You know how, when you’re lying there awake, and your mind starts to wander, even though you can’t sleep, you’ll think of the damnedest things? Last night was like that.
It occurred to me that the Japanese might not have re-runs on TV. I’ve never heard or seen any reference to an animé episode being repeated; instead it’s always, “what’s new this season?” every four months. Now, it might be that they do have re-runs, it’s just that no one on this side of the Pacific cares, since the fansub will be made from the original broadcast. Still, if they do have re-runs, it seems odd that I’ve never seen any reference to them.
The second thing that occurred to me is that TV seasons in the US are shorter than they were 30 years ago. I base this on the current standard of 22 episode seasons. At that pace, three years would see 66 episodes made. For comparison, Star Trek:TOS had 79 episodes in three years. That’s 26 per year, with one extra tacked on to the end. As I recall, NBC had an option for two extra episodes in the third year, but asked for only one. So four shows got chopped off the typical season in later years. Must have been all the crappy mini-series in the early 1980’s.
Can’t say as the change affected me one way or the other; I quit watching TV in the late 80’s. Hm, I wonder if there’s any connection there…
Reruns do exist, but they’re much more uncommon than for US shows. Here, we have new episodes starting in the fall and running through the spring, though not every week (with new episodes concentrated in sweeps months) and reruns during the summer season. In Japan, there’s an expectation that a show will air every week (absent preemption) and that something else will run in that slot once it’s done. It might be a year or two, if not longer, before anyone runs the show again…
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What can I say? When I was in college, I had to stop using even an 0.5mm pencil, because my handwriting was so awful, it blurred too much. An 0.7mm is just out of the question!
And in other news, I’m going to have to try to reinstall the MS-Mincho character set again. It didn’t work last time, and I’m getting tired of seeing everything Japanese come up as ????????.