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Answerman - The Old West

Bandai Entertainment was never able to get the extended "Director's Cut" version of Escaflowne.

Though in some cases, the TV version can be an improvement; I wouldn't complain if Aniplex released the broadcast version of Nisekoi instead of the backgrounds-impaired home video version, assuming there aren't nudity changes or added scenes in the disc version.

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Bandai Entertainment was never able to get the extended "Director's Cut" version of Escaflowne.

Wait, what?? First I've heard of this... Funi picked up Escaflowne with their Bandai collection, didn't they? Now I'm curious if they actually have the rights to this extended version...

I was aware of Escaflowne, but not your other examples. But since I kind of had an inkling, though did not think it occurred that much, I started keeping track of various blogs (mostly Japanese, a few English) who do the laborious job of side-by-side comparisons...

Personally, I bought Sakura Trick for the simple fact I knew it'd flop and I wanted to do what I could to support the genre.

...and the broadcast version of Papillon Rose.

PS: A little light on the Maze masters: this was not done on purpose. The Japanese didn't have an uncensored DVD version either. The only uncensored version of Maze TV was the Laserdisc version. Voices from the internet say that J.C. Staff actually lost the uncensored masters somewhere after they releases the movie into cinema, but before they could actually produce a home video version of said movie. So, not only does the TV series exist uncensored only through Laserdisc and Laserdisc rips, but the movie does not exist anymore.

After reading these 2 articles. I'm not surprised how uncensored masters could've gotten lost, all the uncensored animation masters would've not been lost if they had save them on computers/PCs and USB drives and not in other places when it can get lost easily. Also to people that think Japan is all that high tech like you heard about, well it's not so get that images off your head.

I'll agreed with Zalis116 that the TV version has improved over the home video version. I have to ask: What the hell were the people at the studio thinking when they removed the beautiful background and replace it with generic sparkles and other stuffs that shouldn't be there??

mdo7 wrote:

After reading these 2 articles. I'm not surprised how uncensored masters could've gotten lost, all the uncensored animation masters would've not been lost if they had save them on computers/PCs and USB drives and not in other places when it can get lost easily. Also to people that think Japan is all that high tech like you heard about, well it's not so get that images off your head.

Maze the Megaburst Space was animated in 1997. How many Western shows were digitally stored back then, not to mention on usb drives?...

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Bandai Entertainment was never able to get the extended "Director's Cut" version of Escaflowne.

Wait, what?? First I've heard of this... Funi picked up Escaflowne with their Bandai collection, didn't they? Now I'm curious if they actually have the rights to this extended version...

it cuts out an explicit scene from a pornographic video game featuring what appears to be an underaged girl, so it seems like a reasonable decision to me.

First of all, USB flash drives weren't introduced until 2000, and those models only held about 8MB [source]. No services like DropBox existed, and there are security concerns with protocols such as FTP (SFTP would probably not have been widely available by that time), not to mention that Internet speeds were slow. HDDs weren't that cheap, and would have been clumsy to ship; same with LaserDisc, and DVD is a lossy format unsuitable for master copies.

On top of all that, Digipaint was still a few years from wide use, if it even existed by then at all, so the film would have been traditionally animated and shot on analog film, so this entire argument is a complete waste of time.

The basic premise of the Piracy problem is that WAY TOO MANY fools are stealing money and property from the producers. Otherwise, Japanese companies wouldn't care about releasing their stuff in our market the same time as theirs. So clearly one buyer can make a difference as long as the rest are also of the same mind. A Worker is worthy of his wages.

Conquistador0 wrote:

The basic premise of the Piracy problem is that WAY TOO MANY fools are stealing money and property from the producers. Otherwise, Japanese companies wouldn't care about releasing their stuff in our market the same time as theirs. So clearly one buyer can make a difference as long as the rest are also of the same mind. A Worker is worthy of his wages.

Piracy has nothing to do with an English release. As if Americans couldn't pirate rips of legal streams or the Japanese home video release. If anything, lengthy delays only encourage piracy here. The Japanese fear that their own citizens are going to reverse import, it has nothing to do with us.

As for why they keep getting the wrong master tapes? Sometimes it's malice -- the Japanese publishers are always reluctant to let the overseas release of an anime be as good as the far more expensive Japanese versions.

Whats the name of the anime in the picture shown in the column btw? with the red hair chick and male?