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).