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All right…as part of my move to bill myself as a web professional, I’m striving to present a (marginally) less geeky facade online, and to associate all online content with my real name. As a result, I’m moving away from using the name “Andorus” as an alias wherever possible–and that includes renaming my websites. “Andorus’s Hideaway” is (for now) simply ecomancer.net, but will eventually be changed to something else.
“Andorus’s Pirates of Dark Water Page,” though…I have no clue.
So, I’d like you all to tell me! What do you think would be a good new name for the site? I’d like something kind of classy, obviously related to the show, but not too over-the-top or contrived. I suck at naming stuff on my own, so any and all input would be appreciated! This site also wouldn’t exist in its current state if not for the contributions (and words of moral support) from several thousand of you all over the years, so it’s only fair to include you in the decision-making process.
Please comment here, or send me an e-mail. Thank you so much in advance!
Thanks to Nathan for alerting me to this, and sorry I didn’t post it earlier (I was out of town and fell pretty sick while I was traveling, so I’ve been out of commission for over a week).
A guy by the name of Soetermans took it upon himself to make some major edits to PoDW Wikipedia site, deleting a lot of stuff he (and he alone) claimed doesn’t belong on Wikipedia. I think the admins intervened in the favor of the regular maintainers, but a lot of content that was once there is gone. If you have the inclination and time and aren’t averse to editing Wikipedia (some people think that’s the height of geekiness, but I think it embodies the original intent and ideals of the World Wide Web in many ways), please take a few moments to head over and add in whatever info you’re willing.
Oh, and a note to the guy who insisted in the Discussion tab (sorry, I’m not a frequent contributer and am not up on my Wiki-jargon) that Frank Welker is the only voice actor for Niddler: actually, he isn’t. I have VHS copies to prove that Roddy McDowall did do the original voice, and I swear I’ll digitize them soon so everyone can see! (Not that I’m complaining about having a social life…it just makes my online presence more incidental and less regular.)
Maybe I’ll ride this wave of guilt over letting this website just sit here and rot, and go back to my parents’ place, pick up my copies of the VHS tapes, and go to our local Indian grocery and see about having them converted. I’ve been eyeing DVD-burner/VHS decks, too, so I can just do it myself. And TVs, because those are also kind of important. ;P It’s been really nice living a TV-free existence, though I’d only be using it for movies and basic channels (reloading weather.com and searching for streaming webcasts of local weather when under a tornado warning is not ideal! But for Atlantans, 11alive.com does have one). I’ll figure something out soon. And maybe I’ll spend a weekend just catching up on website updates…it’s so hard when the weather’s so beautiful, though.
God, I need to update this site so badly. I have something like a year’s worth of stuff to put up, but I guess the fact that I have an active social life is a good thing, though not so good for any of my websites. ;P And I’m trying to go easy on my hand and wrist, which have been aching lately from overuse, since I spend 40 hours/week on a computer already. I’m getting back into playing the violin seriously again, so I definitely don’t want to strain my hand as I prepare to audition for community orchestras.
Anyway, this is just to say that I’m finally loosening up a bit, raising the floodgates, what-have-you. If you’re on Facebook and you want to add me as a friend, feel free! Thank you to everyone who has tried to friend me already, and I’m truly sorry for having to turn you away before! Facebook’s customizable privacy settings have made this possible now, so I’m not broadcasting my personal contact info to every single person I add. ;P Just be sure to mention that you found my name through the site–I want to add people with whom I share some connection/commonality, and not just random folks.
(And there seem to be about 27 Facebook groups that relate to PoDW these days–besides the standard “Pirates of Dark Water” groups, there are other ones like “Replace the F-word with Noy Jitat” (ha! I love it), and a few “Classic Cartoons” groups. Take your pick!)
Yet again ripping off Cartoon Brew, but this was too fantastic not to post. A whole site devoted to (mainly tongue-in-cheek) dissertations on various animated series and movies! There’s nothing there on PoDW (yet? anyone?). But it’s a pretty hilarious read, with some real gems featured, and, on occasion, some interesting and insightful points. Check it out.
The first of the two PoDW VHS Yahoo! Japan auctions I won arrived last week (wooo!), so when I was at my parents’ house this weekend, I hooked up our VCR and checked it out. (I love how this was express-mailed and arrived in a matter of days, but the box of stuff that I shipped when I was visiting Japan in mid-March hasn’t arrived yet.) I’m mailing back and forth with the seller of the five individual episode videos, but he’s not being too flexible with my sorry-I-don’t-live-in-Japan-so-please-have-pity-on-me plea, in terms of shipping and payment; I’m concerned I may just have to give those up. Oh, well–at least I have this!
The video I received was the one I thought was “The Saga Begins” (the 90-minute edited movie version of episodes 1-5), when in fact it was the full-length Dark Water miniseries dubbed in Japanese. Sweet! It’s on a VHS, and in fair quality, but I will totally have it converted to DVD to rip clips from it. If people are interested in creating fansubs, I can help with the translations, though I’ve never done video editing myself before.
(And I will be converting my VHS copies of the English Dark Water miniseries to DVD, too. I think there’s a healthy amount of interest in what the show originally was over here. I only just realized that our local Indian grocery offers that service!)
It was surreal–it’s been quite a while since I last watched the episodes, so while I knew what would happen, I was focusing on listening for the dialogue, and it was almost like new all over again. It was a lot of fun!
Click the link below to read the full review (yes, I took notes, shut up–all about minor changes and Japanese cultural/linguistic notes).
(Thank goodness Wordpress saves drafts–my browser crashed when I was writing this this weekend.)
Here’s something else: the actual Japanese title isn’t merely Dark Water, but “Michi no Umi he Dark Water,” or “To the undiscovered/mysterious sea: Dark Water”. Neat, eh? It had a limited airing, on NHK-BS2 on satellite TV. I don’t think they aired all 21 episodes, based on the air dates I found, but I don’t know that for sure.
And it had unique opening and closing theme music, sung by Hironobu Kageyama, who might or might not have been Ren’s voice actor (there’s also a guy named Takeshi Kusao cited as voicing Ren).
- The opening theme is “Aisubeki no Senshitachi”, or Beloved Soldiers.
- The closing theme is “Senshitachi no Kyuusoku”, or Soldiers’ Rest.
They’re just as cheesy and generic as they seem from the titles–I found clips of both songs (scroll down to the beige box with two sets of links; in the second list, 5 is the opening theme and 6 is the closing–each will spawn a pop-up window). For those who can read Japanese, here are the lyrics for the opening and closing. Set your browser’s character encoding to Shift-JIS for these.) Look for them if you ever go to a karaoke parlor in Japan–you just might find them!
That’s all for now, but that’s plenty!
I just hit the freaking JACKPOT. An e-mail from a fan about Japanese releases of the show made me realize, “wait, if I can speak, understand, and type in Japanese, why not do a Google.jp search for Japanese info on the show?”
There isn’t a lot out there, but I’ve found Yahoo! auctions for videos, and totally original images of the Japanese video art, within my first 10 minutes of looking.
I think I may try to beg and bribe my friends still in Japan to bid on these for me, since shipping and bidding and everything are probably domestic only.
And…dude. On joysound.com (Joysound is one of the major karaoke machine/music providers there), there seems to be a JAPANESE SONG relating to the show, possibly sung by Ren’s voice actor, titled “Aisubeki Senshitachi” (”Lovable Soldiers”). Oh my god.
That’s about it for now. But that’s plenty! I only wish I’d thought of this while I actually lived there. Japanese VHS format is NTSC (I can’t remember if I tried playing videos from here over there or vice versa, though), so if my friends do consent to bid, win the videos, and ship them to me, hopefully I can view them here. We’ll see!
(By the way, I’m back from Austin and Japan; I’ve replied to all the messages I’ve received and kept an eye on my spam folder, so if you haven’t gotten a reply, please send your message again. Thanks!)
Banana Soychoo (psst! I just sent you a reply, but it bounced) writes in with a merchandise info request (bold emphasis mine):
“I used to own a pirates of dark water comic, it might have been #5 but i cant be sure. It’s the one where ren and niddler are in the belly of the maelstrom, and there is one part where they are running from the constrictus. What i’m really looking for is the other comic that was on the other side of it. It was one of those 2 in 1 comics where half way through it was the end of the other comic and you had to flip it upside down and backwards to read the other one….Could you please tell me(if you know) what was the comic on the other side?”
This is the first I’ve ever heard about this, but it sounds pretty awesome! If you have any info on this, please comment here.
And on that note: I’m going out of town for several weeks and then moving, so I may not have regular online access till April. (I’m attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, and then I’m going back to Japan for 1-2 weeks!) If you’ll be at SXSW and want to say hi, please do drop me an e-mail.
“Noooo!” I can hear some of you wailing, upon the mention of the dreaded f_____ word. Well, that’s kind of all we have left, and people are still writing!
The first is a new FanFiction.net upload, the first new story there in over two years–it’s the beginning of a story set in the future of the PoDW universe. A crew of three rescues a stranger struggling on a raft…only to find that he’s Ren, the son of Primus, who’s failed in finding the final five Treasures of Rule and passes the Compass and the Quest on to this new group with his dying breath. I rather liked the Ren/Primus parallel.
The second is the product of a fanfic challenge, and is an in-progress series of short pieces rooted in an alternate universe: what if, after episode 5, Tula had joined up with Bloth, in order to learn his plans and to keep him away from Ren? Some of these short pieces (friends-locked on her journal, but public on the fanfic community where I originally found this) have a decidedly adult twist to them…as a woman aboard a pirate ship, certain sacrifices have to be made. I haven’t read them all yet, but I’ve liked the ones I’ve seen so far.
And the third is a cute play on Ren’s lovely looks, gorgeous blue eyes, and long locks of blonde hair–“Dude Looks Like A Lady”.
Oh, and another old one (from 2000, yikes): Dark Water in Neverland, a PoDW/Peter Pan and the Pirates crossover, done in round-robin format.
It’s also time to start posting some of this huge backlog of links I’ve been bookmarking for a very, very long time. (For the “omgwtf you obsessive scary woman” naysayers, I don’t spend hours a day scouring the web for this stuff…I find a new link every couple of months, bookmark it, and forget about it.) I think I’ve posted the really awesome stuff immediately, but there are still a few gems. Apologies if any of these have been posted already!
I first found out about Heritage Auctions through cels they’d put up for auction on eBay (strange that an auction site would put their items on another auction site, but maybe it was for the extra advertisement; it worked, in this case!). Through a random search, I came back to their site and saw that they have several dozen pieces of animation artwork currently for auction at the moment, in batches of two or three (usually the actual cel plus its accompanying clean-up animation drawing, but sometimes with an extra cel as well). If you’re interested in collecting animation art from PoDW, this seems to be the place to be. They seem to have consistently been selling PoDW animation art for a while now.
(If the direct link to the PoDW listings doesn’t work, go to ha.com and search under Comics and then Animation Art.)
Oh, yeah! As an update to the previous post, I got in touch with Alex, the Super Toy Archive webmaster (and a pretty big PoDW fan himself). He has a Hasbro catalog with images of the discontinued second line, which dispels several rumors that have been floating around: the biggest one is that there was never a Tula action figure. Even in this second line, they didn’t make one, which I think is surprising and also incredibly stupid. (Hello? Main character? So what if she’s a girl?) He’s offered to scan the pages in the next few weeks–I’m definitely eager to check those out and I’ll be sure to post them here.