Shark Tank:Anime Edition 2.0: An Event Made Even Better
By Vidhi Gupta
With the beginning of the first batch of Ashoka University, began the workings of The Anime Club and its endeavor to spread anime and Japanese culture on campus. The Anime Club has evolved a lot since its inception and today, the focus of our article is one of our biggest events, Shark Tank: Anime Edition!
The first time The Anime Club did Shark Tank was in Monsoon 2021 and at the risk of bragging, it was quite successful. The event took its inspiration from the actual Shark Tank reality show where entrepreneurs pitch their business models to a panel of investors to invest their money in it. The Anime twist resulted in an event where participants sign up to pitch an anime of their own choice to a panel of Professors who judge the anime based on how convinced they were to watch the anime. In other words, the Professors decide on how convinced they were to “invest” their time to watch the pitched anime.
The first edition was held online and we had a panel of 2 judges, Professor Aman Shreyas and Professor Aprita Das. Professor Shreyas, a veteran anime watcher, and Professor Das, a newcomer to anime, ranked student’s presentations and asked critical questions as to why they should watch the anime. Among the various participants, we saw a diverse range of anime being pitched, including the shounen troupe setter One Piece, to the shoujo-SOL favourite Komi Can’t Communicate, to the underrated masterpiece Perfect Blue. Participants pitched their chosen anime using a variety of methods, including traditional presentations, plain simple arguments, or even playing the trailer of the anime! It would have been better if they had made the trailer themselves, but we can never tell what the Professors will like!
The result of the event was that Komi Can’t Communicate won first place. Perfect Blue won second place and Ousuma Ranking won third place. The other result was that Professor Arpita Das liked our event so much that she agreed to be a part of our panel of Judges again this year!
In Shark Tank: Anime Edition 2.0, we have gone bigger and better! Our panel increased to 3 Judges consisting of Professor Arpita Das (ICT), Professor Tatyana Kostochka (Philosophy Department), and Professor Sourav Ghosh (Mathematics Department). Finally, after enduring the hardships of online semesters, we adapted the model of the online event to an offline setting and introduced a surprise third prize! Our prize pool this year went up to Rs. 1500 and both spectators and participants also got a chance to enter the Anime Budgetcon Bingo! The idea is that once people collect the stamps from our pre-events and stalls, they can enter a raffle at Budgetcon to win exciting prizes.
For more details:
Budgetcon
Date: 18th April, 2024
Time: 5 pm onwards
Venue: Atrium, Mess Lawns, and Amphitheatre
It will be full of fun, games, food and a chance to explore anime and Japanese culture! The members of The Anime Club will be dressed up as their favourite characters and we encourage the student body to dress up as well! Shark Tank is an event that The Anime Club can proudly call a passion project and we were very excited for people to pitch their chosen anime. Whether people were participating or part of the event as an audience, we hope that everyone got amazing recommendations out of this event and enjoyed the anime as much as the event. Even people new to anime (like Professor Das) could choose their first anime based on the pitches or even approach an Anime Club Member for opinions. We hope to see everyone in similar large numbers in the next iterations and we hope our effort results in the same success as last time’s!
