AnimeVillage.com Home Entertainment

Background
AnimeVillage.com was a website launched in 1998 by Bandai America that sold anime titles on VHS exclusively online. The company itself was extremely short lived, as it was ultimately folded into Bandai Entertainment in 1999, though the website remained active until 2001.

(1998-1999?)


Logo: In space, we zoom out from a model of the Earth with many lines and dots, possibly representing internet connections, jetting out balls of light. A strange object comes from the bottom right of the screen and spins around the Earth, twirling as it does. It collides onto the side, causing an aura to be ejected and the lines to glow. A lens flare appears in the spot on the Pacific Ocean as the glows dies down and the object emerges from the lens flare. The camera rotates to a point that the sign is seen on the the top of the Earth and it stops spinning, revealing it is actually a purple sign. We zoom up to the sign to see 3 rectangles in purple with an silver outline, 2 of which are facing the same direction and facing the opposite way of the sign in the middle of them. The top sign says "anime", the middle says "village", and the bottom says ".com". The logo then fades to a black background with print logo, in which there is a red square with a logo similar to the one before we faded to this, but with white instead of silver and is also seen on the pole, the signs being closer to each other and being different in shape as well, and the text in a different font. Below it is "AnimeVillage.com" in purple and below that is "HOME ENTERTAINMENT" in red.

Technique: Really good CGI for its time.

Music/Sounds: A strange hum is heard first followed a Japanese string tune. A explosion can be heard when the sign hits the Earth and a flourish is heard in the end.

Availability: Extremely rare, since all of AnimeVillage's titles were distributed online during the early days of the internet, making this a REALLY difficult find. It appeared on a 6-tape English-subbed boxset of The Vision of Escaflowne.