A Big Announcement After All

[krpalmer]

It’s been a little while since I last took in a “streaming fan presentation,” so when I saw some notices Discotek Media would be offering one of them I did mull over watching it. I’ve bought a good number of their anime Blu-Rays, even if one reason for that might be taking heart it’s possible to make anime discs that keep other fans enthusiastic without encoding quality being signalled by prices far higher than anything with actual wide appeal. (The company does seem to run on a shoestring all the same, re-releasing titles put out by other companies years ago and following that up with works years or decades old.) There were promises of a big announcement, although seeing the speculation of some had me a bit cautious about “letting expectations run away on you.”

As it turned out, the thought of tuning in to the stream didn’t quite return to mind until several minutes into it, and I didn’t follow it all the way through. Midway through, though, my attention was caught by a mention of Project A-ko, and the announcement the elaborate upscaling plan the company had set in motion wouldn’t be coming to pass didn’t bother me a bit in the moments before my speculation was fulfilled. After years as one of the recurring examples of “the original film’s nowhere to be found,” looking up a place in some archives nothing seemed to refer to really had found the film.

While I understand Project A-ko’s grandiose comedic action was a formative element for a certain bracket of English-speaking anime fans, for me it did seem to wind up one more of the titles exposed enough my university’s anime club hadn’t shown it when I was there. Some of my most memorable early exposures to it were mentions in some “anime MSTings.” While I did eventually get to see the initial film through a previous Discotek release, sourced from laserdisc onto DVD, I’d formed the impression by osmosis following titles were a matter of diminishing returns and not watched them. Still, the news of the upscaling plan had got my attention, involving not just “the Domesday Duplicator,” a device that can intercept the analog signal off a laserdisc within the player itself rather than having to wait until the additional loss of the regular outputs, but also image processing to sharpen everything. I do feel a bit sympathetic for the people who’d been working on the upscaling, and pondered the film having been found not by someone from Japan but by Robert Woodhead, who runs the now somewhat less prolific AnimEigo (although it’s doing a bit more now that it’s done for years) and helped put out some “dungeon-crawling computerized role-playing games” in the 1980s. With that, of course, I will be interested in getting the Blu-Ray when it does come out.

Comments

[lovelyangel]

I love Project A-ko! So it's a no-brainer for me to get the film on Blu-ray – whenever it happens to come out. I think schedule slippage from Discotek is the norm. They're promising to do the first season of Kodocha this year, and I'm patiently waiting for that one.

I still listen to the Project A-ko OST; it's awesome!

[krpalmer]

I didn't pay too much attention to the "projected release dates" in the presentation, although I did notice a warning the new license of Dear Brother wouldn't be available for as long as many others are. (Years ago, I chipped in for the Anime Sols crowd-sourced DVD releases of that series, sweating out every pre-order period, but I haven't yet opened those DVDs...)

In pondering my own reactions to Project A-ko, I considered how right now I'm intrigued in any tidbit of information I can find about "1980s North American anime fandom," back when it was a matter of importing untranslated material from Japan and passing along nth-generation copies on videotape, but might not pay quite so much attention to the early 1990s when companies were being established. I did also wonder about what titles might become the ones brought up whenever people start lamenting about "vanished masters"... I recall insinuations the film reels for Sailor Moon were cut up and handed out as bonuses years ago, and that one episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion is stuck at standard definition because its materials went missing.

[davemerrill]

Very excited to hear they'd found the original film for A-Ko. It and the sequels turned up on Retrocrush, and we watched them all - 2 is actually the weakest of the sequels. 3 and 4 are worth checking out.

Definitely gonna be getting that BD when it comes out, which means I'll have owned this film on laserdisc, VHS, DVD and BD. Go fig.

[krpalmer]

I suppose I could go ahead and check out the sequels at last, even if I'm thinking "once I've returned to the original on the impending Blu-Ray"... All I have of Project A-ko myself is the DVD Discotek sourced from the laserdisc. (By the time I supposed myself able to afford anime, the DVD era had begun. Somewhat later, I bought a Manga VHS tape of "Macross Plus: The Movie" from the discount bin in front of BMV Books on Bloor Street, just to have one bit of "anime on tape." I did at least handle laserdiscs back in university; the anime club had placed all eight instalments of Bubblegum Crisis in a room students could visit and watch the discs in.)