The Shade

It starts to pick up about halfway. If you can be patient, by around episode 25, it does start to improve.

Hey, I just got my email confirmation that I've won a free screening pass from the ANN contest. Mind you, I've already seen it on fansubs, but I probably will go see it. Would have been better if I had won 2 passes, could have brought along a friend who's a huge eva fan.

Hey Bishopcruz: any update on the sub patches you're doing? I really like them and appreciate all the effort you're putting into them.

Finished Mobile Suit Gundam last week. Brief opinion: Episode 1-30: I know that I said that the first 30 episodes were slow and I stand by that. Episodes 31-43: If the entire series had been at this level, I might really consider it one of the best series ever. What a turnaround. The last 4 especially were good, almost approaching theatrical quality story telling at times. Good stuff Next up: Going with a current series that just wrapped up: Haruhi Suzumiya 2.

Still watching Mobile Suit Gundam. After watching 35 episodes, I can see why this show was originally set to be canceled after episode 39. Man, those first 30 were... hmm... how to describe them... flat. While I understand that Tomino was trying to portray war as not exciting and horrific; it is difficult to be engaged when you are really indifferent to the plot and characters. It does start to pick up again after episode 30, but I can see why this would have been too late to save the show. With Tomino and Co having been succesful in getting a 4 episode extension, I can imagine that Eps 40-43 will probably move along much faster than the others, but we'll see...

Decided to go really retro. Currently watching Mobile Suit Gundam. So far, it's a bit slow after having watched 14 eps, but it's starting to grow on me. I think it also helps that I'm trying to approach this by pretending I've never seen any Gundam series at all (which, being the very first Gundam project, is how it should be).

Well, that explains why the fansubs I watched never really worked that well. I was also using MPC, never even though to switch player. Each time a song would come up, like Rankafan & Master Dex said, the video would slow down, but the audio would continue as normal. This made for a very infuriating experience. Glad to know that, if I ever encounter a similar situation in the future, there's a workaround for it.

Reading the Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind manga for the 5th time. It really is just so much better than the film version (even if the film version is pretty good in its own right). I'm sometimes amazed that the guy who brought us the films "My Neighbour Totoro" & Kiki's Delivery Service" can have created a comic that is so much more serious than these films. For those of you who had ever watched the film version of Nausicäa and wondered what would happen if these giant insects ever really started to attack humans, you get your answer in the manga.

I vote for Contact starring Jodie Foster and a then up and coming (and currently derailing his career) Mathew McConaughey.

If he did say it. sorry for asking about it. I didn't feel like reading 21 pages to see if it had been mentioned. I can still live recompressing the WMV audio, so it's ok.

Hey Hikuro. I downloaded the WMV version and liked it. Good job! But, as the audio is already compressed, I was wondering if you could upload the audio & subs only to any downloading site. This would save me from having to recompress it to ac3. I already have the HD remastered DVD. All I would do is rip the video and add in your audio & subs.

You nailed it. One of the high points of the original Predator was that even Ah-nold was no match for the Predator and only barely defeated him using brains rather than brute force.

I don't see anything in there that could be the sort of news we're looking for.

I just wonder how the budget was divided. Anyone have any educated guesses? And I won't accept an answer like 90% went to Yune and 10% for the rest. I would like real guesses.

Got the 12 Kingdoms for Christmas, but haven't had a chance to watch it yet. I'm planning on starting this weekend. I hope it's good, but I will try to keep an objective mindset.

Interesting topic. In Canada, before cable, we were rather limited in what we could watch. There were only 3 networks (CTV, CBC, SRC French CBC) that we had access to with our puny antennas. I can't remember in what order I watched them, but the first anime I can remember seeing in English was Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman). In 1978-9, I would have been 4-5 years old. Also, around this time, I remember watching these series in French: Albator (Space Pirate Captain Harlock). I was always blown away when that ship would slice, literally, through other ships. Candy, Candy: What can I say, back in those days, there wasn't that much animation running on Sunday mornings and we took what we could get, even the girly shows. Le Petit Castor (The Little Beaver): I can't even find any information on this show in English Wikipedia. It was shown only in Canada in French. It was about a group of anthropomorphic animals: beavers, bears, foxes. Again, it ran on Sunday mornings. Add to that Ulysses 31, Captain Flam (Captain Future). We had a lot of good stuff in French, and most of it was unedited. Of course a few years later, Voltron & Robotech would come on the English channels and change the way I perceived animation. I also liked Thunderbirds 2086 (Science Rescue Team Technovoyager), but I don't think they ever ran the full series in Canada.

I looked into flashing my player's firmware a couple of years ago, but by then, it was already too old. I've had it for 7 years. Just for the heck of it, I think I'm going to send a note to Kadokawa/Bandai and ask them how they authored those subs and see what they say.

Yes, it's the collector's edition 2 disc edition (plus the ost included as a 3rd disc). And bad news for me: I tried the disc at a friend's house and it works perfectly. So, it looks like I'm screwed. Still, like I said above, this is the first time I've ever encountered this issue. Also, as there 2 more sub tracks on the disc and they work perfectly well on my player, I can only conclude that whoever Kadokawa/Bandai hired to encode this disc did something unusual. I wonder if it would be worth it to contact them and report this.

Thanks for the suggestion Keith, but unfortunately, it didn't work. I will try it on another table top player and see what that does. If it still doesn't work, I'll contact Kadokawa. If it does work, well I'm screwed.

Hey everyone. Hope you all had a nice Christmas and that Santa delivered lots of anime, manga, and other related items under your trees this year. I got The Girl Who Leapt Through Time DVD Collector's Edition DVD from my parents and at first, it was a great gift. As I sat down to watch it using my table top DVD player, my great gift seemed plagued with an annoying problem. I wanted to watch the film in Japanese with English subs and chose these options in the setup menu. As the film started and the characters started talking, no subs came up. I checked and the subs were active. I also tried turning them off and on, but with no effect. I tried out the other 2 sub tracks included (one for use with English dub translating on screen text and the other for the Japanese commentary), both of these worked fine. I then decided to try it on my DVD-ROM and all subs worked well on it. There also appeared nothing out of the ordinary about the dialogue subtitles that would have prevented my table top player from displaying them. I looked online if I could find any other people experiencing this similar problem, but could not find any. At this point, I guess I should also mention that my table top player is 7 years old, but this is also the first time I have ever encountered this problem. I also find it strange that it plays the other 2 sub tracks. Before asking some friends with newer players to test the DVD, I wanted to get some feedback from you guys and also to see if you have any recommendations on solving this problem (short of buying a new player ).

Once somebody downloads and tests it, can anyone confirm if this set will include the English dub?

I was thinking the same thing. <cat hissing>

Oshii didn't direct Patlabor 3, so maybe that's why it was a bad film. Put me down also for Kusanagi shoots first. There's just too much temptation with these "2.0" versions to want to change things around too much. Also, I'm just not a fan of 3D animation on 2D cell work, especially when it looks so obvious like in the new 2.0 footage previewed.

Thanks for correcting it. I tried to put up spoiler tags, but couldn't for the life of me figure it out. Now that I look at it, I see the spoiler tag on the left side of my screen. I was looking for an icon on top. As for the movie, like I said, I went in expecting Temple of Doom quality, and it's exactly what I got. So I wasn't disappointed by it at all.

I went in expecting a Temple of Doom level film, and that's what I got. Spoilers: