Year Three in Room 5
By Dylan Acres
As of August 17th, this website will celebrate its third anniversary
online. The past year has been a very strange one for Maison Ikkoku
fans, particularly those in North America. It had both remarkable
joys and disheartening pains, and I'll talk a little about both
here.
This past January saw the end of the Maison Ikkoku manga with Part
Nine Issue Ten. The ending was a very happy one, and even saw the
printing of a few chapters that had been skipped at the very beginging
of Maison Ikkoku, in the new Animerica Extra magazine. Those bonuses
only served to further heighten the excitement that drew fans of
the series together for the grand finale, and what a finale it was.
The wedding issue was translated with loving care by the professionals
at Viz. As characters appeared for the last time to wish the happy
couple luck in their future life together fans got one last chance
to wish everyone a goodbye before seeing what the future had in
store for each of them.
Sadly, not all the news of the past year could be happy news. The
Maison Ikkoku anime from Viz Video has seen some very rough times
since the cancellation of the dubbed version last October. The subtitled
version was put on hiatus, and for most of the year, fans had absolutely
no new Maison Ikkoku anime to watch. We were left feeling cheated,
dissapointed, and disillusioned about what would happen to our favorite
anime. When no new information came for months, fans wondered if
the series would ever be continued.
Luckily for fans of the show, subtitled episodes began again just
this month, and many of us are working very hard to see the release
of hybrid DVD's so that the dubbed version can be restored and more
mainstream fans can hopefully be brought into this wonderful world
of ronins, apartment managers, and tennis coaches, the unique love
they share, and the painful trials they all have to go through in
the love story of a lifetime.
Dylan Acres is a psychologist and college professor. Maison Ikkoku has long been his favorite manga and he has written a number of articles on the series and Rumiko Takahashi including an analysis of the animation directors of Maison Ikkoku, Takahashi's love of the Hanshin Tigers and a cataloging of the color artwork of Rumiko Takahashi.
|