I’ve been following Kadokawa Shoten CEO Shinichirou Inoue’s Twitter feed for a while mainly due to Bill 156. Today, he posted a tweet saying that a huge announcement for Suzumiya Haruhi will be published in the next issue of Kadokawa’s The Sneaker magazine (the bi-monthly that the original light novels are serialized in) coming out on Dec 27th.

Given the complete lack of information, I am just going to make a completely baseless guess and call it now: live action movie adaptation of the original Yuuutsu story arc! (No, not this one.) Remember you heard it here first.

Well, at the very least, I think we can be sure that it won’t be a new special rip-off remastered edition of the DVDs, since the Blu-ray box only just came out.

I haven’t received my Haruhi Vol.4 DVD yet, so I don’t know if there’s anything else in there. But long story short, Lucky Star is licensed. Video embedded after the break.

Actually, I wonder how well Lucky Star will fare… It’s definitely not Haruhi’s kind of awe-inspiring existential sci-fi high school moé adventure, and the otaku jokes get quite hardcore on some occasions. How many anime fans in America have actually heard of Animate‘s tenchou?

And slightly off-topic, I really hate what Bandai did to the limited edition R1 releases for Haruhi. The DVDs come with way too much useless crap and the thin cardboard box feels cheap. I would gladly do without the Haruhi hair ribbon and other miscellaneous trinkets in exchange for cooler-looking and more durable DVD packagings. I still bought them anyway but that’s only because I’m an idiot. Oh well.

Watch the video and find out.

P.S. ASOS Brigade myspace page.

Read on for the details.

The DOCTYPE declaration has been taken off. The original DOCTYPE was !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN".

People were speculating that Funimation was the one who licensed Haruhi because the DOCTYPE matches the one used on their website. It seems that whoever licensed Haruhi wanted to kill this rumour, since it’s kind of weird for someone to remove a working DOCTYPE for no reason (the site is valid HTML 4.01 according to W3C).

The hidden text in the source code has also been changed to 「北米計画がçºåŠ¹ã—た。」, or “the North American project has been launched.” I think this pretty much confirms it 100% that Haruhi is licensed.

If the DOCTYPE was really removed because of the rumours, then this pretty much rules out Funimation as the mysterious company. Plus the fact that all the “in-jokes” are being done in Japanese, it leads me to believe that the licensing company has to be Kadokawa Pictures USA (which currently only has FMP! TSR under its belt).

Haruhi.tv has also been updated with an escape program from YUKI.N. Looks like season two announcement is coming soon.

Whatever the case is, you can hear my wallet dreading the future. ＿|￣|O