What kind of hurdles do you have to leap to bring new titles to us?

MG: The biggest thing is simply making sure that the fans know about it because there are so many new titles being released constantly, and you have to be real careful to make sure that people know that first volume is out. How the first volume performs is how the retailers decide to continue ordering it. If that first volume comes out and they sell a lot of copies, they're going to reorder that and pre-order the second volume in larger quantities. Otherwise, you see a gradually diminishing effect because every time they have fewer copies, obviously they're going to sell fewer. It becomes a cycle to fight against.

Something we've been doing in the last year or so, almost two years now, is bringing store managers from the various chains to conventions and showing them what the market is, who it is that's really buying their products. Which I think has really helped anime sales quite a bit in a lot of the large chains.

When managers come to a convention and see fans, they realize that there are families there, young kids, older folks, males and females pretty much evenly distributed. Then rather than selling anime the way they were - which was putting it on this one shelf and spine-front all the sexy girls or to put it in the kids section or whatever - they understand that they're not selling a genre - anime isn't a genre - anime is a medium.

You're also bringing some older titles into the market this year?

MG: We're doing Mospeada and Southern Cross, which were the basis for the latter two sections of Robotech. And, of course, for the last year and a half we've been doing both City Hunter and Nadia, which are both great older classic shows.

Personally, I'm a Dirty Pair fan.

MG: It's a great original show. Fortunately, it's done really well, so the OVA sales got us to go back and do the movie, Project Eden, and the two OVAs, The 005 Conspiracy and The Riddle of Nolandia, which were originally released by Streamline.

I hear you're opening new studios in Houston and Austin to accommodate ADV's expansion?

MG: We've actually just finished construction on the second Houston studio. It's actually technically the third Houston studio because we have another studio that only does post work. We're breaking ground on the second studio in Austin, and later this year we're going to be building even more recording facilities in Houston. Plus we're still farming some titles, such as Burn-Up Excess and Arc the Lad, to outside companies.

We keep increasing size to get to production faster, and, when we finally we've gotten big enough . . . but I don't see that happening. Not in the next couple of years, the way things are going.

What's the plan with the much-anticipated Spriggan?

MG: It opened about two weeks after September 11th. A lot of the advertising, unfortunately, pretty much got absorbed in the media hubbub.

We've got other titles. We're looking right now at giving the second two Gamera movies limited theatrical releases.

Is there anything you want to say to the fans out there?

MG: Yes. Thanks for making ADV such a huge success. We're in our tenth year now, and I still find it amazing how much ADV and anime have grown over the last ten years. It's because of you, the fans. Thanks very much for giving me a job.