It's hard to ignore how low-level the discussion is right now about the production and marketing details of the third season of One Punch Man. The vast majority of people leave comments without even bothering to check or remember the details of the second season of the anime. So in this post, I wanted to bring up at least some of these details about marketing and try to start a more productive discussion. In my opinion, based on the material shown, the third season looks to be on par with second one or an improvement over it, albeit not a significant one.
Of course, it's worth starting with the fact that releasing a PV one month before the release is fairly standard practice for J.C.Staff, and this applies not only to low-priority shows, but also to shows to which they devote a lot of effort.
For example, Railgun T from 2020 received its first PV on December 15, even though the anime itself began airing on January 10.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/38481/Toaru_Kagaku_no_Railgun_T/video
Another example is School Prison from 2015, which received its first PV on May 27, and the anime itself began airing on July 11.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/30240/Prison_School/video
So it's not exactly a new approach to marketing. Since the third season will start with a recap (just like the second season), the premiere of the first episode will take place on October 12th. This means that they will probably release PV2 sometime this week or next week.
However, the approach to One Punch Man is definitely different from other shows, and this applies to both the third season and the previous second season. After all, J.C.Staff releases pre-animated trailers for One Punch Man. If you look at PV1 for the second season, you can see that some scenes are significantly different from the final version. For example, Saitama's shirt is red here, although in subsequent marketing it is green. Metal doesn't have any texture on it. And the frame with Genos standing upright is simply not in the season itself. Such changes seems quite weird unless we assume that it was similarly pre-animated specifically for the marketing. Only PV2 used scenes directly from the anime itself (though only from the first episode). And it was released on March 19, while the season itself began airing on April 10.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/34134/One_Punch_Man_2nd_Season/video
However, there are still questions about the marketing. For example, it is unclear why they would release a collage of posters featuring characters and monsters as a KV, as it simply looks cheap. In the case of the second season, the poster was also a collage of characters, but they were placed more creatively, rather than simply grouped together. And most importantly, other J.C.Staff projects do not do this, even if they have fewer resources. |
