Not having been overly exposed to Utena, I have no idea what's going on here. I Have only seen scattered episodes and pieces of episodes. It's been on my vague "stuff I want to get around to seeing one of these days" list. Only recently since reading SOTS have I become more interested in seeking out copies of the series in one form or another (probably on DVD) Was more than one studio involved in it's creation and animation -- and then being a pain about the rights to its work or something here? Enlightenment please?

-Logan

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"No, this is not a good town for psychedelic
drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

-Hunter Thompson,
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Zoner, please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it:

Software Sculptors got the US license and then, after getting 1-13 out, died in a painful way. Since then, the various groups have been thrashing through fixing what do with the license, as it's considered part of the 'assets' and thus needed to be disposed of. So they're still thrashing through the last third of the series, getting that licensed.

I can't help but wonder if this is going to be a series released in thirds by three different companies when it's all over.

--
Geoff Depew - Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Malakite of Lightning and Angel of Tech Support Professionals
(They won't give me LARTs, they say that's restricted to Michael.)

SS isn't gone; it became part of Central Park Media, but it still exists as an imprint. The Utena movie was just released under the same logo.

They tell a good story of legal wrangles - basically, SS think they're entitled to the entire series under their original license, whereas the Japanese licensor disagrees - but I have a cynical suspicion that what really happened was that SS got hold of the title, watched the first few episodes, thought, "Oh, this is a cute campus-life series with a kind of weird fantasy twist, and it's by Ikuhara - we can play up the Sailor Moon connection," then marketed it accordingly. Then they saw the later parts of the series and went, "Holy crud! We can't sell this to little girls, it's got incest, date rape and mind control in it!!" - then got all panicky and froze for a couple years. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

That's not quite right.

SS didn't go away, they were bought out by CPM. Actually they always had a close link - they used the same offices for a while. SS wasn't officially part of CPM at first though.

I forget the timing - SS may have picked up Utena after the buyout, or before. It doesn't really matter.

SS got the materials for 1-13, the plan was to do the series in thirds as batches. When they went to do 14-26 they had problems. The story from CPM is that the license they signed gave them the rights to the entire series, but their licensor balked and claimed it was only for 1-13 and an option on the others - so that they'd have to renegotiate the rights to each 13 episode block.

Apparently they worked out the details on 14-26.

-MegaZone, megazone@megazone.org
Personal Homepage http://www.megazone.org/
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The Jury is still out here on the movie. I don't know if I want to see it at all.

Tom 'Dreamshadow' Tjarks
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"I'm just gonna go play Mage Knight now...."

Trust me. The movie is a mind-warp job that is only vaguely related to the series. The series makes sense, in its own inimitable way. And the series has no Car Wash of Doom, no automorphism, no Disneyland-On-Wheels... oh well, I could go on for a while about the differences. Give the series a chance -- you won't be disappointed.

-- Bob
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In Xanadu did Newton-John a stately disco dome decree...

The premise is the same, but the development is totally different; it seems like they just concentrated 39 episodes of weirdness into about two hours of film, producing one of the most bizarre cinematic experiences of my life.

-- Sean --
"After that, pi felt downright conventional."
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