Viz Licenses Original Sailor Moon Anime Franchise

[psychopuppet]

Viz has done special complete series sets for Naruto for FYE . If a Sailor Moon one did happened I’d imagine if FYE still exist in the future that’d be where one would surface .

[InuYashaCrusade]

Originally Posted by psychopuppet

Viz has done special complete series sets for Naruto for FYE . If a Sailor Moon one did happened I’d imagine if FYE still exist in the future that’d be where one would surface .

FYE probably won't stick around long enough for that to happen. They were recently purchased by Sunrise Records. I guess we'll see what happens from here.

[nagpo]

Originally Posted by Imaginarion

But the releases have been rightly criticized for the terrible video quality. Toei refused to properly rescan the film negatives in HD -- because Toei is as cheap as cheap gets -- so Viz were forced to upscale the SD video tape masters themselves in order to release the show on Blu-ray. In an effort to boost colors and sharpen the image artificially (which cannot truly be done unless a new, HD scan of film material is produced), Viz completely mangled the job. There is so much ghosting, aliasing, smeary DNR and lost detail in the first two seasons, it's a travesty, and difficult to watch at times. With Sailor Moon S, they had gotten the message that their upscale was dreadful, so they spent over a year remastering it in a completely new, more labor-intensive way in order to achieve a more natural, filmic look. The season looks much better than Sailor Moon/Sailor Moon R, but it's still not up to snuff for a proper Blu-ray. SuperS and Sailor Stars are sourced directly from new upscales Toei commissioned themselves, and look great -- Sailor Stars, in particular, looks incredibly good. But two seasons with acceptable image quality doesn't discount the fact that the other three are dreadful. Maybe someday, Viz will re-release the first three seasons with Toei's new upscale, but I wouldn't hold your breath for anytime soon.

.

I'm watching these sets right now since I have the series completed and it's really not an understatement about just how poor the quality is on these sets. I've seen bootleg anime from china with better visuals than these sets (not sailor moon just anime in general).

These sets are worse than low resolution, highly compressed, streamed, daily motion videos from the 2000's. It's a screw up on a massive scale and I don't know how Viz got away with it and why Toei and the creator of Sailor moon herself didn't reclaim the rights from Viz when these things came out. It tarnishes the brand and work THAT much. I can only assume said parties simply weren't paying attention to the resulting product and/or didn't care.

These sets are proof of Viz's lack of quality control and skill/ability to do a release such as this. I mean, most of the big anime companies like funi and viz are bad in the visual dept. but Viz really went out of their way to take the crown for biggest screw job with these sets.

But I'm the idiot who bought them all LOL. I find them best watched far, far away so you can't see the visual problems so easily

[SillyG]

Originally Posted by Imaginarion

The packaging and dub for the Viz sets is perfect; lined up on a shelf, they look absolutely beautiful. And the new English dub is 10x better than the old censored and edited one, with the added benefit of using the same voice actors for all 200 episodes of the original series, all three movies, and all 39 episodes of Crystal.

I never asked about the packaging. I inquired about how the Viz releases of seasons 4 and 5 were somehow not "uncut".

Originally Posted by Imaginarion

SuperS and Sailor Stars are sourced directly from new upscales Toei commissioned themselves, and look great -- Sailor Stars, in particular, looks incredibly good. But two seasons with acceptable image quality doesn't discount the fact that the other three are dreadful. Maybe someday, Viz will re-release the first three seasons with Toei's new upscale, but I wouldn't hold your breath for anytime soon.

I am well aware of the circumstances surrounding these releases, so you're selling ice to an Eskimo here.

Madman have used the Japanese masters for their Blu-ray releases, so there's that, though one should bear in mind that our releases are likely to be Region B locked. And for what it's worth, Madman openly rejected the use of Viz's "remaster" for their Blu-ray releases (though they have utilised their dub), and waited until Toei's Japanese masters were ready before issuing their own Blu-rays (prior to which, they had been releasing the Italian masters on DVD).

The breakdown of Madman's releases are as follows:
Seasons 1-3 DVD: Italian masters
Seasons 4-5 DVD: Japanese masters (downscaled to SD)
Seasons 1-5 Blu-ray: Japanese masters

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by prkchopexpress

i know this is apples and oranges, but the ingmar bergman set from criterion was $150. they could have charged way more (and you could say they are, but they have like five sales or so a year where you can get it for that price or less.)

i might have said this forever ago, but if you made a box set of all the seasons and it was between $150-175... that would be sold out and they have they’d have to order another pressing.

also, for the price of one half of one season, you could have hulu for like four months and watch all the episodes.

so yeah. it’s not selling because it’s too expensive, on top of the streaming. being like 90% cheaper.

i’m not embarrassed to say that i want to have all the sailor moon in my collection. but hey, why not just let it sit on the shelf forever?

At that price (less than $1 an episode), VIZ would be losing money. Consider how much the license had to have cost given how big of a title it is and the amount of content (200+ episodes + 3 movies), plus the cost of dubbing 200+ episodes, plus the "remastering" process. It's garbage, but still cost money to do.

Originally Posted by InuYashaCrusade

When was the last time Viz did a complete collection? A lot of their series get released in parts and that's it. InuYasha The Final Act got a complete release but series like Tiger & Bunny, Nura, Accel World, etc. all still haven't received one.

FYE Exclusive Naruto Complete series.
https://www.fye.com/naruto-complete-...009246473.html

They previously had this in 2018, it didn't come with the 3 movies for the original series.
https://fandompost.vbulletin.net/for...episodes-1-220

[prkchopexpress]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

At that price (less than $1 an episode), VIZ would be losing money. Consider how much the license had to have cost given how big of a title it is and the amount of content (200+ episodes + 3 movies), plus the cost of dubbing 200+ episodes, plus the "remastering" process. It's garbage, but still cost money to do.

i guess if the quality wasn’t so bad, at least from what i’ve heard, it wouldn’t be so bad.

but even if it was $1/episode..

the seasons would be $40 each for the complete season. and then maybe $10-15 per movie...

that would still be like $250+ cheaper that the sets as they are now.

(which, the sets right now average $91 before tax and would cost a total of $451 before tax and without the movies. which would be another $50. so... $500 before tax for the complete series).

the miyazaki set was $150 and that sold out very quickly. i’m not saying the studio should lose money, but the high prices are costing them more with less people buying them. granted, those are movies and not series.

yes. i’m cheap and don’t want to spend the money on all of these or wait for a sale after five years.

[zenpai]

Originally Posted by prkchopexpress

yes. i’m cheap and don’t want to spend the money on all of these or wait for a sale after five years.

I mean, I am cheap too. But thankfully I’m also very patient. I can wait as long as I need to to find the items I’m looking for at the price points I am willing to pay. I’ve gotten a lot of OOP hard to find, generally super expensive items for prices they were at when they were still in print (Katanagatari PEs, R.O.D. BD Box, Toradora PE, etc). Things pop up every so often and I watch closely, so I am able to get what I want roughly 90% of the time.

This goes for Sailor Moon as well. I gave myself an ultimatum that I will not ever spend more than $40 on a single Part set (even the LEs) and so far I have stuck to that. Granted, I’ve mostly gotten them out of order, but now I’m only still missing R Part 2 and S Parts 1 & 2.

[Andy2992]

The fact Madman still hasn't announced a release date for Stars part two leads me to believe that the rumour that there's something going down with the English license being revoked might actually be true. I sold off all my US blu ray sets to get the Madman ones and now I could potentially be left with an incomplete set.. ugh.

[Traveller]

Why would they do that at the last minute? Where’s that rumor coming from?

[SillyG]

Originally Posted by Andy2992

The fact Madman still hasn't announced a release date for Stars part two leads me to believe that the rumour that there's something going down with the English license being revoked might actually be true. I sold off all my US blu ray sets to get the Madman ones and now I could potentially be left with an incomplete set.. ugh.

Surely that would result in a breach of contract?

I imagine that they would have paid for the license to all 200 episodes and the 3 movies ahead of time, otherwise, why bother licensing the series at all?

The fact that the US release has been delayed is probably affecting us only because Viz have always released them before Madman (which is probably a condition of the licensing agreement to disincentivise importing).

Madman is releasing a complete season 4 set in April, so I'm not worried at this point. With a property this big, and the inevitable backlash from diehard fans for a property of this calibre, Viz/Madman won't go down without a fight.

[InuYashaCrusade]

Originally Posted by Traveller

Why would they do that at the last minute? Where’s that rumor coming from?

Rumor is that Viz did something which Naoko Takeuchi didn't care for and rights to Sailor Moon are frozen again.

[Mikezilla3k]

I predict that she's gotta freeze the rights and then unfreeze them once bootlegs copies are selling like hotcakes.

[InuYashaCrusade]

Originally Posted by Mikezilla3k

I predict that she's gotta freeze the rights and then unfreeze them once bootlegs copies are selling like hotcakes.

Bootlegs are out of control regardless. Nearly identical 1:1 anime bootlegs are flooding eBay.

[Traveller]

Something about a pamphlet character writeup was it? Or something else? I find it hard to believe small stuff like that would provoke a freeze.

Either way, the creator is way too controlling for simple re-releases of content.

[Imaginarion]

Originally Posted by Traveller

Something about a pamphlet character writeup was it? Or something else? I find it hard to believe small stuff like that would provoke a freeze.

Either way, the creator is way too controlling for simple re-releases of content.

She’s the reason SM was unlicense-able for 15 years to begin with. Naoko Takeuchi is extremely touchy about ANYTHING with regards to her magnum opus, and is slighted by even a single typo in an episode title. She seems to not have taken issue with the piss-poor video quality of Viz’s sets, for some reason, but instead something incredibly minor that was printed in one of the LE booklets. I do not know what specifically she took issue with, though. And she has absolute control over the license, not Toei. So she can rescind it whenever she wants. An absolute nightmare to work with.

[InuYashaCrusade]

Originally Posted by Imaginarion

She’s the reason SM was unlicense-able for 15 years to begin with. Naoko Takeuchi is extremely touchy about ANYTHING with regards to her magnum opus, and is slighted by even a single typo in an episode title. She seems to not have taken issue with the piss-poor video quality of Viz’s sets, for some reason, but instead something incredibly minor that was printed in one of the LE booklets. I do not know what specifically she took issue with, though. And she has absolute control over the license, not Toei. So she can rescind it whenever she wants. An absolute nightmare to work with.

Are we sure that the issue was the booklet error?

[BigOnAnime]

Keep in mind that error in the booklet is something that came originally from Toei, and was in other foreign releases. If that was the problem, then she'd have to take issue with Toei. I don't buy the booklet error being the reason if it's true nobody can license/renew the series again.

[TheBoss062]

I’m someone who doesn’t own any other edition of Sailor Moon. Should I cut my losses and settle for the Blu-ray or is there a more tolerable version in existence?

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by TheBoss062

I’m someone who doesn’t own any other edition of Sailor Moon. Should I cut my losses and settle for the Blu-ray or is there a more tolerable version in existence?

The Madman releases (Australia) are better / more tolerable

Season 1 to 5 Blu-ray use the Japanese Blu-ray upscale (the Japanese upscale is filtered, but still better than the VIZ upscale)
Season 1 to 3 DVD use the Dynit masters, which retain the film grain. The DVDs are in NTSC.
Season 4 to 5 DVD are downscaled from the Japanese Blu-ray upscale

I've started watching the Madman DVD of season 1 recently, looks surprisingly good upscaled.

[TheBoss062]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

The Madman releases (Australia) are better / more tolerable

Season 1 to 5 Blu-ray use the Japanese Blu-ray upscale (the Japanese upscale is filtered, but still better than the VIZ upscale)
Season 1 to 3 DVD use the Dynit masters, which retain the film grain. The DVDs are in NTSC.
Season 4 to 5 DVD are downscaled from the Japanese Blu-ray upscale

I've started watching the Madman DVD of season 1 recently, looks surprisingly good upscaled.

Are they Region Free?