Chapter 11: The Stolen Last Hope
MOMO
After, ummmm, becoming completely relaxed, the two of us went to work promoting our product worldwide. We tried to send it to Japan, as they were anxious to watch it. And we tried to send it to much of Europe through Australia. But something went wrong...
THE WORLD
Boats to deliver the show by DVD seemed to meet with strange accidents or get lost at sea. There was even an instance where this woman was riding the ship that carried that cargo, and somehow wound up in a stable time loop where she killed another version of herself in one instance, was trapped at sea in another, and died in a car wreck in a third. The company planes as well, but they all crashed into the ocean for some reason.
GEMINI
It was because they tried to adjust for the curvature instead of flying straight across. These planes keep trying to pitch up and down to adjust to a curve that wasn't there, and they crashed right into the sea.
THE WORLD
As it happened, adoption of the show in Japan was extremely slow, despite their natural interest in seeing the American-made anime. The show also delivered to Australia with equally mixed results. In Australia, the first attempt was a broadcasting service through radio and wifi systems, but the signal in Australia was so horrible that the general public couldn't see it (urban legend still speaks of how the earliest fiber-optic wires in Australia were constructed from kangaroo entrails), so they instead recorded the show in VHS on extra-long play taping speed.
To make matters more confusing, the text of the show (being designed with Japanese audiences in mind as a target viewer) read «魔法のプリンセス ミンキーモモ» or Mahō no Purinsesu Minkī Momo, yet the Australians called it Magical Girl Gigi. It was dubbed over poorly, because some Australian dubber thought her name made more sense as Gigi, since he had a daughter named Gigi and knew nobody in Australia by the name of Momo. And so, the tapes finally were shipped to Japan (where they correctly identified the title through its text), but between the terrible ELP mode that they were recorded in and the fact that Japan largely had gotten with the current times and switched to DVD and Blu-Ray, the copies they had to work with were quickly turning into static. The VHS copies were also gradually being lost, as they were tossed into the trash when they became inoperable. The last tapes were turned back to DVD and spread across the Earth in such poor quality that everyone thought it was some old 1980s show instead of something made in the 21st century. Nevertheless, it was seen and made an impact on anime. But as far as copies went, most were unlicensed.
MOMO
I didn't understand it at all! We tried planes and boats overseas but our profits showed up as a fraction of what we delivered. We called Australia and Japan, and Japan told us that they had expected more shipments, while Australia said they made copies as delivered some to Japan. I asked for a sample of the product they had in Japan and wound up with a DVD copy that looked like it had run through the laundry! And what was this Gigi thing? Where were the pristine DVD copies we had sent?!?
We tried to salvage our business by getting into the streaming game. After all, these days everyone seemed to be getting into the Youtube and Amazon Prime game. They eventually took down the show, saying that another company already made this series, so we must have plagiarized from them.
THE WORLD
It is a little known fact that major corporations like Amazon and YouTube are run by extradimensional aliens. So while the bulk of the world didn't know that in another dimension other people had made this show, Jeff Bezos and Susan Wojcicki took one look at the show which had been made earlier in a different dimension and flagged it for copyright, immediately taking it down.
Noah and Momo were dumbfounded, as their work was treated as a copy of people they had never heard of. And thus, despite a fanbase hoping for a way to watch this show normally, the show was stuck unable to be shown to the public.
