Thank you! Long story short, I've been trying to get a foreign-language copy and ended up wasting money on a weird-frame-rate bootleg of the Japanese version, and a German version of the U.S. cut... so I was thinking very much that it was time to stop messing around and just go straight to the source. So this is exactly what I needed to know!Goji wrote:The Japanese Blu-Ray from 2014 is the only source you should ever be bothering with, at this point. Some of the scenes from the theatrical version, which have existed in bad quality since the '80s, are from a better source here, so it's definitely a huge improvement over the ancient DVD transfer. The transfer itself is mostly solid (I think it's probably one of their better ones, but don't quote me on that), but parts of it are a little overly red, IIRC. Honestly, Space Hunter M or Tamura would know more of the specifics better than I would, so hopefully they'll chime in.
One thing to note is that this is not the recent 4K restoration, which is the one that reinstated the missing trims from a source that wasn't 16mm, for once. That still hasn't had a home video release, and the ball is totally in Toho's court on that one (same goes for the 4K res. of the original film).
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Maritonic wrote:I have to ask, as I feel like my knowledge of this subject is a dark, unlit room; why, exactly, are the Showa Era releases such a nightmare on home media? It seems like there are just so damn many of them, even in the Japanese market, and they all seem to be missing *something*. Like, there is no *definitive* version of each film.
This is just how it SEEMS, I could VERY well be wrong about this. Can someone explain this to me?
I'm guessing rights issues, mostly? King Kong vs. Godzilla has the biggest problems because of the joint Universal production muddling the rights...
But I think a part of it is that each film also tends to have three versions; a Japanese original, a U.S. re-edited version, and an International Version prepared by Toho that could be adapted (re-titled and redubbed) into each language (including English). So basically, you have one Japanese version and 2 English-speaking versions (sometimes, you even get a third U.S. dub from a smaller distributor). Each of these versions can tend to have things exclusive to their re-editing, AND each of them can have mutiple rights-holders allowing whoever owns it now to only release certain bits or cuts, AND sometimes the masters/negative/prints of the original weren't well-maintained or stores, so the custom bits from one of the versions may only be available in low-quality or have deteriorated.
I think that accounts for most of it.