The MST3K was always an add-on tier in VRV. They do have a number of Rifftrax still in the VRV Selects section. They’ve been grabbing some interesting stuff including all the Stargate stuff including Origins and weird things like Freakazoid’s full run, Killjoys from SyFy and random animated movies. Considering Crunchyroll and Funimation are each $8 on their own, $10 to get both plus all the addition Mubi/Shudder/VRV/Roosterteeth stuff is pretty phenomenal. They’re also getting way better at offering cross service suggestions. So if you a certain Anime it will suggest similar themed content across all the verticals in the app now.
Hulu does have a decent selection. I’ve also been thinking about getting a HiDive sub recently. They’ve added some interesting older shows, but they don’t seem to have apps for Roku or PS4 which is kinda a dealbreaker.
My main complaint with VRV is for some reason it autoplays movies if you go to their page on the website. It doesn’t do that in the app version, thankfully.
Yeah I noticed Stargate and Freakazoid earlier. I’d happily switch over, if I hadn’t done an annual renewal in November. I turned off auto-renewal on my crunchyroll account earlier. I just don’t want to double pay.
I saw something on HiDive the other day that really interested me…think it might have been the original Gatchaman, which I knew as Battle of the Planets when I was a wee tyke.
That’s an interesting story, actually. I never realized until I looked it up (after seeing it on HiDive) that the series was HEAVILY edited for US release. The robot voiced your Alan Young (7-Zark-7) didn’t even exist in the original series. All those scenes were added to fill in after the cuts that were made.
You now have me super curious about what changed with the US version. I watched (and LOVED) that as a kid, and my older brother and I used to build the phoenix and all the ships in Lego at fairly large scale (about 3 feet long) that had compartments to store all the smaller vehicles. It looked a bit like this (but eh, more blocky!)
My experience is that to get the rights to a single item, it is very common for Japanese companies to force the buy of a batch of rights to various crap they hold.
My guess it that instead of not using those extra rights, one might as well recycle them and try to make an extra buck out of it. It was probably the thinking behind all those 50 episodes series (who would never have been broadcasted, and wouldn’t have fitted on a single tape) butchered into 1h30 features by dear Sandy. But I learned about the existence of Sandy watching MST3K for the first time this year, and maybe it is common knowledge.
A lot of the battle stuff was flat out removed, replaced with Center Neptune footage (none of which originally existed). There are other significant changes, e.g. Keyop’s bizarre speech, Zoltar’s sister.
On the subject of currently watching anime, we’ve actively been using our VRV sub lately for a variety of stuff:
Today’s Menu for the Emiya Family. Mentioned upthread, only had one new episode come out since then (as expected from what others said then).
My Hero Academia. I’m not actively watching it, but I’ve caught a lot of it via others in the house watching it and seeing endless stuff about it on Tumblr and Twitter.
Cells at Work. Cute and funny!
Akagi. The polar opposites of cute and funny! (Also, I read a bunch of the manga years ago, so the anime hasn’t touched on anything new to me, but it’s been fun seeing other people’s reactions to it.)
Pop Team Epic. Only watched the first three episodes so far, but man, what a ride.
My girlfriend and I have also been making good use of the watchlist, after months of forgetting it was a thing.
Thanks for the HiDive recommendations earlier folks.
Tried and enjoyed the first episodes of most of them. My girlfriend quickly got hooked on Parasyte, that’s the only one we had time to finish. Great show! I’ll be resubscribing to watch more after the Xbox version is ready. :)
If anyone else decides to try it: The website worked much better than the mobile apps for us. Those are pretty basic, and they don’t remember your audio / subtitle settings between episodes.
So, people do like HiDive? Don’t really need/want another monthly sub, but it’s tempting (and I know I could probably just watch Gatchaman on a free trial, but knowing me I would end up keeping it).
Desktop browser. It’s still Flash-based, for god’s sake. And all the resizing controls disappear while ads are playing.
Their ad network is bizarre as well. Ads with no sound. Ads with a runtime of a minute or more but that you can skip after 10 seconds. I don’t understand why anyone thinks that’s a good idea.
