fucking tax writeoff.
A part of me thinks that WB wouldn’t touch RWBY because, for now at least, it does make money. But I think if this next volume doesn’t do well, it could be in for trouble. For right now tho, I think they’re eyeing up Gen:Lock to be cut.
Most folks from some forums I frequent figure everything from Rooster Teeth is too out of the way to end up getting cut like properly Warner-owned media.
Not to get to pedantic, I do think it's fine overall, but I do want to say that the steady increase in quality to me at least is debatable. To me there was a drop after season 3 where they struggled to find their footing again for a while. Season 3 peaked pretty good though so overall not the worst thing ever. Also their fights an animation definitely didn't steadily increase in quality, but that's really understandable considering the circumstances. They were legendary shoes to fill afterall. The voice acting definitely steadily improved over time, as well as I would say most of the character writing. The overall plot can be debated I think. The show is a darling to me, but I can't deny it's flaws. Really through no fault of it's own, just some really terrible circumstances.
I dig your presentation style. The balance of informative, and personal is just right! This situation has been so frustrating, disheartening, and frightening. Thank you for making this video!
but no one has attacked or going on strike at WB HQ!!!! that's the problem of all of you, I'm always lazy in protesting on the internet instead of doing it outside like area 51!!!!! and that goes for you!!!
@@albertoromero5075 I don't expect artists to risk their jobs to gain the attention of a company who clearly doesn't value them. And I doubt protesting outside would do anything either. Financial loss as a result of these decisions is about the only way a major corporation like this will pay attention. Spreading information, circulating negative buzz, and cancelling subscriptions are among the only tools we have.
I just got into "forced indefinite unpaid hiatus" from my job because the CEO for the company I worked for really likes the line going up and up and did not care for * the * only person responsible for most of the graphic material for his company. It do be like that 🙃
People still sucking the cock of GoT even after the last few trainwrecks of it's previous seasons is sad, it can go off & die in a corner now, R.R can finish his books & they can go get those. This merger timed right around it's release alongside all of those cancellations was not a coincidence
I've always tried to practice 'ethical' piracy, even before the rise of streaming services. I'll often 'try before I buy', and if I like the series, I'll buy the physical version of it. If I didn't like it, then I never would have bought it in the first place. And for all of the reasons mentioned in the video and the increased fragmentation of the streaming services (1 or 2 was manageable, but now everyone wants a pieces of the pie and it's incredibly expensive to pay for all of the services), I'll download things available by streaming for the day it inevitably gets yanked, the streaming service gets bought out, costs become even more unreasonable, etc etc.
I honestly thought it would take something truly terrible for Jeff to support the "high seas" in any sense of the word. Truly we are in the darkest timeline.
Political upheaval, war in Ukraine, the massive climate crisis, capitalism destroying art & artists alike. You only now realize just how bad things are these days & then there was that awful pandemic. The 2020s are basically the end of the world in 1 massive crapstorm & we're all screwed.
Animation is so disrespected in the West by the higher ups in these corporations. Animators work so hard to bring their work to life, and then it's scrubbed away like it never existed.
Sue them. Every creator who is being robbed get together, get a class action together, and sue them. It's easily demonstrable that HBO is denying revenue to creators. The CEO won't even care if they get sued; he just wants this year's numbers to look good. Constant access needs to be written into IP contracts and union agreements going forward. And frankly maybe we need to burn the stock market down as well, but I'm trying to be realistic about what can be done within our current system.
Or, at the very least, creators retain ownership of their IPs should a streaming service cancel/delist them from their platform. That way, even if the current platform doesn't want to host the content anymore, artists can still get their shows to the fans by other means - selling a license to another streaming service, or hosting it on their own site for donations/small fee. Corporate entities outright owning creative properties they had no hand in producing other than writing a check shouldn't be in control of IPs
@@missbeast821 It's a good deal, but that would require destroying the current system and making sure the selfish grubbers are physically unable to influence the next one.
@@missbeast821 Excellent idea, and that is a tactic that could be implemented through federal legislation by changing IP laws. Given how deeply our senators and representatives are in bed with lobbyists and mega corporations, it would be very difficult to pass, but Europe has been very progressive on these items. Get it passed across Europe, in NZ, in Australia, Canada, and other countries and maybe, eventually, it will follow in the U.S. Still waiting for that affect to kick in on healthcare, but we might get there in the next 100 years.
Canceling and delisting movies and shows that have finished production just to avoid paying the creators residuals definitely sounds like it should be considered a form of fraud. Those creators wasted years of their lives making that media on the assumption that they would get that future revenue as compensation. They should be forced to pay those residuals anyway based on what the projected sales/views would have been.
After the posting of this video it is now confirmed that the Batman animated show with Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams has been scrapped and is now being shopped around. If an animated Batman show isn’t safe at HBO Max, truly nothing is
Like they have the numbers to tell them how much millennials love rewatching the ‘94 animated series, you’d think someone would see how stupid it would be to let another streaming service rake it in with a new show and have to pay licensing fees on top of that
@@PedroSteckecilo that's what most people mean when they say Isekai. I always found it stupid when people defend Isekai by saying going to another world is fine, when its really the deluge of bad writing and pure fan service people have a problem with the "genre".
To be fair to other streaming services, this sort of tax write-off only applies to merging companies within a short period of the purchase. That means most companies can't do this. The intended purpose of this loophole is to allow merged companies to get out of unnecessary ventures the purchased company invested in that don't align with the company's main interest (i.e. if the purchased company invested in gyms but, the main company just wants to stick with pharmaceuticals). The way WBD can do this is by saying the projects were intended to make X amount over 5 years on the service but since the project is cancelled, it can't be included in WB's projected worth. I'm guessing The Flash can't be cancelled because it's too close to WB's main revenue driver and costs simply to much to claim it as an alternative revenue venture
Thank you very much for making this video! As improbable as this might sound, I am a massive fan of Sesame Street, especially the classic era, and seeing HBO eradicate over 200 episodes overnight (without any warning I must add, unlike other shows there was no delisting announcement) was incredibly disheartening. It really confirms to me that companies have no interest in preservation, because if they don’t even want to put any effort into preserving one of, if not the MOST culturally significant show in history, than what hope does that leave for other media? I suppose it makes sense that a company would only care about history if they could find a way to profit off of it, but that doesn’t make it any better... I can only hope that one day there will be a complete library of all 4000+ episodes for children, fans and historians to watch forever, but when things like this keep happening it can be hard to stay optimistic. The same applies to all of the other shows erased in this purge, and my heart goes out to all of their fans. Media deserves better!
I'm a librarian I know this is horrible & I don't think our civilization will survive 20 more years with how things are right now. You have seen the current political situation & how people have decided to declare war on the truth right? I have heard people talk of genocide against people with aspergers for crying out loud in addition to racist stuff & people trying to defund police, fire departments, hospitals, schools, libraries, & more out of sheer greed.
Man, this is almost as awful as MAPPA and Netflix underpaying the animators less than average while working on Yasuke. At least the animators actually get that money!!
I majored in animation and minored in dramatic writing and I happened to get a professor who'd worked on spongebob and other animated shows and what I was flat out told is that the film industry in general hates animation. They don't respect it. They don't want to pay for it. They don't want to even acknowledge it's worth getting awards. He talked about how for being the head writer on some of the most classic spongebob episodes out there he made maybe about 15k which sounds like a lot till you account that this is 3 episodes without residuals or royalties and that he made the same amount and more doing live action. It's not just that companies have no respect for the people working the industry it's that so many of these groups don't even see animation as real shows/films. There was a film professor who I remember flat out said 'sure you can work in animation but it's not real story telling. it's a bunch of drawings and it doesn't have acting or directing. Maybe once in a blue moon a real film comes around but those are done by non animation directors.' People want the profits now and want more and more without ever acknowledging the reality. They want the line to go up. they want line up without acknowledging what really makes the line up and it makes me cry to see.
That second professor needs to get over themselves. A lot of time and effort goes into making animation a valued artwork equal to the work of live actors.
“No directing” what?! It’s literally the only medium where every aspect of what is presented is a direct decision of the creator. Every aspect of the lighting, every object on screen, every minute mannerism of the characters, every choice in the color pallet, the perspective and camera lens replication etc... its all motivated nothing is there by happenstance. I could not think of more incorrect opinion a professor could have about film. Like someone clearly never saw anything directed by Satoshi Kon
@Coolgamer2000s at this point we need to adopt the Japanese studio (bones) model works somewhere for a few years making connections and forming a well oiled team and then just branching off with that team into its own animator owned thing. Really hoping the team at Sony responsible for spiderverse and Mitchell’s will do exactly that.
Something that I've always found fascinating about piracy culture is that... While there *is* a lot of "I can't pay"/"I don't want to pay"/"I deserve this for free"/etc. among users, there's also a *hell* of a lot more "We need to preserve this." than one might expect, especially among those who initially put together the cracks, rips, and uploads that other people then acquire. Anime fandom was one of the first places I really noticed this -- twenty years ago, almost, now -- in that there was a lot of effort to replace older, lower-quality releases with higher-quality ones as time passed, because if it's worth preserving, it's worth preserving in the highest quality you can. There was a lot of stuff going on around that time about replacing hardsubs (baked into the video -- at that time easier for most users) with softsubs (a separate, text-only part of the file -- or a separate file all together -- with timing information attached), especially, because softsubs preserved more of the original work in its original form. Same deal with multi-lingual releases, when media container file formats were getting better and better, and more easily able to handle multiple audio streams without confusing the video players that could play them. It really was interesting to me back then, and it probably shaped some of my modern views on piracy -- for better and worse, as it both gives me a better understanding of the preservation side of things, but also less of a moral inclination towards buying things, even when that's a possibility, if it's something I only casually care about.
The people and co-workers who surround me in real life constantly look at me like I'm crazy when I say that I don't like/trust the digital age of "stream everything" entertainment. And they don't understand why I advocate for physical media. This. This is exactly why. There are SO MANY shows and movies that I've fallen in love with (mostly on Netflix) that I'll NEVER own because streaming platforms staunchly refuse to release any of their material for purchase on DVD, Blu-ray or 4K. Project Power, Day Shift, Army of the Dead, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Kate, Blood Machines, Oxygen, I Am Mother, Triple Frontier, Extraction, What Happened to Monday...I COULD GO ON AND ON! And I hate the fact that one day this could happen to them. Netflix and other streaming services could go under, there could be server issues, rights issues, server farm storage issues, someone could get a wild hair up their a**...anything. And poof. They're gone and forgotten. I hate this.
it is brazenly gross watching shit like this happen in the media industry, but I think warner's total disregard for its own content and employees is particularly rancid, hope it really crashes and burns around them so they reverse it
Stop spreading misinformation, Warner has NO SAY in what’s happening to its own content. Warner Bros. was sold to Discovery by AT&T and the Discovery CEO took over the helm for WB Discovery when he choose to merge the companies. David Zaslav and his accountant are the ones pulling all the strings, everyone else is a bystander
This is just heartbreaking! Especially for all the people who made this show for their loved ones or kids, like you said, and who can no longer show it to them!!! It's SO WRONG!
Man, it's almost like the guy who turned The Learning Channel into 90-Day Honey Boo-Boo and Counting shouldn't be trusted with a plastic knife, much less with important artistic and intellectual property... That bastard wouldn't know art if it challenged him to a MultiVersus match.
Like always I remain a firm supporter of piracy. Not because I like it but because it's necessary to allow information to grow. I'm kinda surprised by this move by HBO, they know they have been losing money to piracy and what they do? Give up and give them the entire market, truly a move worth applauding.
You think HBO wanted this tragedy? The real problem is Discovery & your piracy isn't helping at all is it? I'm thinking we should double down on the Warner Bros Stuff that HBO Max still carries while boycotting the Discovery stuff & sending angry emails to Discovery. We want them to realize that the Warner Bros stuff is successful while Discovery isn't.
@@bookmew1081 unless those are a million lost subscribers over a period of several months it will hold no sway in the decisions the company takes. Money makes might. Again cute idea, but ineffective.
Correction: we can and some of us are, but at present most of those people don't have reliable Internet since they're busy fighting the Tatmadaw in Myanmar or waging guerilla warfare against loggers in the Amazon, so we don't see or hear much about them within the digital infosphere. I never quite realized that until I started looking for a place to donate some soap and a giant web of meatspace anticapitalist orgs suddenly came into view.
This is why, no matter how relatively limited a collection it may be compared to the overall selection typically available via streaming, i will NEVER get rid of my physical media, allowing me to enjoy said media until it and/or i crumble to dust, and NOT when some overpaid executive says so ☹️
Yeah western animation was at a moment where the sort of stories were broadening, catching up to anime as you said, and this is a massive step backwards. The hatred I feel for David Zaslav is just absolutely massive. The only consolation is that the critical and financial response to the great HBO Max purge has been so horrifically bad for Warner Bros that it will scare other companies and maybe WB from doing something like this again. WB lost 2.39 billion dollars in 3 days over this. I hope that WB is smart enough to reverse course on these actions and not stupid enough to double down and cut costs even more brutally.
Zaslav is horrible & it isn't even WB it's all Discovery who bought them! I hate that RUclips bans free speech otherwise I would use the Sla word as that is what Warner Bros is to Discovery at this point.
What's insane to me is not only are they saying "screw you" to their own long-term longetivity, employees, and customers, they're also creating potential problems for streaming services as a whole. By setting the precedent that this could happen, I imagine it will make creators very wary of exclusivity deals with platforms going forward. Why would they want to risk that the company could just erase all their work? I truly hope it becomes standard for creator contracts to include some kind of clause requiring the media remain available in some form. And I don't know what can be done to prevent finished or nearly finished projects from being scrapped for tax write-offs (other than a reform of the tax laws but that's not likely something to get done any time soon) but I hope something is figured out.
The thing that bothers me (well, alongside literally everything else about this) is that the "tactic" doesn't even make sense. These cuts make it *look* like they're making the business profitable, but they're actually just cutting revenue sources and assets and dressing up the numbers to make it look like it's all going well. It's just like when video game companies cut on testing and development costs, but end up losing profits in unsold games because of poor reception.
If this proved anything, is that, the main people, the executives and the CEOs, owners of the streaming services and IP, still see Animation in a condescending way OR at least Zaslav does giving he didn't hesitate to pull the rug for so many animation projects
This is disgusting. The problem with publicaly traded companies is that they have no incentive to worry about long-term viability. If it wasn’t for corporate sort-sightedness like this, oil companies would have started investing in alternative energies decades ago to prepare for when oil inevitably runs out.
Same, I could never play It, but I'll always remember how they absolutely screwed over the vita when they let It rot, I lost everything on It and It made me understand no gaming console from them was safe to buy, that they didn't care about the consummer
I work at a store and not too long ago someone came in and balked at our selling of DVDs and such when everything is available online for streaming and having to pay "premium" prices. And now I wonder if they had a favorite show lost to this purge and now know the merit behind physical copies.
The problem with physical is that they have stopped selling new copies as Geoff mentioned so you can't get it that way. It is going to be hard to get it used soon as well. I took a look at ebay while watching this video and infinity train is already selling between $70 - $100. It's great if you managed to get a hold of a copy before it got expensive, but it sucks if you try to get it now. It's the same problem with video games. I am trying to buy games I missed out on as a kid and some of them are hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you want a physical copy.
Ah, when capitalists are so inept they can't even do capitalism right. Imagine having so little clue how to run a media company that you can't go a year without cooking your books.
According to Zaslav, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Discovery is profitable enough by producing low-cost reality TV tripe gobbled up by people who love the lowest common denominator of entertainment. Warner Media was an albatross around AT&T’s neck (from his point of view), so he figures he knows better than anyone who ran it before him. Now, he’s going to be in for a rude awakening because what audiences at HBO Max want is not what Discovery+ is selling, so he’s going to lose a lot of money and hopefully shareholder dollars in the process.
The precise climber, while I understand the sentiment, this was always what capitalism was, we didn't devolve into a previous system, merely that our system no longer had to place nice after the fall of the USSR, and it becoming apparent that China is just as capitalist.
What I think is fascinating about the difference between most Japanese isaki and the trio of American isaki he mentioned is who they are aimed at. The Japanese shows are mostly power fantasies for teenage boys whereas the American ones star teen girls and while they become extremely powerful and the world's they discover are fascinating and sometime whimsical, they have to earn their power and the worlds are also exceedingly dangerous. I don't know what says about the difference between our cultures and the perspective of the creators, but seems worth exploring.
Counterpoint: that's how Japanese isekai used to be as well. Before the current massive wave, isekai was stuff like Vision of Escaflowne, Fushigi Yuugi, and Spirited Away. So is the current crop of American isekai inspired by those old school series? Or is it a case of convergent evolution? Are we going to get our own Western wave of power fantasies for boys?
@@anthonylarocque7975 I really hope we as a society have moved beyond that. It certainly helps that Western cartoons starting boys have been much less toxic in their presentation of masculinity.
2022 is literally Animation Armageddon! The world of animation is at stake. I feel really bad for all of the talented animators, creators and directors involved in these projects. Animation is not replaceable, the fact that they're treating it like that is genuinely terrible. We must take action NOW because this is getting out of hand.
Discovery+ is probably going to fail soon. There just doesn’t seem to be a diverse enough range of content to hold onto viewers. What monsters would cancel Elmo’s late night show? I know no one who owns Discovery +. American animation is so undervalued. I’m sad that perhaps many of these creators work is going to become lost media for a nonsensical reason.
Infinity Train fans have been fighting for this show since the pilot aired and we keep fighting against odds, but now it's not just about Infinity Train anymore. It's not even about all the other shows HBO Max royally screwed. This is a war for the entire animation industry - all the shows, fans and creators. #CancelHBOMax and make a hard copy of everything you care about.
Is there anything people who aren't subscribed to HBO max can do besides cancel their subscription? I've been so excited the the Batgirl movie since it was first rumored back in 2016, now that it's canceled I feel betrayed and devastated. It feels like a bad april fool's joke. I want to do something that make HBO realize what a bad idea this was but I don't think theres much I can do...
I’m cancelling my HBO subscription after this whole debacle and batgirl just being cancelled. Which is just the ceo flushing millions of dollars down the drain for no reason. I guess the only other thing people can do is just not subscribe to HBO max, there are other streaming platforms
You can show support for the shows that they cancelled and promote them to your friends and family. It adds value to the IP and it ensures that it will continue gaining an audience after it's gone. Also make sure to show support for the 2D aminated shows that are still ongoing and available to the public as it adds value to the medium and streaming services will be less justified in pulling support from them.
HBO isn't the problem, it is all Discovery who did this & screwed over both HBO Max & Warner Brothers! You should spread the word to boycott Discovery for their crimes & send them angry emails to them.
My best friend has been waiting for Venture Bros and Metalocalypse to get animated conclusions for years and after finally getting a movie announcement... This happens and most likely they'll cancel it all once more. This situation blows for everyone except the soulless execs.
This is why I am a hardcore proponent for physical media. It isn't the be all, end all, but being able to own, and I do mean own, a copy of media is important because it means that you can take on the responsibility of preservation via backup copies. To my knowledge, taking an example Geoff made in the video, there is no way to own a copy of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you can only license it via streaming services that can, and have done, the work to strip those from devices that have them downloaded. I do not support streaming platforms, they are in effect the latest channelization of the internet and have been grossly effective at sectioning off vast swathes of content from customers unless they pay a fee on top of the fee they have to connect to the internet in the first place.
@Bionick Toa indeed, though with the hard push of just about every entertainment to go to streaming/rental systems, a broad swathe of the customer base has moved over to that, even as it's grown more inconvenient and costly
This is also what has made me extremely wary about buying exclusively digital versions of games - you are only buying the license so they can just remove your license at any time and that's that. Same thing with servers one day going down - you can never play it again in the case of some games that do server checks before really starting up. Not to mention that you can't resell it even though you own it. The state of laws in the US that protect consumers and the digital things that they buy is WOEFULLY behind the times and there's zero push to fix it. The fall of physical media has also seen the loss of those cool extras I used to buy DVDs for - deleted/extended scenes, interviews with writers and directors, little mini documentaries about the making of. Very few physical releases come with those and most are not on whatever streaming service that goes to. Streaming has undoubtedly made it much easier to have access to content, but there absolutely are downsides and what's happening with HBOMAX is the darkest underside of it - a company completely owning an IP and having total control over every bit of it. It's not "art" to be seen by the world, it's a product that exists to make a profit, and since streaming has not turned out to be the replacement for people buying physical media that companies wanted (they are not making NEARLY as much money as they used to when they sold VHS/DVD/Blurays), they are all panicking and scrambling. They want to make ALL THE MONEY and they can't anymore and it's putting them all in a tailspin.
I never anticipated that HBO Max, one of my favorite streaming services that I couldn't shut up about to my friends and family, would become hot garbage with an uncertain future within the span of a few weeks.
This is some massive character development from your "No good reason for piracy" days, and I appreciate it. That said, I'm not really sure how to get started with P2P file-sharing sites. I've done a fair bit of streaming piracy in my day, and while I have adblock and the owners of those sites aren't making money from me I'm not sure how to do the more-ethical choice of direct sharing. Anyone have tips?
Not sure how helpful this is, but... I'm lucky enough to have a friend who's good at getting hold of subbed tokusatsu show episodes, and we've had an arrangement where he'll send me a few eps at a time in a ZIP file via Discord. That's at least one way of sharing media that I know works.
Mental Outlaw had some videos on it. Unfortunately all you can find are reuploads of “Top 10 Tørrent sites”. Be sure to get a VPN (like Mullvad for great privacy, but might be a little slow). Be sure to look at any .dll/.exe/program with EXTREME skepticism. I’ve also heard that the good guy ratio is 1.5 (for every download, upload about 1.5times).
The Owl House is unironically my favourite Isekai, followed up shortly by SAOA and Infinity Train. I also couldn’t watch TOH or Infinity Train legally in my country, despite watching them through multiple times it doesn’t show on analytics because they won’t let me give them my money and it’s so frustrating that the shows are seen as underperforming because there are surely multitudes like me.
@@Jaydee-wd7wr oh lol. The last abridge anime's I remember watching were littlekuriboh's yugioh abridged or TeamFourStar's Dragonball Z abridged. I haven't tried SAO abridged yet.
@@Jaydee-wd7wr I was really confused how Sword Art Online Alicization fit in between The Owl House and Infinity Train. It being SAO Abridged makes a lot more sense.
Geoff, you NEED to see Infinity Train. Take a quick break, binge it, anyone who's seen it will understand a little delay in whichever video/podcast you make next. Which will be about Infinity Train, btw I'm calling it as soon as you watch it. I mean Owl House and Amphibia are great, but Infinity Train has impact not unlike its name. Even if you need to wco fun com it, if you know what I mean. Maybe I'm using that slang wrong, but be sure to bring your baggage cause it's gonna take you for a ride.
This is a really well put video on a depressing situation. The purging of a lot of animated content means bad news; it shows that anything can be taken away for any reason. This sucks for trying to archive media too
And they have the nerve to start advertising an option for a yearly membership. Why would I purchase that when you could just nuke my favorite shows at any point. (BTW my favorite show on their was sesame street cuz my daughter will sit there for a half hour in the morning and allow me to get a cup of coffee with out having to share)
When the shitstorm first started, I remember when Justin Sevakis from Discotech Media said that the streaming wars "lasted only slightly longer than the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wars". FUCKING. OOF.
It baffles me that they are dead set on doing whatever they can to make sure they release The Flash no matter what but are doing everything they can to remove anything that's in its way
I've also heard that a lot of the cancelled shows have had either LGBTQIA+ creators or actually contained LGBTQIA+ representation. So like I don't think it's a coincidence that these shows in particular were cancelled to make short-term profit...
I been wondering this, discovery’s. CEO is known to be homophobic. I just didn’t know enough about all the shows to say for sure that LGBTQ+ was the unifying factor though
Their is a monetary incentive to produce shows that tick certain boxes and push certain themes/ideas due to there being a literal diversity score/current x thing witch is why you get content that panders to a thing with out any actual meaning care or support on the actual issue where is matters (contreys that still are homofobic and/or sexist get custom tailored content with those messages edited out)and(poor representation due to lack of well written original diverse characters) (hiring people due to the box they tick and not their actual skill/talent) they probably aren't doing it out of hate for lgbt they just never cared and dropped content content containing that message when it could no longer financially benefit them
@@ducktape2218 I agree, whether this decision was made out of malice or indifference, it still kinda shows that representation to them was just about money and nothing more. Which is really fucked up
I will always feel salty and feel bad for my man Olan Rogers for the cancellation of Final Space. Such an amazingly quirky and beautiful show, cut short before it’s time to connect to a bigger audience.
The worst part of this is that if any of those platforms like iTunes scrub the show from their site, then that means that people who have paid for the show and didn't download it right away, will NEVER be able to download it again. I've learned this the hard way when the license iTunes had for Black Jack anime episodes was scrubbed and I can't get a show that I PAID for anymore. Preservation of media is such a mess right now and there needs to be a better way.
Animator here: I noticed they targeted unionized studios that were working on the productions. I work in Canada, where there is no animators union, nor residuals for animators (was that ever a thing for animators??) If I was payed a penny for the amount of times the shows I worked on was aired and re-aired, I'd be able to move out of my dingey apartment. Also, yes, please Pirate your animated shows, especially if they are owned by Disney, WB, HBO, etc. The money you put into subscriptions or paying online does not go back to the artists that made them. We have tax breaks/subsidies provided by (drum roll) provincial/state wide government that pay for the first half-and sometimes entire season of production before a client company ever pays the animation studio in question. And the Client studio can at any time cancel the fucking contract- like what they did here. (also see the Life Of Pi oscars and the closing of the award-winning studio.) The act of piracy will incentivize these greedy shareholders to fucking pay the people who made them their fair share. A "I won't pay unless I know my money goes to the people who actually put work into making this show" effort, so to speak.
have you considered making a video on the fact that sony has a functional monopoly on anime streaming in the west, owning both crunchyroll and funimation, because there's another big argument for piracy if ive ever seen one
Y'know, for the last few years I've had so many people look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them I collect all my favorite shows and movies on physical media when possible. When asked why I always tell them that I do so because I'm not a fan of having my right to view media dictated by some exec that can effectively nuke my options to when and where I can watch something. Usually they respond with something like "oh that's just being dramatic, even if it gets taken down from one platform it'll always be up on another". This situation definitely opened a few eyes.
Much as I like my physical media collection for the sake of collecting stuff, if what I really cared about was having untouchable backups of all my favorites in the most efficient way I'd invest in a couple of hard drives instead. Less space, less cost, and redundancy. Your disk can scratch or rot, your tapes will wear out, but you can copy that .mkv to as many backup drives as you need forever.
I don't even think dystopian sci-fi writers could have predicted a future where the best way to support an artist's work is to steal it.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but what hurts a lot about this is that it makes it so much harder for *kids* to watch these shows. Adults and teens will know to pirate or quickly download it, but kids won't. They won't get to find these shows or grow up on them, and a lot of these creators made these *for their kids* and kids like them. Especially when you look at something like Sesame Street, which was originally created for kids with limited educational resources. It's horrifying.
@@morley364 I will make sure to show my kidy all my favorite childhood shows, honestly growing up in the 0s/10s was great for me because a lot of the great stuff was still around on TV, most of my fav childhood cartoons/shows were from the 20th century and I will absolutely make sure that my children watch this sort of stuff rather than whatever bullcrap the american media machine decides to shit out next. We should all make sure to do this
Just steal then donate
@@notagoodanimator1352 This guy with the tight business model for artists. Just e-beg man. Go to patreon. Don't even bother trying to get actual money to live. Just beg your fans for cash directly
farenheit 451
I do genuinely believe that as a society we need to get serious about media preservation. Peer to peer does help but I think we need to find ways to preserve art long term because ironically, technological advancement as made art more difficult to preserve just because of how we store it.
After the hbo max fiasco blew up on tumblr, posts circulated explaining how to burn videos on DVDs. It's important that this information gets shared because my generation, who grew up with the internet, knows jack shit about preserving media in a physical form.
Libraries. You are thinking of libraries. Please support your local library and tell them that certain cartoons are not available on streaming anymore. Most of them will try to purchase the dvds and make them available to library users.
Filecoin: decentralized file storage does this.
Honestly pretty interesting how it works. On the one hand the internet and the ease at which backed up data can be copied makes it easier to preserve media. No more lost or rotten tapes or damaged films. On the other hand modern DRM makes it harder and harder to copy stuff which means that when a company decides to pull something off the internet it’s just lost if that DRM has never been circumvented. I think it kinda goes both ways
Like I don’t really see how a burned dvd or blu-Ray is any better than a digital copy on a hard drive. Yeah a hard drive can crash but dvd’s can get scratched up too and burned ones actually tend to fail given a long enough time too. I think what’s most important is that there’s enough backups and that they’re verifiably, think of something like redump for games. Though that’s much harder for media like films or music.
I think you mean IPFS which filecoin is based on top of? I think all filecoin does is give users an incentive by actually allowing them to make a (reaaaaally) small amount of money by renting hard drive storage for peer to peer distribution.
On the other hand cryptocurrencies are pretty horrible for the environment so I don’t know how to feel about using that for that purpose.
As one of the many that have followed Infinity Train since the pilot first-aired, seeing it struggle for years all for it to end in such a disrespectful way, almost hurts. Can only imagine how it feels for those who have actually worked on it
I was halfway through the last season when the just took it away without warning. It’s really disappointing. I hope they’ll give it a 5th season at some point for Amelia’s storyline.
So David Zaslav can get rid of cartoons like Infinity train but a nut job like Ezra Miller gets to stay at the company this doesn't make any sense at all and quite frankly I'm upset by this
and why you do nothing and go destroy the HQ at once!!!!
#attackHQ
#KAREN2022
They should shamelessly rip it off in a new show like Infinity Chain or something, and nobody but the lawyers would be mad at them.
WB and nick's lawyers are already angry at all of you and are going to start putting rules everywhere on the internet!!!
#KAREN2022
The craziest part of this is that literally EVERYONE on the Warner Bros and Cartoon Network side of the merger thinks that this was a bad idea and was actively telling the Discovery half that doing this was going to cause problems. Their new CEO just wants to pump out more mediocre non-scripted series that the Discovery audience loves so much and to do so he's taking every decent relationship his comapny has with animators and is tossing them out the window.
Well I'm going to throw you out the window if you're going to attack the HQ!!!!
@@albertoromero5075 bro what?
Deep breaths Alberto. Note 1) Fiscal years aren't the same as calendar years. The 2022 fiscal year ends 10/1. That about 5 weeks. Hang on until then.
discovery is losing billions already, they could lose another 25 billion by the end of this year this merger is going to end up like the aol merger a big huge waste of money that will be look upon by in years ahead
Yeah when your own employees/the people you are merging with are telling you it's a bad PR move. It's a bad fucking PR move.
Funny thing is that I cancelled HBO Max early in the year because of Infinity Train's cancellation and because I just wasn't using it enough to justify still paying for it. But I just took it as normal short sighted business nonsense, and moved on. But I had no idea how correct I was to do so because this is just morally wrong and offends me in a way I didn't even think they were capable of doing.
Cartoons were one of my main reasons for getting hbo max. Now it's gone and I never even got to finish infinity train. This just sucks.
@@yunogasai1338 Same, it was the cartoons and the year of brand new movies that made it seem worthwhile to me.
@@yunogasai1338 the good news is you can still find it “on the high seas” ;)
Infinity Train was one of their most popular and highest rated animated shows, even after its cancellation. It constantly trended on social media like every month. They also removed OK KO, Summercamp Island, Mao Mao and Mighty Magisword, plus a bunch of shows and movies that were either cancelled or had a second season or sequel still in production plus 200 episodes of fucking Sesame Street. This is like if Crunchyroll just out of nowhere decided to remove a bunch of shows that only got one season, a couple that had a second season on the way and then one of the shows removed was on the scale of popularity on their platform like, say, Naruto Shippuden. And on top of that, they decided to remove like 200 random episodes of One Piece. This is basically what WB/Discovery did to HBO Max.
OK KO had a crossover with Sonic The Hedgehog. Not only was that the kind of brand synergy wet dream the suits at Warner Brothers would stain their pants for, it was a connection from older animation fans to newer animation fans. I saw old Sonic SatAM fans tune into a show they had less than zero interest in because it had a fun crossover with something they liked.
Imagine binning that just to save a couple bucks on tax. I don't know if kt makes good business sense, but it doesn't feel like a great long term strategy.
@@ragnarockerbunny It has gotten so bad that investors are losing their shit, WB's stocks have lowered in value by like 20 billion dollars and most of the animation industry is beyond pissed. This is by far one of the quickest I've seen a corporation basically commit seppuku. It's amazing.
@@mr.goblin6039 The fact even the investors were not pleased is beyond refreshing, most of the time you hear a bad decision being taken for them, the fact they're going crazy over this too is important
Infinity Train is a cult hit at best, just because something trends on Twitter doesn’t mean it’s organic.
Unless we start paying these cartoonists salaries and healthcare I’m not going to complain about David doing his job, get rid of anything that doesn’t make Discovery money
@@christianmathew398 WTF? How are you gonna come here, spew nonsense that isn't true, pretend to give a shit about animators... and then dick ride the greedy business man literally removing shows and firing people so he DOESN'T pay residuals that go into those people's healthcare? Are you mentally ill? What is wrong with you?
The posts from the show creators on social media about this are heartbreaking. Execs really don't care at all about the media they own and seem to be especially dismissive of animation.
They're corporate executives. By definition they don't care about anything except Line Go Up.
Apparently cartoon network execs warned about how much good will was built between the network and animation crews would be burnt by any move like this especially doing so without warning the creators.
The Tig n seek tweet i saw by an art director is so sad "sure i could pirate the show but my kids can't and i made it for them".
I just find it curious the move comes the week house of dragons comes out. Coincidence?
@@nayr_murdoc5366 definitely think they are using the GoT show timing as a distraction tactic.
1:27-1:31 Yes, Owl House, Infinity Train and Amphibia should absolutely have their own video. I think it’ll be worth noting how those stories all exploring the “other world” concept in their own distinctive ways while also having endings and not being infected by the clickbait title curse most Isekai originating from the Narou site have.
Going back a bit further there’s star vs the forces of evil as a reverse isekai, (or isekai adjacent depending on how you want to classify it,) and over the garden wall which is a clear western isekai ahead the curve. Lastly with the amulet graphic novels rights getting bought by Dream works makes me suspect we may get yet another great western isekai with that. I think going over the history of the western isekai and especially the 3 you mentioned would be an extremely interesting video.
The Owl House is essentially a mediocre version of Witch Hat Atelier with weaker world-building and pacing issues.
@@ThePreciseClimber as a fan of both I literally don't see the connection between the two at all other than the fact that they're about witches that draw glyphs 💀 completely different story and tone
@@alannahhegarty1482 Ok, do two things have to be exactly the same for you people to be able to compare them? It's not like I'm comparing an apple pie to the theory of relativity. :P
Both WHA & TOH have the same basic premise - a magic-loving, non-magical girl wants to learn magic, she gets taken in by a recluse mentor and discovers the concept of magic glyphs.
There are other, smaller similarities, too - there's a female bully character with family issues that quickly warms up to the protagonist, the mentor with a troubled past who lives far away from the core magic education facility, a major antagonist hides his identity by wearing a mask, one character has a curse that turns them into a wild quadruped, etc.
But the differences are what makes Witch Hat Atelier GOOD. It has way better story structure and way better world building (the author didn't just slap a high school in the middle of her setting, for one). Character arcs are more organic, too.
@@ThePreciseClimber you're right I hadn't thought of some of the other similarities on the spot actually haha but I still stand by the fact that they both achieve what they set out to do. Yes Toh is flawed in some aspects but it's still incredibly charming, it's funny, quirky, has lovable characters,is emotional when needs be, and I thought the story was really compelling (especially the second half of season 2 ofc) + lumity solos :p
I agree that the school is unnecessary tho, it allows for some fun stuff to happen but I do agree it was kinda shoehorned in and it basically disappears for most of season 2 anyways. As for the pacing, as I'm sure you're aware of its mostly down to the fact that Disney cut it short, meaning they had to drastically speed up the pacing for s2pt2 if they wanted to cover everything that needed to be covered. So I think with the short notice and just how much material was left to cover in a few 20 min episodes they did an incredibly good job for what it's worth
Hearing that Summer Island Camp had completely finished production on their final season and was ready to go, but may very well never be seen at all is heartbreaking.
Even worse if like other shows, no one on the crew gets even a digital copy of the finished episodes.
If I am correct it will still release on cartoon network. Hope that helps you.
@@DNSNat dvr the episodes when they premiered
@@DNSNat ...Unless they kill CN itself.
@@anthonyrousseau8050 I heard that rumor and I am hoping that is not the case.
@@DNSNat CN is pretty much done for. Sadly, 30 years of presenting content means nothing to a bunch of ol' white guys
It drives me insane how short-sighted modern businesses are. One of the biggest problems of modern businesses is how little stake executives have in the long-term health of a company.
This reminds me of how megacorporations act in various movies.
Reality is starting to become like fiction, and not in a good way.
the phrase 'too big to fail' starts to make a new, completely different meaning for entertainment giants, apparently
I've seen this at companies that I've worked at as well. They make stupid decisions that will very obviously hurt the company in a few years for the slightest of balance sheet improvements. Then a couple of years later the old CEO is gone and the new one blames the old one for their short-sightedness while making new stupid short-term decisions.
The worst is that most people are buy and hold investors that just want a company to do well long term. But the hedge funds, VC, corporate raider-types are all looking for quarterly returns and they hold the most sway as large active investors.
@@graham1034 It's why the industry would be better off without them.
Why would they? It literally doesn’t affect their own lives or wealth in any meaningful way if the company goes underwater. Even if Zaslav gets fired tomorrow it’s not like he’s going to be starving in the street.
The great ONGOING HBOMax purge: Batman The Caped Crusader, the Gumball movie, tons of Looney Tunes projects, not *necessarily* cancelled but all sold off because WB are desperate to continue tanking their own stocks, I guess.
Sadly after seeing the news of house of dragon on hbo max getting almost 10 million viewers I honestly doubt they'd be seeing a loss in profit from removing animated shows and if ceos of other companies with streaming services see this mistreatment as incosequential and follow suit then that would lead into a really dark time for animation that I hope we never get to see.
I hate that the timing is so purposeful. Like you know they did that on purpose.
They better not go after Lower Decks, its the best Star Trek show
I have a feeling views will sharply decrease as the series goes on
I mean, all that means is that a lot of their pre-existing customers decided to watch the heavily advertised new thing based on one of the most popular series of the 2010s. Squid Game and Stranger Things' incredible success didn't nullify Netflix's issues (even ignoring that House of Dragon's immediate success might not stick around as long).
@@Future_Vantas Lower Decks is paramount and its part of their Star Trek every freaking week strategy.
When streaming platforms remove content, it erodes consumer trust in the longevity of the content on that platform, and streaming platforms as a whole. I have started collecting hardcopies of my favorite shows, because I no longer have any confidence that they will be available long term.
THIS. The damage done to the bottom line in the immediate is negligible. The damage Zaslav has done to _consumer trust_ is _incalculable._ It would be like McDonald's announcing that in the interest of savings _some_ of their Happy Meals going forward _might_ be _slightly radioactive._ It doesn't matter how few, doesn't matter what the numbers are! You have _crossed the line._
I bought a physical copy of Neon Genesis Evangelion because I had a gut feeling that Netflix might remove it for other shows, like they usually do every once and a while, ironically enough that was before Netflix began removing their content due to low viewership.
@@tomboyjessie1352 at least Netflix warns people within their platform that their about to remove something.
@@mesiagamer5217 True, they usually give a month advance but I think Netflix fars better cos, most likely, they'll bring a show back to test the waters again.
They try to weed out genres to make it easier for newcomers to catch a series, so you often have to rotate things to have more clarity BUT HBOMax can rot!...
@@mesiagamer5217 true
Cancel your HBOMax yes, but more importantly cancel your Discovery+ if you have it. Because part of Zaslav's plan is to merge HBOMax under Discovery+. Zaslav is doing this because he doesn't care about HBOMax and has every intention of getting rid of it.
Who in the hell even uses Discovery+.
@@galehunter2519 People who love such quality entertainment as “1000 Pound Sisters”
Discovery has a streaming service??
I am all for cancelling it. I don't even use it much anymore so I'm good.
I might’ve considered Discovery+ for cooking show content, but honestly, I don’t trust Zaslav not to mess with those shows as well.
One month ago, WB was in everyone’s good graces with stuff like The Batman, and Multiversus.
Now, they’re reviled by everyone.
WB isn't hated by people, it's Discovery who's to blame and rightfully hated.
Everyone on the WB has been letting everyone know that they're even angrier than the fans and been protesting as much as possible without losing their jobs, like the Uncle Grandpa creator tweeting fanart of UG with a gun in his mouth about to pull the trigger.
It's the execs on the discovery side who did this, they're the ones with control over the companies and they're the middle aged dumbass boomers without any remote awareness of what they're doing responsible.
If by "everyone" you mean "cringeworthy autistic people on Twitter who obsess over the trainwreck that is the North American Animation Industry"? Then yes, be my guest. But most people don't give a fuck about North American animations because the vast majority is raw, uncut SHIT!
The anime pope decrees that pirating is no longer sinful. This speaks volumes on the state of animation and how disrespected it is by businessmen.
Support creators!
“Pirating is still sinful, but it’s now just a minor sin instead of a deadly sin. Plus, you get a full pardon if you pirate against the heathen CEOs.”
@@UGNAvalon oh that reminds me i should pirate 7 deadly sins
( that was a joke)
Piracy is still awful and only makes the problem worse as it gives people a bigger excuse to cancel more things. Don't be an idiot.
David Zaslav is really putting a big ass bulls-eye on his head by pulling this move. Animation is just as, or even, important than any other genre in the business
His shareholders will want his head as well. Warner Discovery stock has lost half its value in the past four months. It was worth $26 on April 8th and as of today, it’s worth $13.22.
@@PeachWookiee Genuinely I don't understand how this combined with the Batgirl fiasco isn't ringing alarm bells with the people high up at WBD, surely by this point they've lost infinitely more money than they would have supposedly gained from cancelling Batgirl and all these shows getting delisted
And today, the stock started below $13 and ended at $13.16. Yeah, Zaslav did something incredibly unwise…
The fact he hates animation makes me strongly dislike him greatly.
"more media is more widely accessible today than at any point in human history" well, besides a few days ago...
legally, that is
Incredibly well put video. I think a lot of people need to see this to understand the magnitude of Zaslav's stupidity and disrespect. As for me, I'll be sharing it everywhere I can. Here's to all of us sending a strong message to those clueless executives 🤞🏻
From a cold, cynical business perspective, I understand why WB is doing this.
But any intern can point to the fact that the public is beyond fickle, and the larger the bomb, the bigger the crater.
All I understand is that someone in there wants to die in a riot.
I'm not sure what that would accomplish for WB and HBO if they did.
I don't watch discovery+ and I already stopped watching HBO max before this... Honestly it sucks like crazy especially after Disney is trying to make people pay to watch advertisements
@@lunatic0verlord10 complex way to die but hey, maybe they just watched inception a few to many times
Warner Bros isn't doing this by choice, Discovery is making them & really this Murder I mean Merger only happened because people didn't support Warner Bros nearly enough the past several years & desperate for money they let themselves be bought by people who made terrible decisions that we all regret. Cancelling HBO Max won't do anything at this point, although Discovery + needs to be boycotted. This is a war between Discovery & Warner Bros & we must make sure that the Warner Bros stuff is profiting while Discovery isn't so that we can send a clear message.
Also we should spam tons of emails to Discovery so that we can be sure they know the message!
This whole situation has felt so devastating and depressing for me, and I already have a crap ton of bad things going on in my life. Animation is something that I love so much and yet to see the disrespect that it receives really makes me sick. Saying girls "graduate out of animation" and removing so many great and amazing animations from HBO max has just left me so hurt. I can only hope that these shows aren't lost forever and relegated to the boundaries that is piracy.
Okay, having the whole situation laid out like this, I can finally see the scope of what's going on here. They are doing exactly the thing that's been done to much of retail, like Sears and Kmart, where the execs by out a store, drain it for all the profit its worth, and drop its body on the side of the road to die while they reap the rewards the stock market generates doing a dramatic collapse of a major company like this.
This is corporate vampirism. These individual shows are just the first victims: they're trying to murder WarnerMedia itself, and all its subsidiaries like HBO and Discovery. One of the oldest media producers that still makes things: that's an exceptionally dramatic death.
They took all those shows off HBOMax *because* it would cause people to cancel their subscriptions in droves; they're cancelling finished movies *because* they'd be able to make their money back; they're doubling down on the Flash *because* people have already decided they're not going to watch it.
Because a bunch of rich twats are watching on the sideline, betting on how long it's gonna take for the beast to go down.
Isn't it just wonderful that the stock market basically works by rewarding people for running businesses in worse ways intentionally?
Oh, what was that thing about capitalism driving efficiency and innovation again...? I seem to have heard that one a lot.
And that is why someone should take aim at the twats, and show no mercy.
The word you're looking for is venture capitalism.
You mean like what the happened to Gamestop
@@notimeforcreativenamesjust3034 Yep
I know Geoff's poked fun at RWBY before (and I'm not looking for a fight if you don't like it), but I'm honestly terrified that it, and Rooster Teeth as a whole, might be next on WB's chopping list. It's a passion project in memory of its late creator that's gotten 8 seasons of steadily increasing quality, and I *really* hope it doesn't get canceled for a fucking tax writeoff.
Oh fuck I hadn't even thought about that.
A part of me thinks that WB wouldn’t touch RWBY because, for now at least, it does make money. But I think if this next volume doesn’t do well, it could be in for trouble. For right now tho, I think they’re eyeing up Gen:Lock to be cut.
They even have an anime now!
Most folks from some forums I frequent figure everything from Rooster Teeth is too out of the way to end up getting cut like properly Warner-owned media.
Not to get to pedantic, I do think it's fine overall, but I do want to say that the steady increase in quality to me at least is debatable. To me there was a drop after season 3 where they struggled to find their footing again for a while. Season 3 peaked pretty good though so overall not the worst thing ever. Also their fights an animation definitely didn't steadily increase in quality, but that's really understandable considering the circumstances. They were legendary shoes to fill afterall. The voice acting definitely steadily improved over time, as well as I would say most of the character writing. The overall plot can be debated I think. The show is a darling to me, but I can't deny it's flaws. Really through no fault of it's own, just some really terrible circumstances.
I dig your presentation style. The balance of informative, and personal is just right! This situation has been so frustrating, disheartening, and frightening. Thank you for making this video!
oh no, not you, you are the best with your Henry Stickmin vid, but please do not join with those crazy dums!!!
@@albertoromero5075 What's the problem exactly? It's brutal to see all these animated projects being axed and thrown away!
but no one has attacked or going on strike at WB HQ!!!!
that's the problem of all of you, I'm always lazy in protesting on the internet instead of doing it outside like area 51!!!!!
and that goes for you!!!
@@albertoromero5075 I don't expect artists to risk their jobs to gain the attention of a company who clearly doesn't value them. And I doubt protesting outside would do anything either.
Financial loss as a result of these decisions is about the only way a major corporation like this will pay attention. Spreading information, circulating negative buzz, and cancelling subscriptions are among the only tools we have.
but you have not tried to invade the WB HQ, you now, like area 51 of 2019, try that tool!!!!!
I just got into "forced indefinite unpaid hiatus" from my job because the CEO for the company I worked for really likes the line going up and up and did not care for * the * only person responsible for most of the graphic material for his company.
It do be like that 🙃
Surely the mainstream won't immediately forget about this outrage after just one episode of House of the Dragon.. surely..
...sad
People still sucking the cock of GoT even after the last few trainwrecks of it's previous seasons is sad, it can go off & die in a corner now, R.R can finish his books & they can go get those. This merger timed right around it's release alongside all of those cancellations was not a coincidence
Well I don't have an account.
And I'd say that the mainstream should take some GoT-esque actions against this injustice.
Imagine caring about GoT after S8.
I heard way more outcry so I would say it didn't work
I've always tried to practice 'ethical' piracy, even before the rise of streaming services. I'll often 'try before I buy', and if I like the series, I'll buy the physical version of it. If I didn't like it, then I never would have bought it in the first place. And for all of the reasons mentioned in the video and the increased fragmentation of the streaming services (1 or 2 was manageable, but now everyone wants a pieces of the pie and it's incredibly expensive to pay for all of the services), I'll download things available by streaming for the day it inevitably gets yanked, the streaming service gets bought out, costs become even more unreasonable, etc etc.
I honestly thought it would take something truly terrible for Jeff to support the "high seas" in any sense of the word. Truly we are in the darkest timeline.
Political upheaval, war in Ukraine, the massive climate crisis, capitalism destroying art & artists alike. You only now realize just how bad things are these days & then there was that awful pandemic. The 2020s are basically the end of the world in 1 massive crapstorm & we're all screwed.
I’m so angry and also scared about the lack of copies and a lot of work and art becoming lost media
Animation is so disrespected in the West by the higher ups in these corporations. Animators work so hard to bring their work to life, and then it's scrubbed away like it never existed.
Sue them. Every creator who is being robbed get together, get a class action together, and sue them. It's easily demonstrable that HBO is denying revenue to creators. The CEO won't even care if they get sued; he just wants this year's numbers to look good.
Constant access needs to be written into IP contracts and union agreements going forward.
And frankly maybe we need to burn the stock market down as well, but I'm trying to be realistic about what can be done within our current system.
In our current system?
Fire and lead, I say. They have the most impact.
Or, at the very least, creators retain ownership of their IPs should a streaming service cancel/delist them from their platform. That way, even if the current platform doesn't want to host the content anymore, artists can still get their shows to the fans by other means - selling a license to another streaming service, or hosting it on their own site for donations/small fee. Corporate entities outright owning creative properties they had no hand in producing other than writing a check shouldn't be in control of IPs
@@missbeast821 It's a good deal, but that would require destroying the current system and making sure the selfish grubbers are physically unable to influence the next one.
@@missbeast821 Excellent idea, and that is a tactic that could be implemented through federal legislation by changing IP laws.
Given how deeply our senators and representatives are in bed with lobbyists and mega corporations, it would be very difficult to pass, but Europe has been very progressive on these items. Get it passed across Europe, in NZ, in Australia, Canada, and other countries and maybe, eventually, it will follow in the U.S.
Still waiting for that affect to kick in on healthcare, but we might get there in the next 100 years.
Canceling and delisting movies and shows that have finished production just to avoid paying the creators residuals definitely sounds like it should be considered a form of fraud. Those creators wasted years of their lives making that media on the assumption that they would get that future revenue as compensation. They should be forced to pay those residuals anyway based on what the projected sales/views would have been.
After the posting of this video it is now confirmed that the Batman animated show with Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams has been scrapped and is now being shopped around. If an animated Batman show isn’t safe at HBO Max, truly nothing is
Like they have the numbers to tell them how much millennials love rewatching the ‘94 animated series, you’d think someone would see how stupid it would be to let another streaming service rake it in with a new show and have to pay licensing fees on top of that
As a wise young lady in a host club once said: I hate these damn rich people
In the words of a certain superhero from Marvel: I understood that reference.
@@Reckless56 the older I get, the more of a mood Haruhi becomes 😂
I became so happy when Geoff just called The Owl House, Amphibia, and Infinty Train American Isekai
They are... the good kind that isn't just a videogame self insert fantasy
@@PedroSteckecilo You are absolutely right, most isekai is just trash anime too
@@PedroSteckecilo that's what most people mean when they say Isekai. I always found it stupid when people defend Isekai by saying going to another world is fine, when its really the deluge of bad writing and pure fan service people have a problem with the "genre".
@@FanTalks1 nah, isekai is just a genre. We got plenty of Japanese and Western "isekai" that are amazing.
Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are my two favorite Isekais
Multi billion dollar corporations don’t have the peoples best interests at heart?
Who could’ve foreseen that?
To be fair to other streaming services, this sort of tax write-off only applies to merging companies within a short period of the purchase. That means most companies can't do this. The intended purpose of this loophole is to allow merged companies to get out of unnecessary ventures the purchased company invested in that don't align with the company's main interest (i.e. if the purchased company invested in gyms but, the main company just wants to stick with pharmaceuticals). The way WBD can do this is by saying the projects were intended to make X amount over 5 years on the service but since the project is cancelled, it can't be included in WB's projected worth. I'm guessing The Flash can't be cancelled because it's too close to WB's main revenue driver and costs simply to much to claim it as an alternative revenue venture
Just canceled my HBO Max subscription. What Zaslav did to the animators was utterly disgusting and I hope he gets sued for revenue denial.
If you have a Discovery+ subscription cancel that too
Hit Zaslav where it hurts
I don't have one.
This is ghoulish. Working in animation, hell, any entertainment medium must feel like a nightmare right now.
Thank you very much for making this video! As improbable as this might sound, I am a massive fan of Sesame Street, especially the classic era, and seeing HBO eradicate over 200 episodes overnight (without any warning I must add, unlike other shows there was no delisting announcement) was incredibly disheartening. It really confirms to me that companies have no interest in preservation, because if they don’t even want to put any effort into preserving one of, if not the MOST culturally significant show in history, than what hope does that leave for other media? I suppose it makes sense that a company would only care about history if they could find a way to profit off of it, but that doesn’t make it any better... I can only hope that one day there will be a complete library of all 4000+ episodes for children, fans and historians to watch forever, but when things like this keep happening it can be hard to stay optimistic. The same applies to all of the other shows erased in this purge, and my heart goes out to all of their fans. Media deserves better!
I'm a librarian I know this is horrible & I don't think our civilization will survive 20 more years with how things are right now. You have seen the current political situation & how people have decided to declare war on the truth right? I have heard people talk of genocide against people with aspergers for crying out loud in addition to racist stuff & people trying to defund police, fire departments, hospitals, schools, libraries, & more out of sheer greed.
Man, this is almost as awful as MAPPA and Netflix underpaying the animators less than average while working on Yasuke.
At least the animators actually get that money!!
It's amazing how streaming has not only become just like cable, but WORSE than it.
I majored in animation and minored in dramatic writing and I happened to get a professor who'd worked on spongebob and other animated shows and what I was flat out told is that the film industry in general hates animation. They don't respect it. They don't want to pay for it. They don't want to even acknowledge it's worth getting awards. He talked about how for being the head writer on some of the most classic spongebob episodes out there he made maybe about 15k which sounds like a lot till you account that this is 3 episodes without residuals or royalties and that he made the same amount and more doing live action. It's not just that companies have no respect for the people working the industry it's that so many of these groups don't even see animation as real shows/films. There was a film professor who I remember flat out said 'sure you can work in animation but it's not real story telling. it's a bunch of drawings and it doesn't have acting or directing. Maybe once in a blue moon a real film comes around but those are done by non animation directors.' People want the profits now and want more and more without ever acknowledging the reality. They want the line to go up. they want line up without acknowledging what really makes the line up and it makes me cry to see.
Not acting!? Tell that to all of the wonderful voice actors for games, tv shows, and movies. That person needs a wake up call.
That second professor needs to get over themselves. A lot of time and effort goes into making animation a valued artwork equal to the work of live actors.
“No directing” what?! It’s literally the only medium where every aspect of what is presented is a direct decision of the creator. Every aspect of the lighting, every object on screen, every minute mannerism of the characters, every choice in the color pallet, the perspective and camera lens replication etc... its all motivated nothing is there by happenstance. I could not think of more incorrect opinion a professor could have about film. Like someone clearly never saw anything directed by Satoshi Kon
@Coolgamer2000s I would totally watch that.
@Coolgamer2000s at this point we need to adopt the Japanese studio (bones) model works somewhere for a few years making connections and forming a well oiled team and then just branching off with that team into its own animator owned thing. Really hoping the team at Sony responsible for spiderverse and Mitchell’s will do exactly that.
Something that I've always found fascinating about piracy culture is that... While there *is* a lot of "I can't pay"/"I don't want to pay"/"I deserve this for free"/etc. among users, there's also a *hell* of a lot more "We need to preserve this." than one might expect, especially among those who initially put together the cracks, rips, and uploads that other people then acquire.
Anime fandom was one of the first places I really noticed this -- twenty years ago, almost, now -- in that there was a lot of effort to replace older, lower-quality releases with higher-quality ones as time passed, because if it's worth preserving, it's worth preserving in the highest quality you can.
There was a lot of stuff going on around that time about replacing hardsubs (baked into the video -- at that time easier for most users) with softsubs (a separate, text-only part of the file -- or a separate file all together -- with timing information attached), especially, because softsubs preserved more of the original work in its original form. Same deal with multi-lingual releases, when media container file formats were getting better and better, and more easily able to handle multiple audio streams without confusing the video players that could play them.
It really was interesting to me back then, and it probably shaped some of my modern views on piracy -- for better and worse, as it both gives me a better understanding of the preservation side of things, but also less of a moral inclination towards buying things, even when that's a possibility, if it's something I only casually care about.
The people and co-workers who surround me in real life constantly look at me like I'm crazy when I say that I don't like/trust the digital age of "stream everything" entertainment. And they don't understand why I advocate for physical media.
This. This is exactly why.
There are SO MANY shows and movies that I've fallen in love with (mostly on Netflix) that I'll NEVER own because streaming platforms staunchly refuse to release any of their material for purchase on DVD, Blu-ray or 4K. Project Power, Day Shift, Army of the Dead, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Kate, Blood Machines, Oxygen, I Am Mother, Triple Frontier, Extraction, What Happened to Monday...I COULD GO ON AND ON! And I hate the fact that one day this could happen to them. Netflix and other streaming services could go under, there could be server issues, rights issues, server farm storage issues, someone could get a wild hair up their a**...anything. And poof. They're gone and forgotten.
I hate this.
I am mad I may not find a copy of Kakegurui that has the netflix dub instead of the sentai dub
it is brazenly gross watching shit like this happen in the media industry, but I think warner's total disregard for its own content and employees is particularly rancid, hope it really crashes and burns around them so they reverse it
Stop spreading misinformation, Warner has NO SAY in what’s happening to its own content. Warner Bros. was sold to Discovery by AT&T and the Discovery CEO took over the helm for WB Discovery when he choose to merge the companies. David Zaslav and his accountant are the ones pulling all the strings, everyone else is a bystander
This is just heartbreaking! Especially for all the people who made this show for their loved ones or kids, like you said, and who can no longer show it to them!!! It's SO WRONG!
Man, it's almost like the guy who turned The Learning Channel into 90-Day Honey Boo-Boo and Counting shouldn't be trusted with a plastic knife, much less with important artistic and intellectual property... That bastard wouldn't know art if it challenged him to a MultiVersus match.
I wonder if he's still proud of the success of 90 Kids and Counting, starring his flagship character Josh Duggar?
Like always I remain a firm supporter of piracy. Not because I like it but because it's necessary to allow information to grow. I'm kinda surprised by this move by HBO, they know they have been losing money to piracy and what they do? Give up and give them the entire market, truly a move worth applauding.
You think HBO wanted this tragedy? The real problem is Discovery & your piracy isn't helping at all is it? I'm thinking we should double down on the Warner Bros Stuff that HBO Max still carries while boycotting the Discovery stuff & sending angry emails to Discovery. We want them to realize that the Warner Bros stuff is successful while Discovery isn't.
@@bookmew1081 Sure a couple of emails is gonna change the world. Cute but ineffective.
@@juliogomez2534 I was thinking millions of emails would make a difference.
@@bookmew1081 unless those are a million lost subscribers over a period of several months it will hold no sway in the decisions the company takes. Money makes might. Again cute idea, but ineffective.
I wish we, as a human race could band together against the big companies but for the love of god we can’t and we don’t.
Correction: we can but we don't
Correction: we can and some of us are, but at present most of those people don't have reliable Internet since they're busy fighting the Tatmadaw in Myanmar or waging guerilla warfare against loggers in the Amazon, so we don't see or hear much about them within the digital infosphere.
I never quite realized that until I started looking for a place to donate some soap and a giant web of meatspace anticapitalist orgs suddenly came into view.
We can and saying we can't is why we don't
Correction: We can, but most of us are blind.
Pirating media and just sending the artists some cash in the mail is the one true way
When everything becomes Patreon...
This is what Roger Rabbit was said: "You know there's no justice for Toons anymore."
This is why, no matter how relatively limited a collection it may be compared to the overall selection typically available via streaming, i will NEVER get rid of my physical media, allowing me to enjoy said media until it and/or i crumble to dust, and NOT when some overpaid executive says so ☹️
Yeah western animation was at a moment where the sort of stories were broadening, catching up to anime as you said, and this is a massive step backwards. The hatred I feel for David Zaslav is just absolutely massive.
The only consolation is that the critical and financial response to the great HBO Max purge has been so horrifically bad for Warner Bros that it will scare other companies and maybe WB from doing something like this again. WB lost 2.39 billion dollars in 3 days over this. I hope that WB is smart enough to reverse course on these actions and not stupid enough to double down and cut costs even more brutally.
Zaslav is horrible & it isn't even WB it's all Discovery who bought them! I hate that RUclips bans free speech otherwise I would use the Sla word as that is what Warner Bros is to Discovery at this point.
What's insane to me is not only are they saying "screw you" to their own long-term longetivity, employees, and customers, they're also creating potential problems for streaming services as a whole.
By setting the precedent that this could happen, I imagine it will make creators very wary of exclusivity deals with platforms going forward. Why would they want to risk that the company could just erase all their work?
I truly hope it becomes standard for creator contracts to include some kind of clause requiring the media remain available in some form. And I don't know what can be done to prevent finished or nearly finished projects from being scrapped for tax write-offs (other than a reform of the tax laws but that's not likely something to get done any time soon) but I hope something is figured out.
The financial equivalent of dad saying “look how much money I made not buying groceries this week!”
The call to the sea did not come on the wind but from the basement.
The thing that bothers me (well, alongside literally everything else about this) is that the "tactic" doesn't even make sense. These cuts make it *look* like they're making the business profitable, but they're actually just cutting revenue sources and assets and dressing up the numbers to make it look like it's all going well. It's just like when video game companies cut on testing and development costs, but end up losing profits in unsold games because of poor reception.
It works for investors, who only care about short term gains, as they can cashout before it crashes
could also be intentional, trying to wreck the companies to make a profit on them going down
@@megaflamer Eliminating the competition, and making a profit doing so.
@@JimTheCurator its depressingly common after mergers or buyouts
If this proved anything, is that, the main people, the executives and the CEOs, owners of the streaming services and IP, still see Animation in a condescending way
OR at least Zaslav does giving he didn't hesitate to pull the rug for so many animation projects
This is disgusting. The problem with publicaly traded companies is that they have no incentive to worry about long-term viability. If it wasn’t for corporate sort-sightedness like this, oil companies would have started investing in alternative energies decades ago to prepare for when oil inevitably runs out.
I'm remembering the complete purge of P.T. on the PlayStation Network 8 years ago and how much of an impact that was on the Gaming Community.
I only got to play it because a friend had it. It's truly horrible what companies do to art.
It's still talked about to this day along side silent hills.
Same, I could never play It, but I'll always remember how they absolutely screwed over the vita when they let It rot, I lost everything on It and It made me understand no gaming console from them was safe to buy, that they didn't care about the consummer
I work at a store and not too long ago someone came in and balked at our selling of DVDs and such when everything is available online for streaming and having to pay "premium" prices. And now I wonder if they had a favorite show lost to this purge and now know the merit behind physical copies.
The problem with physical is that they have stopped selling new copies as Geoff mentioned so you can't get it that way. It is going to be hard to get it used soon as well. I took a look at ebay while watching this video and infinity train is already selling between $70 - $100. It's great if you managed to get a hold of a copy before it got expensive, but it sucks if you try to get it now. It's the same problem with video games. I am trying to buy games I missed out on as a kid and some of them are hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you want a physical copy.
Ah, when capitalists are so inept they can't even do capitalism right. Imagine having so little clue how to run a media company that you can't go a year without cooking your books.
Honestly at this point that's most of them.
Granted I don't know if any of them have gone to the levels of Zaslav's dipshittery.
According to Zaslav, he knows exactly what he’s doing. Discovery is profitable enough by producing low-cost reality TV tripe gobbled up by people who love the lowest common denominator of entertainment. Warner Media was an albatross around AT&T’s neck (from his point of view), so he figures he knows better than anyone who ran it before him. Now, he’s going to be in for a rude awakening because what audiences at HBO Max want is not what Discovery+ is selling, so he’s going to lose a lot of money and hopefully shareholder dollars in the process.
@@originalscreenname44 Don't you just love corporate Dunning-Kruger? /s
How's feudalism treatin' ya?
The precise climber, while I understand the sentiment, this was always what capitalism was, we didn't devolve into a previous system, merely that our system no longer had to place nice after the fall of the USSR, and it becoming apparent that China is just as capitalist.
What I think is fascinating about the difference between most Japanese isaki and the trio of American isaki he mentioned is who they are aimed at. The Japanese shows are mostly power fantasies for teenage boys whereas the American ones star teen girls and while they become extremely powerful and the world's they discover are fascinating and sometime whimsical, they have to earn their power and the worlds are also exceedingly dangerous. I don't know what says about the difference between our cultures and the perspective of the creators, but seems worth exploring.
Now I honestly want to watch the American isekais because Japanese ones annoy me to high hell.
Damn that’s some really good insight, I hadn’t ever considered that before! It’d make a rly interesting video for sure!
Absolutely worth diving into
Counterpoint: that's how Japanese isekai used to be as well. Before the current massive wave, isekai was stuff like Vision of Escaflowne, Fushigi Yuugi, and Spirited Away. So is the current crop of American isekai inspired by those old school series? Or is it a case of convergent evolution? Are we going to get our own Western wave of power fantasies for boys?
@@anthonylarocque7975 I really hope we as a society have moved beyond that. It certainly helps that Western cartoons starting boys have been much less toxic in their presentation of masculinity.
At least we still have Primal…
For now.
and i thought netflix removing breaking bad was tragic, but this is just...a great depression for cartoons
2022 is literally Animation Armageddon! The world of animation is at stake. I feel really bad for all of the talented animators, creators and directors involved in these projects. Animation is not replaceable, the fact that they're treating it like that is genuinely terrible. We must take action NOW because this is getting out of hand.
Like what Roger Rabbit said: "You know there's no justice for Toons anymore."
Discovery+ is probably going to fail soon. There just doesn’t seem to be a diverse enough range of content to hold onto viewers. What monsters would cancel Elmo’s late night show? I know no one who owns Discovery +. American animation is so undervalued. I’m sad that perhaps many of these creators work is going to become lost media for a nonsensical reason.
Infinity Train fans have been fighting for this show since the pilot aired and we keep fighting against odds, but now it's not just about Infinity Train anymore. It's not even about all the other shows HBO Max royally screwed. This is a war for the entire animation industry - all the shows, fans and creators. #CancelHBOMax and make a hard copy of everything you care about.
To save 3 billion dollars… and they lost 20 billion dollars and counting. Something tells me the shareholders are NOT happy.
The only reason I watched HBO Max was Close Enough so yeah I cancelled my subscription when they cancelled that
Close Enough was really fun. I'm sad it was cancelled :(
Is there anything people who aren't subscribed to HBO max can do besides cancel their subscription? I've been so excited the the Batgirl movie since it was first rumored back in 2016, now that it's canceled I feel betrayed and devastated. It feels like a bad april fool's joke. I want to do something that make HBO realize what a bad idea this was but I don't think theres much I can do...
encouraging your family/friends to cancel their subscriptions helps too.
I’m cancelling my HBO subscription after this whole debacle and batgirl just being cancelled. Which is just the ceo flushing millions of dollars down the drain for no reason.
I guess the only other thing people can do is just not subscribe to HBO max, there are other streaming platforms
I'd say piss off HBO until someone high up does something that will tarnish the whole company.
You can show support for the shows that they cancelled and promote them to your friends and family. It adds value to the IP and it ensures that it will continue gaining an audience after it's gone. Also make sure to show support for the 2D aminated shows that are still ongoing and available to the public as it adds value to the medium and streaming services will be less justified in pulling support from them.
HBO isn't the problem, it is all Discovery who did this & screwed over both HBO Max & Warner Brothers! You should spread the word to boycott Discovery for their crimes & send them angry emails to them.
My best friend has been waiting for Venture Bros and Metalocalypse to get animated conclusions for years and after finally getting a movie announcement... This happens and most likely they'll cancel it all once more. This situation blows for everyone except the soulless execs.
Venture Bros fans are straight up oppressed.
Well once someone snaps and goes postal, it might finally blow for the soulless execs...
All it takes is One Bad Day, after all.
James Uzbaniak tweeted that it will release next year so we probably good
I really wanted The Venture Bros and Metalocalypse movies. I loved both back in the day :(
Warner brothers was like:
“Hey we need more money”
*chops off arm*
“I said *more* money...”
This is why I am a hardcore proponent for physical media. It isn't the be all, end all, but being able to own, and I do mean own, a copy of media is important because it means that you can take on the responsibility of preservation via backup copies. To my knowledge, taking an example Geoff made in the video, there is no way to own a copy of Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you can only license it via streaming services that can, and have done, the work to strip those from devices that have them downloaded. I do not support streaming platforms, they are in effect the latest channelization of the internet and have been grossly effective at sectioning off vast swathes of content from customers unless they pay a fee on top of the fee they have to connect to the internet in the first place.
@Bionick Toa indeed, though with the hard push of just about every entertainment to go to streaming/rental systems, a broad swathe of the customer base has moved over to that, even as it's grown more inconvenient and costly
This is also what has made me extremely wary about buying exclusively digital versions of games - you are only buying the license so they can just remove your license at any time and that's that. Same thing with servers one day going down - you can never play it again in the case of some games that do server checks before really starting up. Not to mention that you can't resell it even though you own it. The state of laws in the US that protect consumers and the digital things that they buy is WOEFULLY behind the times and there's zero push to fix it.
The fall of physical media has also seen the loss of those cool extras I used to buy DVDs for - deleted/extended scenes, interviews with writers and directors, little mini documentaries about the making of. Very few physical releases come with those and most are not on whatever streaming service that goes to. Streaming has undoubtedly made it much easier to have access to content, but there absolutely are downsides and what's happening with HBOMAX is the darkest underside of it - a company completely owning an IP and having total control over every bit of it. It's not "art" to be seen by the world, it's a product that exists to make a profit, and since streaming has not turned out to be the replacement for people buying physical media that companies wanted (they are not making NEARLY as much money as they used to when they sold VHS/DVD/Blurays), they are all panicking and scrambling. They want to make ALL THE MONEY and they can't anymore and it's putting them all in a tailspin.
Reject modernity (streaming), embrace tradition (piracy).
Greed is the bane of art
I'm so pissed about this, I despise these greedy executives twats
I never anticipated that HBO Max, one of my favorite streaming services that I couldn't shut up about to my friends and family, would become hot garbage with an uncertain future within the span of a few weeks.
This is some massive character development from your "No good reason for piracy" days, and I appreciate it.
That said, I'm not really sure how to get started with P2P file-sharing sites. I've done a fair bit of streaming piracy in my day, and while I have adblock and the owners of those sites aren't making money from me I'm not sure how to do the more-ethical choice of direct sharing. Anyone have tips?
Not sure how helpful this is, but...
I'm lucky enough to have a friend who's good at getting hold of subbed tokusatsu show episodes, and we've had an arrangement where he'll send me a few eps at a time in a ZIP file via Discord. That's at least one way of sharing media that I know works.
What about limited share torrents? The 4chan torrent is one of the best sources for old anime because of this.
Just make it on a much smaller scale
Mental Outlaw had some videos on it. Unfortunately all you can find are reuploads of “Top 10 Tørrent sites”.
Be sure to get a VPN (like Mullvad for great privacy, but might be a little slow).
Be sure to look at any .dll/.exe/program with EXTREME skepticism.
I’ve also heard that the good guy ratio is 1.5 (for every download, upload about 1.5times).
The Owl House is unironically my favourite Isekai, followed up shortly by SAOA and Infinity Train.
I also couldn’t watch TOH or Infinity Train legally in my country, despite watching them through multiple times it doesn’t show on analytics because they won’t let me give them my money and it’s so frustrating that the shows are seen as underperforming because there are surely multitudes like me.
Sword Art online alicization? Possibly?
@@yunogasai1338, SAO Abridged, I bet I’ve watched it through over a dozen times now.
@@Jaydee-wd7wr oh lol. The last abridge anime's I remember watching were littlekuriboh's yugioh abridged or TeamFourStar's Dragonball Z abridged. I haven't tried SAO abridged yet.
@@yunogasai1338 it´s insane how the abridged version is uniroically better written then the original.
@@Jaydee-wd7wr I was really confused how Sword Art Online Alicization fit in between The Owl House and Infinity Train. It being SAO Abridged makes a lot more sense.
Geoff, you NEED to see Infinity Train. Take a quick break, binge it, anyone who's seen it will understand a little delay in whichever video/podcast you make next. Which will be about Infinity Train, btw I'm calling it as soon as you watch it. I mean Owl House and Amphibia are great, but Infinity Train has impact not unlike its name. Even if you need to wco fun com it, if you know what I mean. Maybe I'm using that slang wrong, but be sure to bring your baggage cause it's gonna take you for a ride.
Infinity Train is so good! Definitely one of my favorite modern shows to date, animated or live-action.
We need a Nebula like creator owned platform for cartoons.
Agreed. Cartoon Cartoons for jaded streamers. There are so many shows that never made it to physical and now they're gone. What a travesty.
You described it as being sacrificed on an alter. I have a feeling you’re more correct than you know.
0:30 wdym it just confirms jotaro for multiversus
This is a really well put video on a depressing situation. The purging of a lot of animated content means bad news; it shows that anything can be taken away for any reason. This sucks for trying to archive media too
Uncle Grandpa can't die.
He's tried. It doesn't stick.
And they have the nerve to start advertising an option for a yearly membership. Why would I purchase that when you could just nuke my favorite shows at any point. (BTW my favorite show on their was sesame street cuz my daughter will sit there for a half hour in the morning and allow me to get a cup of coffee with out having to share)
When the shitstorm first started, I remember when Justin Sevakis from Discotech Media said that the streaming wars "lasted only slightly longer than the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wars".
FUCKING. OOF.
Cancelled days ago. The "Reasons for cancellation" option didn't let me actually say why. That left an even worse taste in my mouth.
It baffles me that they are dead set on doing whatever they can to make sure they release The Flash no matter what but are doing everything they can to remove anything that's in its way
Infinity train truely deserves a watch, and maybe even a video.
The tragedy of this masterpiece should be told for generations!
I've also heard that a lot of the cancelled shows have had either LGBTQIA+ creators or actually contained LGBTQIA+ representation. So like I don't think it's a coincidence that these shows in particular were cancelled to make short-term profit...
I been wondering this, discovery’s. CEO is known to be homophobic. I just didn’t know enough about all the shows to say for sure that LGBTQ+ was the unifying factor though
Their is a monetary incentive to produce shows that tick certain boxes and push certain themes/ideas due to there being a literal diversity score/current x thing witch is why you get content that panders to a thing with out any actual meaning care or support on the actual issue where is matters (contreys that still are homofobic and/or sexist get custom tailored content with those messages edited out)and(poor representation due to lack of well written original diverse characters) (hiring people due to the box they tick and not their actual skill/talent) they probably aren't doing it out of hate for lgbt they just never cared and dropped content content containing that message when it could no longer financially benefit them
@@ducktape2218 I agree, whether this decision was made out of malice or indifference, it still kinda shows that representation to them was just about money and nothing more. Which is really fucked up
see also: the stuff happening at CNN
I will always feel salty and feel bad for my man Olan Rogers for the cancellation of Final Space. Such an amazingly quirky and beautiful show, cut short before it’s time to connect to a bigger audience.
Since HBO Max is doing this to us, we should put some cancelations on them and boycott them unanimously.
The worst part of this is that if any of those platforms like iTunes scrub the show from their site, then that means that people who have paid for the show and didn't download it right away, will NEVER be able to download it again. I've learned this the hard way when the license iTunes had for Black Jack anime episodes was scrubbed and I can't get a show that I PAID for anymore. Preservation of media is such a mess right now and there needs to be a better way.
Animator here: I noticed they targeted unionized studios that were working on the productions. I work in Canada, where there is no animators union, nor residuals for animators (was that ever a thing for animators??) If I was payed a penny for the amount of times the shows I worked on was aired and re-aired, I'd be able to move out of my dingey apartment.
Also, yes, please Pirate your animated shows, especially if they are owned by Disney, WB, HBO, etc. The money you put into subscriptions or paying online does not go back to the artists that made them. We have tax breaks/subsidies provided by (drum roll) provincial/state wide government that pay for the first half-and sometimes entire season of production before a client company ever pays the animation studio in question. And the Client studio can at any time cancel the fucking contract- like what they did here. (also see the Life Of Pi oscars and the closing of the award-winning studio.)
The act of piracy will incentivize these greedy shareholders to fucking pay the people who made them their fair share. A "I won't pay unless I know my money goes to the people who actually put work into making this show" effort, so to speak.
Is there any way any one of us can pay you and your colleagues back at least $5 monthly to support you?
have you considered making a video on the fact that sony has a functional monopoly on anime streaming in the west, owning both crunchyroll and funimation, because there's another big argument for piracy if ive ever seen one
now they own Rightstuf!
Y'know, for the last few years I've had so many people look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them I collect all my favorite shows and movies on physical media when possible. When asked why I always tell them that I do so because I'm not a fan of having my right to view media dictated by some exec that can effectively nuke my options to when and where I can watch something. Usually they respond with something like "oh that's just being dramatic, even if it gets taken down from one platform it'll always be up on another". This situation definitely opened a few eyes.
Much as I like my physical media collection for the sake of collecting stuff, if what I really cared about was having untouchable backups of all my favorites in the most efficient way I'd invest in a couple of hard drives instead. Less space, less cost, and redundancy. Your disk can scratch or rot, your tapes will wear out, but you can copy that .mkv to as many backup drives as you need forever.
LoL I got an ad for HBO Max in this video tearing down HBO Max
The One Piece soundtracks and instrumental "You are a Pirate" foreshadowed the final arc of the video well.