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.
Rumic World
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