Found out my favorite 90s anime had a budget of 40k per episode

I was digging through some old fan translations from an archived forum, around 2006, and stumbled on production notes for a series I watched on VHS as a kid. Turns out the studio only had about 40,000 dollars per episode, which sounds tiny next to modern shows that push 200k plus. That extra detail explains why the animation reused so many cuts and why the background art was so static, it was pure necessity. It made me appreciate the voice actors more since they carried half the emotion with zero visual flourishes. Anyone else ever looked up production budgets and found out your favorite show was working on fumes?

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camerona791mo ago

Man, that reminds me how I once spent a whole weekend rewatching a show just to count how many times they reused the same explosion!