A quick look at Space Pirate Captain Harlock, via Discotek.
Clearly I haven't watched the entire set of 42 episodes yet, but I thought some might like some early impressions, or maybe they're waiting to read some specific things to decide if they're going to buy it.
Short answer, yes, buy it. There is no 'Galaxy Express 999 TV series' disaster here.
OK. First, packaging. Doublewide Scanavo box holding 6 discs. Inside front has 2 discs, inside back has two discs and there's a 'flapper' holding 2 discs. The front hubs are very solid and hold the discs tightly. The back hubs are a little hard to get discs free and the hubs on the flapper are somewhat weak. But here's the thing: I think this is a rather well designed case for the most part because the flapper hubs are designed to plug into the back hubs, and then a small tab locks the flap down. It's very secure and even if a disc does pop loose in shipping it's not likely to rattle around and get scratched. Of course a case designed like this has no place for a booklet, so it's just as well no booklet is included (altho needed. More on that later).
The discs state they are made in Taiwan. I cannot find any indication if these are DVD-9, there's no code I recognize. It's logical they should be because there's 7 episodes on each disc. Discs all share the same art, but do have both disc volume number and episode numbers.
Picture quality seems excellent to me. I've not seen any 'blocking' or 'jaggy edges' so far, nothing is bleeding or blowing out and if there's a show that would suffer from that it's this one. There are such intense bright reds and whites that back in the VHS days would just smear and blow out like crazy after only a generation or two of duping, not a drop of that here. Blacks are solid and not artifacting like crazy. There was one scene, a vertical pan 'up' Harlock's body while standing at Tochiro's memorial on Earth (ep. 1) that looked a little odd to me, not EXACTLY like a MPEG compression stutter but...I dunno. I'll have to wait for someone more tech minded to see it.
Subtitles are...troublesome to me. They could be better, they could be WAY worse. Translation is overall solid but the Transliteration is all over the place, ranging from 'tight' (direct translation with no 'smoothing') to 'reasonable' (removing the dire formatting and reading more like reasonable spoken English) to 'odd' (either seemingly made up or reading like an English translation of a Chinese translation of the Japanese dialog). As we rarely get direct contact with people like Discotek I can't tell if these are Toei-provided translations that have been 'massaged' a little or what. SOMEONE should have caught that 'thunder cannon' should have been translated as shock cannon, or just ignore the time they use that and stuck with Pulsar cannon which is used most of the time- as one small example.
But the BIGGEST sub issue I have is the so-far inconsistent use of subtitles for songs within the episodes. What I've seen so far is a song will start, we'll get subs, then a chara will start talking and *woomp* the song subs stop, even as the song continues to play. Another time it did this, then cut the song sub back in when a chara stopped talking, then cut out again. third time they didn't bother to sub the song. Now, I know that subtitling on a DVD is a king bitch (cf. statement on ANN's Answerman column) compared to the crazy world of the fansubber but there had to be a cleaner way to do this. And the worst issue, the OP and ED credits. Now, if you know Space Pirate Captain Harlock, those title cards that flash up have HUGE kana/kanji on them, so between them and the animation under there's not a lot of spare room. I think the 'black screen at the end with scrolling English text' style that Mediablasters uses would have been a better choice because we only get like 15% of all the credits translated. Basically the 'above the line' staff and most of the seiyuu. I know it probably doesn't MATTER but it's nice to have that data, isn't it?
And that's why I wish there was a booklet enclosed. Those credits could have been printed in full, the songs translated in full, gosh maybe even something about the 1978 Toei TV Manga festival featurette 'The Mystery of the Arcadia'. So there's a missed opportunity there.
Well, those sorts of things aren't the norm for Discotek so it's no surprise they're not there. Still and all it's an overall solid effort, a release deemed impossible during the fattiest of the 'boom' years of American Anime Releases (when such a risk was actually more safe but no) and I would say overall better handled than Bandai's own release of Zeta Gundam. I am not sorry I spent the money.
Hey, you know what I miss in anime today? Watching these episodes reminded me of one thing that just isn't done anymore.
The eye wiggle.
The way of showing someone holding back REALLY DEEP STRONG EMOTIONS was to have the eyes, or even sometimes just the pupils, 'wiggle' just a bit.
Ya just don't see that anymore. I'm guessing it's harder to do with digicel work than old fashioned hand animation, or something. I miss it.
Anyway, that's my foolish review. Buy it. It's worthy.
