Freeside
Freeside's Anime Pile
Thoughts
I have several thoughts about anime and stuff in general. I will now impose them upon you.
Tenchi!
Tenchi is pretty high up on my list of favorite Animes. I won't say its the best I've seen and I won't even say its my favorite, but I WILL say that I can sit and watch Tenchi all day and the only problem I'll have is the growing apprehension that I'm running out of episodes to watch (which is what happened when I bought the OAV collection).
All and all, I like Tenchi Universe OK, but the Tenchi OAVs are the best by far. The characters are much deeper and better wound together, and the story is more complex and full of life. All the characters are better and more powerful. Tenchi Universe removes all the complex parts of the plot for the TV run and waters down everyone's abilities, which takes far too much away from the story.
Tenchi in Tokyo is totally different, it seems Tenchi goes to Tokyo, and amongst other things, finds himself a human girlfriend. Why? What's the point? Most Tenchi Fans hate this series and as much as I like Tenchi, I don't plan on wasting any of my precious anime budget on it. Amazingly, I still manage to watch it when it runs on Toonami. I guess even bad anime is better than none at all.
LD or DVD?
LD video is usually better cause its uncompressed. Compression is only a problem if the compression rate is too high, like with my FY Suzaku Box. 26 episodes on 4 dvd's. I don't know what bitrate that works out to, but I can see the mpeg compression artifacts in some of the scenes. This is pretty much a problem that anime on DVD has that most normal movies won't have because of anime's non-photorealistic color pallet. MPEG-2 might be tempted to to take shortcuts it shouldn't take and visible loss can be observed. As well, a DVD's are software, sometimes glitches can occur. DVD players can crash. Or in the case of my End of Evangelion DVD, not work at all.
Plus there is the region code problem, but that's easily bypassed. :)
But when it comes down to it, DVD's are cheaper and I'm so much more tempted to buy the subbed DVD for 24 bucks than the unsubbed LD for 50, at least until can fully understand Japanese. That is, unless I can't get it on DVD, then LD's are great. Unfortunately I've been able to find some of my LD wishlist on DVD and have succumbed to the dark path.
Sub or Dub?
I prefer subtitled anime, but a good dub is a thing of beauty. ADV's NG Evangelion is a great example of good dubbing. I'm very happy with the dubbed VHS tapes of EVA I have. The voice actors are GREAT. A Perfect Match for the characters and execution is good.
Bad dubbing however, is too painful to watch. Most Manga Inc. films have pretty crappy dubbing but Macross Plus was done pretty well. Tenchi on the Cartoon Network was pretty hard to watch at first but now I love it. Gundam wing hurts my ears a bit too, but the voice actors actually do a halfway decent job, so I can't fault them too much. Of course, with DVD's you can switch on the fly, so its nearly the perfect medium for anime.
