The Slaughtering of Anime in Singapore

Hey…I believe many of you who do shopping have ventured into video stores. And in Singapore, if you wanna talk about anime available in DVDs and VCDs, one (notorious) name will pop in your head for sure: ODEX.

Yes, THE ODEX that has tearing anime apart in Singapore limb by limb. Why? Read this.

How is anime being tore apart in Singapore? Well, let’s see, ODEX basically has almost monopolized the distribution of anime in Singapore, so we kinda have no choice but to go to their goods. But what do they do in return? Lousy resoultion/quality, seriously bad dubbings (though they’re in dual-sound), and exorbitant prices. How exorbitant, you say? Let’s see, S$29.90 for a vcd box…which contains only around ~10 episodes. That’s like $3 for an episode. Is it worth the money then? The resolution is so bad, you dun wanna maximise to full-screen when watching them on your computer. The dubbing, the hell, you would RUSH to set the audio to the original Japanese before the characters start to speak.

Now, you think it’s worth the money now?

One fact to point out that anime vcds in Singapore aren’t well-received. Now it’s still the Great Singapore Sale period, and a specific video store chain is selling the anime vcds at 4 boxsets for the price of 1. S$29.90.
They must be real desperate to clear the stocks.

And c’mon, let’s face it, anime is readily available on the internet, and it’s no wonder that people get their anime through it. And if you read the letter in the link above, I say that ODEX is concerned about nothing but profits for themselves. I suggest a job change for them: they aren’t cut out for business. 🙂

And hell with it, there are also articles on the newspapers that compliment ODEX. Guess we know who wrote them.

Now, am I still in the wrong to say that anime is being slaughtered in Singapore?