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Creator / Bandai Entertainment

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Bandai Entertainment was an American subsidiary of Bandai America, itself a company specializing in translations/dubs of Japanese media for the United States. Based in Cypress, California, they worked a lot with Bang Zoom! Entertainment and Animaze/Magnitude 8 Post as well as The Ocean Group note  with dubbing and translating popular manga and anime, usually from Bandai and its sister company Sunrise. They also ran one of the earliest experiments with selling anime online, "AnimeVillage.com". They localized most of Kyoto Animation's titles.

On January 3, 2012, their future projects past February, as well as the opportunities for their associates and entertainment from the fans, were all dropped in one fell swoop by president Kenichi "Ken" Iyadomi's announcement that they would no longer release any new anime or manga titles for DVD and Blu-ray after 14 years of being among the major American anime distributors. They would also no longer produce dubs. They laid off most of their remaining employees. They restocked their DVDs until November 15, 2012, when they discontinued them entirely. They are currently restructuring to become a licensor of media toward other companies. Some blame this move on the fansubbers releasing anime illegally online, but some also blame Bandai's failure to have a business model that works in The New '10s. The actual reason is that Bandai Japan didn't see any use for continuing to sell DVDs in a foreign niche market when they could just produce them locally and save more money. By 2013, most of its anime licenses were carried over to other studios.

Mostly unrelated to, and not to be confused with, Bandai Visual (their biggest licensor) or Bandai Namco Holdings (the parent company).

Anime and manga released by Bandai Entertainment:

Anime and manga released by Bandai Visual USA under the "Honneamise" label before being acquired by Bandai Entertainment:

Anime and manga dropped due to their distribution discontinuation:

  • Gosick (now licensed by Funimation, who are also creating an English dub for it)
  • Nichijou (now licensed by Funimation, who initially released it sub-only before rereleasing it with an English dub)
  • ∀ Gundam (now licensed by Nozomi Entertainment with all of the other Gundam shows)

Tropes associated with Bandai Entertainment:

  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Any of their titles that has not yet been rescued will be this.
    • Nichijou (both anime and manga), and Gosick never had an official home media release in America, and are no longer available on Crunchyroll. For Oceania, Madman Entertainment put them out on DVD in sub-only form. Funimation eventually put Nichijou out in sub-only, and is also releasing Gosick with both the original Japanese VO track, and also an added English dub.
  • Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: For several titles, notably:
    • The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya came out in both a Vanilla Edition and a Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition, with the latter version including soundtrack CDs and bonus DVDs featuring the episodes presented in original broadcast order.
    • This was also done with the US release of Lucky Star (except for the last volume).
    • With the US release of Code Geass, Bandai planned out three different releases, specifically targeting the different levels of anime fans. For casual fans, there's the Vanilla Edition single DVDs and "volume packs" (two DVDs packaged together). For the real fanatics, there's the Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition, which is a two-pack plus a Sound Episode CD, an official soundtrack CD and a volume of the spinoff manga.
    • .hack//sign did this when it came out on DVD. They had the regular DVDs and then they had the special edition ones with a Soundtrack CD in each. Except the last two. Second to last had a box to put the previous CDs in, and the last had an extra disc with a few special features on it.
    • Bandai's release of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was handled quite beautifully. On top of the vanilla editions for all 14 DVDs (covering both seasons,) a special edition was released as well, and it only cost about $10 more. The 14 DVDs provided 2 figurines of Motoko, 1 of Batou, 1 of Togusa, 2 Jameson units, 3 Tachikomas, 2 Android Maids, a 2nd Gig mousepad, a Laughing Man t-shirt, the first three Original Sound Tracks, a Section 9 Employee badge, as well as Tin DVD cases to hold the DVDs in. Also, the 2nd Gig DVDs themselves came in metal cases, which themselves are stored in a rather fancy tin DVD case.
  • No Dub for You: Some of their titles in it's later years came without a dub including Hayate the Combat Butler and The Girl Who Leapt Through Space
  • Vanilla Edition: Due to a sudden shift of the rights to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann from ADV Films to Bandai right before the former was about to start their release, Bandai decided that they would quickly release a version that has only the subbed episodes in three volumes, while the full release (dual-audio, feelies, and really cool box) was finished in 2009.

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