Bodysuit 23 #382

Dog continues to be fun to draw.

The first panel proved to be a challenge due to my lack of skills. Biggest issue being trying to have two characters in wildly different positions not look vastly different size wise. First attempt wound up having Miranda looking about a foot and a half shorter compared to Kevin, which is an issue considering they're about the same size. If it were just the two of them standing next to each other or something simple like that it would've been fine.

In anime news: got the DVD boxsets of Patlabor TV since it was stupid cheap on Sentai Filmwork's holiday sale. However, despite owning it, I'm probably going to watch the show through HiDive. The reason being the DVDs only contain 3 episodes a disc.

Now, I don't know about you guys, but I hate getting up and changing discs when I'm trying to watch something. It's not worse thing in the world, sure, but it's a minor annoyance that streaming anime doesn't have to deal with. If it's a DVD from 20 odd years ago, I'm pretty lenient with the small episode count per disc because disc authors back then were pretty fucking terrible with compression methods. These days? Nah. A DVD can handle 6-7 episodes just fine.

Thankfully there is a legit reason behind Sentai's release being like this: the DVDs contain the Japanese remastered footage along with the older video masters. The old (frankly mediocre to bad) dub done for the TV series doesn't sync up with the slight tweaking done for the remastered video. This meant either putting the episodes on separate discs as a whole (English dub disc + Japanese disc), leave out the dub entirely (which sucks for people who like preserving shit, like me), or do two separate releases (such as Discotek's release of Samurai Pizza Cats and Monster Rancher). I guess if  I were to pick a poison I'd go with what Sentai settled on. But on the bright side I can just hop on over to their app instead!

So why buy it at all in the first place if I'm just gonna stream it anyway? Because one day that shit will be gone. Nobody holds a license forever, and who knows when shit will come back. Look at Neon Genesis Evangelion. Took a decade for it to get relicensed, and rumor has it that it's being redubbed. The old ADV Platinum sets included the original dub along with the director's cut episodes with a redone dub to better fit the edited footage. If Netflix ever does sublicenses Evangelion to another company to release a physical edition, they may just stick with the new dub that's made, or if the rumor turns out false, then they may only stick with the original dub without the director's cut episodes. Or have just the director's cut episodes and not the originals.

There's new companies coming into the physical anime release game, and not all of them, and sometimes they don't give a fuck and just want a cheap buck. Remember Warner Bros' attempt at releasing Jojo's Bizarre Adventure before giving up and Viz getting the license? That release was lame as fuck. Biggest offender is Anchor Bay's release of Ghost in the Shell: SAC. Their release had a major fuck up where the language tracks will change in the middle of the episode! There was never a recall or anything. The only bluray release the US got is royally fucked up and who knows when we'll see someone else put a fixed bluray. It makes it more hilarious that I still see the old Bandai release at Wal-Mart in fucking 2018.

Then you have copyright issues that fuck up future releases. If you were a kid like me in the late 90's/early 00's and watched Toonami, then you can probably remember seeing this awesome opening to Big O, which is totally a ripoff of Flash by Queen while the video was a reference to the opening to Ultraseven. I love the fuck out of that opening! Except ever since 2007 that opening has been scrubbed from broadcasts and dvd/bluray releases, being replaced with this new opening. Sure, they got the guy who did the old opening to do the new one, but it sucks for people like me who have nostalgia for that old opening. Worse, it means we're never getting an HD master of it. The best we'll get is a fanmade upscale, which isn't the same. It's also a shame because it means whenever I do buy the bluray for Big O I won't be able to get rid of my DVD sets. I'll be sitting on 2 copies of the shame show.

Whenever I get duplicates of an anime I already own and if there's nothing major between releases, I either give my old copy away to friends or go sell it. Otherwise I have to hang onto them. This is why I keep my old Disney DVD copy of Castle in the Sky with all those added bits of dialogue, because I wanna preserve that stupid decision Disney made. I at least was able to get rid of my Disney bluray copy of it since the GKids release contained the full orchestra soundtrack Disney paid for the original DVD release (but removed from their bluray release). Also have to keep the old Bandai release of Haruhi Suzumiya despite owning the Funimation bluray because it'll be a cold day in Hell before I relinquish ownership of the ASOS Brigade videos in a physical format.

Anyway, seems I'm going on a tangent, so I'll stop now.