Robotech_Master

I read Jamie S. Rich's DVD review of The Castle of Cagliostro - Special Edition at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=23472 and...

...was wondering how on earth you managed to miss the fact that the gorgeously-animated opening credit sequence has been replaced, at Tokyo Movie Shinsha's behest, with a series of framegrabs with the English language credits superimposed over them? Given that you were comparing the original and special-edition DVDs, this should have been immediately obvious.

Even if the original studio was the responsible party rather than Manga
Video, fans of the movie still deserve to know that part of the film does not appear as it was originally intended by its creator before they make their purchase and get a rude awakening five minutes into the DVD. This is a black mark against an otherwise thorough and excellent review.

While I'm on the subject, I'd just like to plug the MP3 audio commentary track that I've made for this film and updated over time. I've packed practically every second of it with observations, trivia, and explanations about this movie and the source material from which it was derived.

You can find it here:

http://www.terrania.us/journal/2004/08/lupin-iii-castle-of-cagliostro.html

tas314

Durring your review did to try playing this disc on a standard interlaced TV display?
I found that it looks great on progressive displays like my computer or a small LCD screen, but when played on a standard TV (even in 16:9 mode) the video quality was MUCH worse. It looks as if the DVD player was only using one field and scaling it to the full screen. Lines that are smooth on the progressive display are jagged on the interlace display. The old version of the movie looks better then the new one on my TV

Like Robotech_Master I was not happy to see the "slide show" that the opening credits have become on this version.

justbarelymovin

Hmm... It looks like I'll be picking this one up, but also keeping my older copy from Comic-Con '01. I'm glad these issues were brought up, or I probably would've just sold off my older version without a second thought.

jamieoni

I'll check out the opening credits right now and amend the review to indicate this. It has been several years since I have watched my previous version, so my memory of the opening credits has faded. As indicated in the review, I did a random sampling of the two discs, so I loaded them up, hit play, and jumped to different points in the film to look for a variety of scenes.

tas314: I watched it on a standard television, and it looked fine to me.

jamieoni

Yeesh, that is a startling change, and totally unnecessary. I've made the note in the review.

Thanks for the heads up, Robotech Master, and welcome to the community.

Robotech_Master

Thanks for updating the review. Now it's perfect.

And do be sure and view it with my my commentary track sometime. I had a lot of fun making it, and learned a lot of really neat things.

Josh Z

Have you tried the disc in a different DVD player? What you describe sounds more likely to be hardware-related than the disc (I could be wrong, I don't have the disc).

tas314

I have tried it on more then one player.
The odd thing is that the TMS studio logo that runs before the movie is not affected, all the lines and curves are nice and smooth.

I created a quick page with some PowerDVD screen shots, and latter added a couple of digital photos of my TV to compare for another form. The page is here...
http://www.utarpa.org/test/Lupin/index.html
The second one of the autogyro wing is better (I figured out how to set the white ballance to match the TV) as you can clearly see the stair step effect on the wing in the photo but it's smooth on the screen capture.

I don't think it's a hardware problem other then if its an odd authouring problem like the field order being wrong some players may be able to fix the problem while others produce poor output.