天下制覇

A little late for an opening week, but not for a week of talking about openings.

Well, thanks to the combined powers of being the first blog on the block to cover StrikerS and being basically the only blog on the block to cover Ikki Tousen, on Monday we passed about three landmarks, over 5,000 unique visitors, over 10,000 page views,  over 1,000 hits in a day, and most importantly… a total of $2.50 in Adsense revenue. All this in about a month of pretty much doing nothing but posting screencaps along with Mike’s random asides on his silly little bullet hell project. I didn’t really have a goal before I started taking this seriously, but it seems like as good a time as any to begin my insidious campaign of educating the unwashed inhabitants of the interwebs.

Over the next seven days, we shall be looking at the various aspects that go into hooking an audience with the opening song and animation and many different openings from all sorts of series all use similar techniques to succeed.

Of course, the last time I gave a presentation on popular media openings, I got to talk about commercial jingles and the A*Team. Sadly, BA Baracus won’t be making an appearance this week, but I promise to work in everything from One Piece, to Galaxy Angel, to Cowbow Bebop and everything in between.

As part of the pregame show and to get people thinking about how they ‘consume’ show openings. Take a gander at this show’s opening. Over 8 episodes, the show had four different openings with three different songs. Ask yourself… who are the main characters? What genre is this? Am I interested in this show? What is it even about? Which one suits the show? At what point have I answered any of the above questions? Are any of them even correct?

Opening #1

Opening #2

Opening #3

Opening #4

I promise this will be more based in actual psychology and media consumption than Mike’s insane ninja physics ramblings, although for day 6, the difference may be hard to see.