The old-school anime DVD/BD news thread.

[greg]

WOW. Discotek is on a roll! They must be doing something right, because they seem to be getting bigger and releasing more and more titles. Nozomi is doing a good job too, of course, but Discotek seems unstoppable.

These are indeed good days to be an old-school anime fan. Wow!

[usamimi]

I was SO excited to see more blu-ray releases from Discotek. I am gonna buy the HELL out of Jin-roh and CardCaptor Sakura! Out of the other ones, the only one I probably wouldn't pick up would be DevilMan, simply because I was never a huge fan of it.

[greg]

I only ever bought the second CCS movie. If this is the first one, I may get it.

[usamimi]

I only ever bought the second CCS movie. If this is the first one, I may get it.

Yup, it's the first one.

[cosmosamurai]

It's really unfortunate that Discotek could not obtain the rights to the Galaxy Express 999 TV series. Discotek would have done right by this Matsumoto masterwork (as I'm sure they will with the Harlock series) but, alas, S'more got it and put out a botched release. The GE999 series would have fit perfectly into the Discotek catalog, given their releases of the movies and the upcoming Harlock, and S'more getting it is just .

I guess my GE999 TV laserdisc boxes will have to remain my archival copy of the show (at least the whole thing was translated for the streaming version).

[usamimi]

It's really unfortunate that Discotek could not obtain the rights to the Galaxy Express 999 TV series. Discotek would have done right by this Matsumoto masterwork (as I'm sure they will with the Harlock series) but, alas, S'more got it and put out a botched release. The GE999 series would have fit perfectly into the Discotek catalog, given their releases of the movies and the upcoming Harlock, and S'more getting it is just .

I guess my GE999 TV laserdisc boxes will have to remain my archival copy of the show (at least the whole thing was translated for the streaming version).

I was just thinking about this yesterday. :/ It really is a shame, I'm sure the Discotek people are big fans, too, given their other GE-Universe releases. Sigh...maybe someday in the future?

[greg]

I sure hope so. Although I have since learned that hard subs can be mandaded by the Japanese license holders to discourage Japanese importing the DVDs, I am sure that Discotek would have at least did a better job with the visual presentation, instead of cramming as many episodes onto each DVD at the expense of screen clarity.

[usamimi]

I sure hope so. Although I have since learned that hard subs can be mandaded by the Japanese license holders to discourage Japanese importing the DVDs, I am sure that Discotek would have at least did a better job with the visual presentation, instead of cramming as many episodes onto each DVD at the expense of screen clarity.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I can live with hardsubs (Had to back in VHS days, right? ;D), but having all those episodes crammed on there and not really caring about the people who'd ACTUALLY buy these? Yeah, not cool. :/

[llj]

I sure hope so. Although I have since learned that hard subs can be mandaded by the Japanese license holders to discourage Japanese importing the DVDs.

I think you might be mistaken here. Although Japanese license holders certainly can be unpredictable, the fact is Japan and North America have DVD different regions so there is no real incentive to discourage reverse importation. Sure, you can have your DVD player modded...but it's not something most people in Japan will do. In fact, S'More's GE999 is the only anime DVD release in the past...12 years (?) or so that has hard subs. I actually haven't seen hard subs on an anime release since the very early days of anime DVDs, like the late 90s and very early 2000s, when companies were still figuring out how to properly do soft subs. And who in Japan is going to reverse import an old release like GE999? It's mostly newer shows that Japanese companies want to protect.

It's only Blu-Rays where Japanese license holders want to discourage reverse importation, since Japan and North America share the same Blu-Ray region. That means you can buy a U.S. blu-ray and play it on a Japanese BD player and it would work.

They've recently found a way around that with a "Geo-lock" mechanism installed in some of the newer BD releases, though, that makes BD players set on "Japan" to not be able to play North American BDs. So we'll see what happens with that.

But it's a lot more likely that S'More couldn't be bothered to do their own subtitles because of cheapness and laziness.

I don't think there is any logical excuse here for S'More's terrible GE999 release. ABSOLUTELY NONE. They crapped out a crappy release and almost all the indications point to their own cheapness and ineptness. This is the same company that released Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo with NO SUBTITLES and with only a PDF file of the translated script on disc 4 of their release. LOL. WTF??? Their excuse? From their own words: They never intended to subtitle the release, due to costs.

AND ANOTHER THING about GE999. The Japanese R2 DVDs apparently were cleaned up and remastered...this is the source material that any self respecting U.S. anime distro company would request to use. S'More's release? They basically used the masters that were used for online streaming a few years back. Why would they use these materials and not the better, cleaner looking masters? Because the masters used for online streaming were ALREADY SUBTITLED. Hence the "hard subs" on their release. S'More just taking the easiest way out by getting something that enables them to exert the least amount of effort possible to release the show.

(Just waiting for me to end up looking like an ass here if Discotek's Captain Harlock ends up having hard subs)

[greg]

Hmm... Well, you're probably right, at least about the reason behind hard subs on the GE999 DVDs. However, there are people in Japan with region-free DVD players (other than myself, of course) who do import anime from North America because it's so freaking cheap. The complete original Gundam TV series will probably cost you 30,000 yen USED (I'm just guessing here, but I could easily go check on this the next time I visit one of the nerdgasm-inducing, huge, secondhand goods otaku paradise stores near where I live.) I bought the Gundam DVDs on Amazon.com and paid less than $100 for both together (although they now go for well over that each).

I seem to remember reading somewhere that when MS Gundam was originally released on DVD R1, Sunrise made sure to make them English dub-only because they were releasing the show on DVD in Japan at the time, and they didn't want Japanese buyers importing the stuff from America.

I occasionally check on what Nozomi has to say about what they're doing, and they recently announced that one series was to have hard subs (some dumb hentai show anyway, not that I care) and they also will occasionally say that a certain show cannot be sold to people in Japan. Fortunately, I've had no problems buying stuff from Rightstuf so far, and they are a great way to buy anime. (Which reminds me, I need to put in a pre-order for their Cobra TV series!)