Ask John: What are the Odds of a Zillion Rerelease?

Question:
Is there any chance that Zillion may come back? Especially to DVD? Also would there also be a slim chance that we’ll get all the episodes instead of four? Does Streamline, seeing if they still exist, hold rights to this anime?

Answer:
The first 18 of 31 episodes of Shooting Photon Zillion are scheduled to be released in a DVD boxed set in Japan on December 5, 2003. That first Zillion DVD boxed set will retail at 18,000 yen, or roughly $170 American.

Back in 1990, Streamline Pictures released the first 5 (not four) Zillion TV episodes and the concluding OAV, “Burning Night,” to American dubbed VHS tape. With its decent action and attractive character designs, the show found a small following of devoted fans that are still interested in the 1987 anime now, 16 years later.

Streamline Pictures no longer exists, but Carl Macek, the Streamline producer responsible for bringing Zillion to America, now works for AD Vision. With Zillion being a show made before many current anime fans were even born, and it based on a Sega video game console that many contemporary anime fans probably don’t remember or don’t even know exists, I don’t really imagine there’s a big market for this title eagerly anticipating an American re-release. But AD Vision has acquired or revived the American distribution of a number of former Streamline titles including Robotech, Doomed Megalopolis, Crying Freeman, and Megazone 23. And Carl Macek has been influential in urging AD Vision to license and release vintage anime TV series (particularly the 1983 anime TV series Aura Battler Dunbine). So especially considering that a Japanese DVD release is imminent, meaning that DVD quality video footage does exist, I wouldn’t say that it’s totally out of question for America to see a re-release of the Akai Kodan Zillion anime. However, at the same time, I also don’t consider a re-release likely. The show wasn’t unusually successful in America a decade ago when it was new, so I don’t know for certain that there would be much interest in it now when it’s animation has aged another 10 years.