Cognition Dissemination: Remember Funimation?

It has, at this point, been about a month-and-a-half since Crunchyroll and parent company Sony Pictures Entertainment announced their valiant plan to plunge the Excalibur into the heart of Funimation. Following Sony’s purchase of the biggest anime streaming network in the world, the writing was on the wall that they wouldn’t keep two competing networks around under one company. The blade would inevitably be run through one of them, and it was obvious that Saber wouldn’t choose the one in every major market worldwide in our Streaming Universe. They assumed the Americans with plenty of nostalgia for Funimation, which existed for years before the time Crunchyroll was a piracy haven (which they’d love for everyone to forget about), will get over it in a short time.

The real surprise here is the speed at which Sony is burying Funimation to have Crunchyroll take over, seemingly out of gleeful desperation. Their efforts have largely been a success, though they’ve run into other issues of their own creation along the way.

Since I last posted about how the migration from one service to the other had run into hitches, two announcements have been made. One has involved the unceremonious death of Funimation’s YouTube channel. It previously existed to promote Funimation’s lineup through posting trailers, clips, and even entire episodes. But it was changed to “Crunchyroll Dubs,” which went into effect immediately after the announcement.

There’s ample evidence that this decision was hastily made, without the knowledge of the person or team responsible for maintaining the account. This happened a little more than a month after the subtitled versions of classic shows like Samurai 7 and Desert Punk were uploaded to it. All the episodes outside the first three in both those series and a few more have “surprisingly” since been set to private. There’s nothing wrong with having an account dedicated to showcasing the dubbed versions of Crunchryoll’s shows, but they didn’t want to work to build up a new account from scratch and took over an existing one. Farewell, Funimation YouTube account.

It was also on April 5th that Funimation’s store was merged into Crunchyroll’s store, with the URL for the former including a link to direct people to the latter. Again, this happening is no surprise, but it happened quickly. Crunchyroll will also take over Funimation’s name for future home video releases starting in June, meaning the Funimation brand won’t live on in that way either. You’d think there was a vendetta here.

One competitive company subsuming another usually never leads to good things for fans in the long run, but this trend doesn’t always apply to streaming services. There remains a chance this entire affair can have more benefits for the anime community and industry than negatives. The embarrassing and self-inflicted wounds Crunchyroll has sustained along the way since early March could suggest otherwise.

Speaking of Crunchyroll dubs: Some dubbing casts for anime this season, chief among them Spy x Family, will consist of Funimation’s crew from Texas. It’s good that they’ll remain employed as they are, as I’m sure of them had some morbid thoughts as they realized their parent company was being phased out with swiftness. Crunchyroll, on the other hand, did this while starting to ghost west coast actors who were still working remotely in favor of in-person recording in Texas.

Okay so if it's not obvious:

From what most of us can tell, Funi/Crunchyroll/Sony is pushing to move everything back in-studio here in Texas right now. I was fortunately given the choice this week to record from home, but mere days later, others were no longer given that option.

— 💀Morgan Lea @ Sexual Anarchy (@morglea) April 9, 2022

There’s no stated reason why Crunchyroll did this at this particular point, nor are they likely to give one. But it’s hard not to think this was at least partially due to the recent Anime News Network article that detailed the fight for unionized anime dubs among Los Angeles’ remote-working voice actors, and the horrendous pay they received for dubbing Jujutsu Kaisen’s first anime season and the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 film. “Jujutsu Kaisen’s English voice actors were likely paid just $150 to $600 each, based on the going rate in the industry. That’s not a per-hour rate. That’s the total amount,” as it was stated and emphasized in the article. The timing of Crunchyroll’s move here lines up, unless this was a funny coincidence. Texas, by the way, is a right-to-work state where it’s more difficult to form and keep unions. This is bad stuff, and it will never stop being funny to see moves like this from what was previously a piracy site.

Having all the shows from Crunchyroll and Funimation on one service that practically goes for $10 a month sounds good in theory. The fact that they’re taking so long to make this happen makes the push for Funimation account owners to cancel their subscriptions from early March more and more puzzling. Crunchyroll was adding Funimation shows every Tuesday until they simply stopped on March 29th, for… well, who the hell knows why. Maybe they should say something about this. Plenty of content remains only on Funimation, and they couldn’t have missed the stated goal of having 80 percent of their content on Crunchyroll by the end of March any harder.

I know this is coming off as me sounding bitter about the whole Crunchyroll/Funimation devouring. I’m not. The promise of having a bunch of content on one service instead of subscribing to two anime services for monthly fees sounded great. But the expectation that arose from this is what makes the migration thus far so, well, bitterly disappointing. Not to mention how they couldn’t wait to put Funimation in the grave. There’s still time for them to get this right, but I’m losing faith that they will, or even want to.