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Regarding dubtitles, I always felt that the intent behind those was for the hearing-impaired or if you had to watch it in a way where you can't really hear the dialogue (such as if the volume is turned way down low or if there is a lot of loud surrounding noise). Personally, I feel it's best tohave two subtitle tracks: A dubtitle one for the above purposes and a normal anime subtitle track. It's important to make it as obvious as possible which is which though.

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The first home video format, Cartrivision, only had feature films available as rental cassettes, which couldn't be rewound on home equipment. VHS had MacroVision copy protection. DVD had CSS. Blu-ray has AACS.

Don't forget that the MPAA came pretty close to banning VCRs from having a record button. Even when argued that home videos would be difficult to create and duplicate without such a feature, the MPAA was perfectly willing to stop home videos if it meant curbing potential piracy, and the case went to the US Supreme Court.

Zalis116 wrote:

"Discs are too perishable" is such a canard. I've lost far more content from hard drive failures than I ever have from disc rot on commercial releases, which is "nothing" -- heck, even the DVD-Rs I burned as long ago as 2005 have still been reliable. There's just so much more that can go wrong with hard drives, whether it's power failures, power surges, drives getting dropped or knocked over, transportation mishaps, breathing too hard on them... Whereas with reasonably careful handling, the only things that're really going to damage one's access to content and commercial discs are theft and disasters like fires and floods. And all of those will affect hard drives just the same.

I agree--after having a hard drive crash on me three times, I now archive everything on data DVDs for anything 4 gigabytes or less and on flash memory for anything larger than that.

Paiprince wrote:

I think what Edgar wants is a "legit" form of horriblesubs and other rip groups (sites that just pull content from CR, Hulu and FUNi and put torrents for download.) and who knows he may be storing his anime in SSD's which has almost none of the downsides of HDD failures. I mean, buying 500GB SSD's en masse isn't outside the realm of possibilities anymore.

That sounds horrendously expensive. Solid state drives cost so much more than the normal magnetic drives. Then again, I am a pretty stingy person.

wonderwomanhero wrote:

That is the one release I don't think there was ever an explanation given for, it not being released I mean.

Only Yesterday was not brought to the US because of the mention of menstruation, which is ridiculous (ever see the 1930's/40's short cartoon The Story of Menstruation?) considering if it was that much of a big deal, they could easily just dub a different line in or something.

My guess is Ghibli wouldn't let Disney change the line. Ghibli is very controlling when it comes to international rights--I must wonder if Disney is the company in charge because it's the only one big enough to put up with Ghibli.

(Reminds me of how the game EarthBound is full of musical references that Nintendo of America wanted to change for re-releases to not have to pay for permission to use due to laws that came out after the game's SNES release, with Ape Studio adamantly refusing. While not the biggest reason why it took so long to get re-released--most of the clips turned out to be short enough to not need permission--it was a pretty big concern with Nintendo's legal team.)

DJStarstryker wrote:

Same. I have a large music commerically pressed CD collection. Some of the CDs are really old, some being as old as the late 1980s. I've only had 1 commercially pressed CD go bad on me - the 1993 version of ABBA Gold. It had zero scratches, but a few of the tracks stopped being able to play. Literally, every player you would stick it in, the player would see an error there and would skip over those tracks. It was very strange.

I did find out that early '90s European pressed CDs have become notorious for failing. 1993 ABBA Gold was pressed in Germany. There was just some issue with the plants. So the failure for that may not even have been disc rot and more of it being pressed badly. FWIW, the CD did work for a long time, just started failing in the past few years.

Oh yeah, I myself have owned multiple copies of ABBA Gold over the years, although I think the reason I've had to rebuy it so many times is more because I've damaged it either by playing it in faulty portable CD players that have parts that heave upwards towards the disk's surface over time or because I used to stick my most-listened to CDs in a CD case that I figured out later on was warping my disks. I also had to replace it once because I left my CD case on a Montreal AMT commuter train (Montreal-Rigaud line) and, while the anime CDs were all left untouched when I retrieved it from the Lost and Found, someone stole most of the English-language CDs.

ABBA Gold is often the only non-anime CD I carry around in my jacket pocket to listen to on the CD Walkman I still use as I'm just that hardcore when it comes to physical media.

2015 will mark the 30th anniversary of when my family first got a CD player and practically all the 1980s CDs I owned back in the day are still listenable today. At least of the 1980s CDs I still listen to from time to time, WHAM! Make it Big being my tween-years CD I still replay the most often (and it's still the same copy I've had since '85 or '86).

I was just watching Kiki's Delivery Service on TV. They used the original English dub with the different songs, English text, the 'In Memory of Phil Hartmann' thing at the end and all that so that version isn't completely lost. Although the video quality got really bad during the end credits.

I live in Australia so I'm not entirely sure if Madman have dubtitles on their Ghiblie release or not. Considering anime is their forte I assume they'd try to get proper subtitles. Although Kiki's Delivery Service is the only Ghibli Movie I've seen subtitled so I don't really know too much about the topic.

Considering their very recent Grave of the Fireflies Blu-ray release had Australian trailers and no new dub I can say for sure that they aren't doing business with Sentai Filmworks. I can only assume the same goes for Disney since their logo is nowhere to be found on any of Madman's Ghibli releases.

leafy sea dragon wrote:

I agree--after having a hard drive crash on me three times, I now archive everything on data DVDs for anything 4 gigabytes or less and on flash memory for anything larger than that.

Paiprince wrote:

I think what Edgar wants is a "legit" form of horriblesubs and other rip groups (sites that just pull content from CR, Hulu and FUNi and put torrents for download.) and who knows he may be storing his anime in SSD's which has almost none of the downsides of HDD failures. I mean, buying 500GB SSD's en masse isn't outside the realm of possibilities anymore.

That sounds horrendously expensive. Solid state drives cost so much more than the normal magnetic drives. Then again, I am a pretty stingy person.

One warning on flash/SSD: they have limited data shelf life and have limited write cycles. USB sticks which use cheaper flash memory with less reserved space and error correction are more prone to errors if written to frequently. If you're just archiving without overwriting, then you only need to worry about data retention. All nonvolatile memory are not actually permanently nonvolatile, as they need some occasional power to retain data. I use BD-Rs since they're just as cheap as DVDs now.

Thanks a lot for the answer, Justin. As I told you, I was extremely sceptical but I guess I wanted to hear the grim confirmation from the keyboard of someone who knows.

Paiprince wrote:

I think what Edgar wants is a "legit" form of horriblesubs and other rip groups (sites that just pull content from CR, Hulu and FUNi and put torrents for download.) and who knows he may be storing his anime in SSD's which has almost none of the downsides of HDD failures. I mean, buying 500GB SSD's en masse isn't outside the realm of possibilities anymore.

Yes. This is exactly what I want. I have to confess that I have been spoiled by fansubs and I have been trying to go legit but I keep feeling frustrated by the fact that the illegitimate alternative is the most convenient (on top of, obviously, being the cheaper).

As for my comment on physical discs being damageable, it's not only I have had more DVDs broken or scratched in one way or the other than HDD faults; replacing a damaged disc is much more expensive than re-downloading a digital file (even though I already paid for that content). Moreover, with discs you have to deal with slow loading times, thousands of copyright/antipirating notices, logo animations, unnecessary menus, etc.

Streaming is almost ideal, or would be in a world where Internet is a stable, ever-super fast constant that doesn't have data caps. In any other world, including this one, it may quickly become an exercise in frustration.

At this point I am almost resigned to put my money into any one of those channels, and THEN, download the fansubs of the stuff I purchased. Easily storable, portable, almost eternal, and immediately available at any time and place. It seems a bit silly to have to resort to that in order to get a product I am purchasing in the way that it is more useful for me, but hey, I also get karaoked OPs and EDs, and translated signs!

To touch a topic from another question, I am extremely surprised that Spirited Away hasn't had yet a BluRay release in the West when several newer or more obscure stuff has! It's the one that took an Oscar, and all!

oh and ponyo (disney) (US) has english dub too

Maokun wrote:

Paiprince wrote:

...

Yes. This is exactly what I want. I have to confess that I have been spoiled by fansubs and I have been trying to go legit but I keep feeling frustrated by the fact that the illegitimate alternative is the most convenient (on top of, obviously, being the cheaper).

As for my comment on physical discs being damageable, it's not only I have had more DVDs broken or scratched in one way or the other than HDD faults; replacing a damaged disc is much more expensive than re-downloading a digital file (even though I already paid for that content). Moreover, with discs you have to deal with slow loading times, thousands of copyright/antipirating notices, logo animations, unnecessary menus, etc.

Streaming is almost ideal, or would be in a world where Internet is a stable, ever-super fast constant that doesn't have data caps. In any other world, including this one, it may quickly become an exercise in frustration.

Add to streaming things like region blocks, missing shows, quality, delays and a few other issues...

As for my modus operandi, to deal with those issues you mention, I watch fansubs/-rips, and then buy anime/figures/art books/other stuff, mostly depending of what I liked and what budget allows. A small example, just received Patema Inverted from Kickstarter but the movie itself I watched already half a year ago.
(Note I'm more of a figurines/art book guy, most of the budget goes towards those...)

It takes care of all three issues, mostly;
Things like discs keep in good shape as they're mostly staying unused in their boxes, and if you're lacking space you can keep them tucked away somewhere instead of taking valuable shelf space as you have other ways of watching.
In case of anime, should you lose the digital files one could make new rips from the discs that were purchased. (though it's probably easier to just download those anew. The correct response would be to have had a backup though...)
And the streaming issues mentioned above are negated. (I do have a CR subscription though)

Quote:

At this point I am almost resigned to put my money into any one of those channels, and THEN, download the fansubs of the stuff I purchased. Easily storable, portable, almost eternal, and immediately available at any time and place. It seems a bit silly to have to resort to that in order to get a product I am purchasing in the way that it is more useful for me, but hey, I also get karaoked OPs and EDs, and translated signs!

...I quess you already touched on my solution with this. Wink

Quote:

To touch a topic from another question, I am extremely surprised that Spirited Away hasn't had yet a BluRay release in the West when several newer or more obscure stuff has! It's the one that took an Oscar, and all!

It only just got its first ever BluRay release in Japan in July of this year...

Wrial Huden wrote:

So dubtitling has reared its ugly head once again! I thought the practice died out in the mid to late 90s.

It never truly went away. It's come up every once in a while, particularly from companies outside of the core anime market. Off the top of my head:

* Tokko and maybe a couple other late 00s releases from Manga Entertainment
* Pilot Candidate from Bandai (with the possible involvement of Bandai Visual)
* Blood+ from Sony
* Beet the Vandel Buster and others from Illumitoon, who really should've known better

Some had dubtitle options in addition to a proper subtitle track, as seen with some early/mid-00s releases from Funimation like Yu Yu Hakusho, Blue Gender, Kiddy Grade, Fruits Basket, Tenchi Muyo GXP, and the first four discs or so of FMA '03. And who could forget the joke dubtitle track that went with ADV's Ghost Stories dub? Don't know if that made it onto the Discotek re-release, though.

ShanaFan852 wrote:

but these days FUNimation is guilty of overprinting their LE's. I've noticed that it takes most LE's at least 2 years after release to become hard to find, and there are some LE's that are 3 years old, and nearing 4 that are still not too hard to find.

That doesn't apply to everything, sadly; BakaTest S2's LE was gone within 4-5 months, and they only ever followed it up with a DVD-only S.A.V.E. release, no standard DVD/BD combo edition.

CatSword wrote:

For example, Right Stuf still has two singles and two complete series bundles of Moeyo Ken in stock from ADV. No one wants to watch Moeyo Ken. However, I'm tempted to almost buy it out of sympathy for the fact that Right Stuf's been trying to get rid of it for almost 8 years.

(Risky Safety appears to be the current record holder in the Bargain Bin; it has 85 copies left of its first disc that came out eleven and a half years ago.)

But good luck finding Vol. 2 or the Vol.3 + Box of Risky Safety. Though I wasn't surprised to find the Vol.3 + Box cheap and abundant when I bought it back in 2007. It does look like they've almost extinguished those Moeyo Ken stocks -- I picked up Vol. 1 as a minor convention prize years ago (a source which over the years, has also netted gems like Arcade Gamer Fubuki), and recently picked up Vols. 2-3 off TRSI and the OVA off Amazon, perhaps out of sympathy. The OVA is mostly watchable, kind of a "Dirty Pair in the Meiji Era" vibe.

ShanaFan852 wrote:

It's also why say the artbox for Melody of Oblivion went from being like $10 from a ton of sellers to $50 from only one.

The prices do seem to have gone back down, which is good because I'd been planning to rebuy vol. 1 just to get the artbox. But lol at the Marketplace Sellers of the complete collection thinking they're going to get $120 when RightStuf dropped their bundle from $30 to $25.

Even if all the problems are fixed, I really don't want streaming to be the future. It took me a while to wrap my head around the concept of buying things you can't physically hold but I'm okay with it now. Spending money on things that you don't even get to own full stop? That's bullshit.

I suppose the whole subscription based thing like CR and a lot of others have is a good system. But the other day I bought Tokyo Godfathers off of the Xbox store thinking it was a download only to find I paid $9 just so I could stream the movie. And unfortunately I just so happen to live in a country with abysmal Internet speeds and a technologically retarded leader so it looked awful and took ages to buffer... great movie though.

A very interesting Answerman, especially for the very useable Ghibli information. It is a shame that alternate equally legitimate scores for Castle in the Sky can't be preserved as options. I like them both, depending on my mood. (I don't understand the argument against the synth score on the basis that it's dated. The film is dated. That's part of it's charm, as with any lasting work of art. Like Nausicaä, it's both a timeless classic and a charming piece of 80s-iana.) I do prefer the leaner dub, though. Strangely I never find myself missing Andy Dick's ever-witty ad-libs, etc.

On Kiki, I would like to know about the subtitles for the U.K. release. Certainly the DVD subs were completely different from the R1 and superior. They might well have reused those subs for the Blu-Ray.

wonderwomanhero wrote:

Only Yesterday was not brought to the US because of the mention of menstruation, which is ridiculous

I don't believe it's as simple and laughably prudish as that, though I know that's the line that has always been passed around.

Only Yesterday is not for children. I've never seen the manga, but the film is josei, right? And even though one of their largest audiences has to be women in their twenties and thirties, Disney may be well right that that audience would not be prepared to be receptive to such a something new in their animated entertainment.

Animation age ghetto. Most of the people I know still don't take aniamted works seriously; the idea of an animated non-comedy for adults is impossible to wrap their heads around. It doesn't matter if it's not for children, and I'm sure Disney always knew that; I think they're horrified of having some parent buy it on home video for their kids, then take legal action when the menstruation line comes up, as it takes only one such parent to ruin the reputation of a company, especially if they start going on talk shows and CNN and such.

I've been seeing fewer parents take the approach of sheltering their children from any adult concepts (or death) though, hence why I think Disney later felt it was safe to publish Only Yesterday.

configspace wrote:

One warning on flash/SSD: they have limited data shelf life and have limited write cycles. USB sticks which use cheaper flash memory with less reserved space and error correction are more prone to errors if written to frequently. If you're just archiving without overwriting, then you only need to worry about data retention. All nonvolatile memory are not actually permanently nonvolatile, as they need some occasional power to retain data. I use BD-Rs since they're just as cheap as DVDs now.

Hmm, I knew about flash memory's limited ability to overwrite, but I didn't know about the degradation of data.

Is there a way to test compatibility with recording on Blu-Rays? I'm not sure if my computer can do it or not. The thought never even occurred to me, since I don't see blank Blu-Rays for sale very often...when I walk into a store, I usually only see blank DVDs and blank CDs.

Hmm. I would have said (and did say) that a josei demographic was actually an extremely important audience for Disney's films in America, but they're used to a certain kind of content.

Last edited by Spoofer on Sat Dec 13, 2014 2:21 pm; edited 2 times in total

jsevakis wrote:

Spoofer wrote:

The 2010 DVD release and Blu-ray of Kiki's Delivery Service are dubtitled (based off the Disney dub).

False. I checked this one myself. The subtitles on the Disney Blu-ray are, with a couple of minor tweaks, the same as on the 2003 DVD.

This is simply not true, and I suggest you check again. The 2010/BD dubtitles retain a few remnants of the Streamline subs (perhaps the section that you checked), but 80~90% or so have been rewritten, mostly to reflect the Disney dub.

I personally compared the first 20 minutes of the 2003 and 2010 DVD releases. I have (only) two years of Japanese under my belt, and while the Streamline subs were often quite accurate, the 2010 dubtitles had inconsistencies galore. According to every source I've found, the BD release reuses the 2010 dubtitles. To confirm it, I engaged in a scene comparison with another poster here, where I confirmed the subs to be pretty much exactly the same as the 2010 release (and obviously different from the 2003 release; this is of course assuming that the poster isn't deceiving me in that he pulled that scene from his BD, though as it goes along with everything I've read on that forum, Fandom Post, and elsewhere, I see no reason to doubt him). I highlighted the most significant differences in the subtitles that I knew to be true to the literal translation, and while the rest of the 2003 subs in the scene also sounded more authentic, my Japanese isn't good enough to attest to it. The only lines in common were the first three (and everything else in the 2010/BD subs were straight-up dubtitles). The rest of the film follows suit. I stand by the fact that the 2003 release contains the Streamline subs and the 2010/BD are Disney dubtitled.

jsevakis wrote:

Spoofer wrote:

The 2003 DVD release featured the Streamline subtitles (which actually were pretty faithful, more often than not). Both the Japanese and the English audio track were slightly mistimed, however (about a quarter to a half second ahead of the video).

I literally just checked the 2003 disc. It did not have sync problems. I don't know where you're getting this stuff.

Again, check again if you wish. The sync problem is pretty subtle (and most people won't notice, unless they're specifically looking for it), but it's there. It's been discussed on Amazon forums and some other (probably defunct) websites back in the day. Again, I personally checked it myself, and it's most noticeable with sound effects. Check Kiki closing the door of the shop at 22:17, and the sound of it closing precedes it actually closing by a few frames (maybe a 1/4 second). The whole film is the same way, and there are those who notice it and are bothered by it (not that I expect it to be a big deal for the vast majority of people). On the 2010 release, it's perfectly synced exactly to the correct frame.

Unless Disney started stealth printing reauthored versions of their 2003 DVD, or you got your discs intermingled, I dunno what to tell you. Everything I said I've personally verified and has been verified in countless other places, and seems to be veritable fact.

For those too lazy to click the link:

2010/BD dubtitles for the one scene (straight-up dubtitles italicized):

Quote:

Friends: What kind of town are you looking for? A big town?

Kiki: Yeah, by the ocean I hope.

Friends: I'm so jealous of you.

Kiki: But I'm not going just for a good time. To be a good witch, I have to train for a year away from home.

Friends: Yeah, be sure to tell that to the boys.

Mother: Kiki, it's time.

Kiki: Okay.

Mother: That's the broom you're leaving on?

Yep. I just made it this morning all by myself.

It's too small to really be safe. I'd rather you took mine. I know it better.

But, Mom, that one's so old.

And that's why it's good. You can rely on it time after time in any kind of weather. Now, Kiki, do this for me please.

But I put so much work into this one. Right, Jiji?

Jiji: Your broom is nice, but let's take your mother's.

Kiki: You're no help.

Old Lady: Kiki, can't you make yourself another fine broom when you get settled down?

2003 Streamline subs (lines that I noticed were completely literal compared to the dubtitles in bold):

Quote:

Friends: What kind of town are you looking for? A big town?

Kiki: Yeah, by the ocean I hope.

Friends: Wow! I'm so jealous of you.

Kiki: But I'm not going for a good time. I'll be training at least a year.

Friends: Yeah, but they'll have discos, won't they?

Mother: Kiki, it's almost time.

Kiki: Okay!

Mother: That's the broom you're leaving on?

Kiki: Yeah. I just made it. Pretty cute, huh?

Mother: It's cute, but you can't start witching on a broom that's too small. Take mine.

Kiki: But, Mom, that one's so old.

Mother: That's why you should have it. It never loses its way, even in a storm. Kiki, trust me.

Kiki: But I worked so hard on it. Right, Jiji?

Jiji: Your mother's broom would be better.

Kiki: You rotten traitor.

Old Lady: He's right. You can make yourself another broom when you get settled down.

I think that when a series creator helms as the anime version's director, it could be more interesting because maybe they can incorporate things into the anime (canon aspects is what I mean) that they they didn't yet put into the source material. For example, if Kishimoto was directing the Shippuden TV show, he might put some important character back story that he didn't have in the manga because things didn't work out for that.

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