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Anime Weekend Atlanta - Day Two - Macross
Production Saga
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Here's what the entire world of anime fandom wants to see: the remastered
and subtitled version of Macross, the Dimension Beyond Space and Time,
to be released by AnimEigo. Fans who have seen the original version of
the first of the three series turned into the Americanized Robotech know
that Macross is a far different creature, more sophisticated and intense
than the version that was seen on U.S. television. At Anime Weekend Atlanta,
fans were so anxious to see the remastered Macross that, when Robert Woodhead
of AnimEigo said "We are going to take every last dime you people have,"
the audience cheered. |
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| Woodhead treated those fans to a sample of producer Shin Kurokawa's
work on Macross. Shown was how the AnimEigo version removes the major video
flaws from the previous versions seen on television, cable and home video.
It's been a long, expensive and complicated struggle to create a watchable
and accurate version of the mid-1980's classic, so complicated that
the release date for the Animeigo DVD edition has been delayed again, Woodhead
said. |
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Among other things, hard experience from previous DVD releases has
shown Woodhead that not all discs will work properly on all players. Older
and less expensive players have firmware incompatibilities with the encoding
of newer discs, he said. So AnimEigo is going to push back the Macross
release date - most recently planned for the Christmas holiday shopping
season - until they're sure that they can get the DVD's wo play properly
on all players. "If we tried to get Macross out for Christmas, we would
not be able to test it properly," said Woodhead. "It's too much of a risk." |
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| So, AnimEigo's major holiday release will be the next set of Urusei
Yatsura episodes on DVD. If that works properly, the company will know
if they'll be ready to master and release the Macross discs, which most
likely will be released in late spring or early summer of 2001 (around
two years after AnimEigo announced they had the rights to release a subtitled
version of the series). The extra time will let AnimEigo also work on extras
for the DVD release, Kurokawa (pictured) hopes to get Mari Iijima, who
voiced Minmay, to record a commentary track. In the meantime, AnimEigo
is working to get its back catalog transferred to DVD (with five studios
handling those titles). And Carolina Recording will bring back the English-language
You're Under Arrest cast to dub the television episodes of that series. |
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