Does anyone know if the mighty Chickenshack ever put anything out on Laserdisc? For those who are unfamiliar with this group, they provided the soundtrack to one of the greatest anime films ever created that you've possibly never heard of. The simply divine, Urban Square.
I found a rather ropey live recording that looks like a VHS source on AlphabetPipe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzUgTADXI7w
The video appears to be called 'Live at Nissin Power Station'. And while it's inevitably great and everything, it's alas only a live performance of their track 'Still At Temps', which is the second part which follows perhaps their most famous track, and the title song to the brilliant Urban Square, 'At Temps'.
This is the track in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dS2GnJhDs
And this is the same track used in the opening sequence to one of the greatest anime of all-time you've possibly never heard of, Urban Square:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYGO1_kXgPU
So if anyone knows anything about any live Chickenshack Laserdiscs or VHS tapes, heck even Betamax of V2000 cassettes, I'm interested!
I have the VP50 Pro and the Edge. The VP50 Pro is great and packed with features, but the firmware is very buggy and I frequently have issues with analogue audio on it. The DVDO Edge (not the Green version) has a similar issue with audio but is quickly fixable by swapping the audio input and back again. No idea why it does it but there you go.
The Edge lacks a lot of the VP50 Pro features but to be honest the Edge does enough for me and the results are that good I'm considering moving the VP50 Pro on just purely because of the analogue audio bug. Maybe someone else will be okay with it who doesn't use Laserdiscs, but for me I'll stick with the Edge for now. Lumagen kit is lovely but way out of what I'm prepared to pay to fiddle with SD sources, plus I don't have the home setup to warrant getting the best out of it anyway. I just want to spin discs and spend less time fiddling and farting around. :thumbup:
Oh no what an absolutely sickener and especially so regarding the Guitar Fantasia LD Ted :thumbdown:
If it’s a very small crack on the outer edge there’s hopefully a decent chance it’s still safe to play, then again if your going to risk it I’m sure it will be initially with the 925....my fingers are crossed for you mate!
It's spinning now as I type this! So happy as you know what a pain in the arse this disc was to find. May be a while.before it shows up again but I'll keep a look out for you. The analogue one is still popping up from time to time but it sells fairly quickly so you need to jump on it when it appears if possible.
Meant to watch only 5 mins of it but now I'm watching the whole thing haha! I'll put a review up later if anyone is interested.
Gutted about Lady Battle Cop as I love that film. I'll have to source another some day or just get the DVD.
Having received this disc from Japan today (complete with microscopic crack) I couldn't wait to try it out. Has the elusive search and the wait been worth it for this 1991 release of the 1983 disc of a 1982 concert? Read on to find out. Note I have covered the 1983 pressing in detail at the following link, so please do take a look there first to get up to speed if you wish to:
So here it is. The elusive Digital Audio edition (or Digtal according to the obi strip) of Masayoshi Takanaka's 1982 concert Guitar Fantasia and the first thing we're going to look at here is the back of the sleeve. There's some aesthetic changes here. The same concert stage photo has been used but instead of being at the top half of the sleeve it's now on the bottom. The drop shadow colours around the band portrait photos are gone and just simple borders around the photos (still the same colours). There's a spelling mistake too noting that 'songs' are now 'soongs'. The small print appears to be the same. With this release an obi strip is present which declares that the 1991 pressing is a 20th Anniversary celebration release of the original concert recording from 1982 (and released in 1983 on Laserdisc and VHS).
What about the disc? Well, this is a biggie. The original 1983 pressing I have is a 2 sided CAV disc. This 1991 release with the Digital Audio track is only a 1 side CLV release. Yet both discs run at 60 minutes? I'm not quite sure how that was acheived. Anyone know? Better compression algorithms perhaps? Well whatever it is, Side 2 on the 1991 disc is now blank.
Now for the big change. Originally the 1983 disc and it's subsequent pressings were analogue only. This 1991 edition now features a Digital Audio stereo track. But does it make a big difference to the original release? Honestly? I don't think so. I also think that the audio sounds a little more busy, like it's struggling for space, for width and power. Comparing it to the 1983 disc and I genuinely notice a difference. The 1983 disc sounded more open, with more range to the sound stage. It's not a night and day difference that will unite galaxies and change the human race forever, but it is there and it is noticeable in my opinion.
Picture quality is the big one for me, and I think it may be down to this single side business. To me and my very humble opinion, I think the 1991 disc is a lot softer than the 1983 original. Perhaps it's a mix of compressing it all to one side but also the age of the master source perhaps? 20 years is a long time. Looking at the original disc it doesn't come up as quite so faded or soft. Both discs do have a little noise to them but it's nothing too bad. In the picture department there really is a difference and the winner is the 1983 disc imho.
So which disc do you get? Well I suppose it comes down to getting whichever disc shows up first. You tend to need to be quick buying it once it appears as it tends to sell fairly rapidly from what I've seen. Failing that, if you want to hold out and pick the right disc, and if you are putting a bazooka to my face and forcing me to choose one, I would pick the 1983 disc unless you absolutely MUST have the Digital Audio track. As said, there isn't much in it between the two, but owning both discs and in other folks cases they will likely want to own just one release and taking in to account the expense of importing, I say go for the 1983 Kitty Video original disc. The picture is superior and the audio, while a close run thing, is the important factor here for a music disc purchase. Why have just 50% of something when you can have the whole shebang?
The 1991 disc isn't bad, though the whole 1 side thing troubles me deeply and I can't shake it. Just having seen both I can't really formulate a case for getting the 1991 disc. Maybe it will sound better on your setup, maybe it's just me and my hearing? I don't know, but I do know what I like and it's the 1983 Kitty Video disc. So if forced to choose if my life depends on it, I choose that one. In total honesty though, just get whatever shows up and be happy you snagged a copy. Crank up your sound system and enjoy it! :thumbup:
I didn't notice at first that it is a 4K scan and a 4K video. Surely this one will get the full fat, full beans, UHD treatment? Perhaps a little smattering of HDR too?
I hope there will be a 4K release. Fingers crossed.
Just finished watching the Disney 1970 blockbuster Dad Can I Borrow The Car?... and am blown away by it's wonderousness.
What happened to the mouse? A company that used to take risks, was a bit psychedelic, was creative, and fun. I remember a friend went to Disney World in Florida donkeys years ago (as all the rich kids at school did for their Summer holidays in the 1980's/early 1990's) and came back with an Epcot Centre VHS. That monorail looked like something that was built by craftsmen on Neptune. It was one of the best videos I'd ever seen in my life and it was about a fecking monorail! I wouldn't get to visit a Disney park in any form until 2012 when I went to Disney World Tokyo. :oops:
Anyway. IMHO Disney needs to stop with the 52,387 Star Wars films they seem intent on making as well as the armies of expensive lawyers they are building that would put a Warhammer 40,000 battle to shame, and start going back to stuff like Dad Can I Borrow The Car?... and the Herbie films. </rant>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsAv5akyi5A
EDIT: Actually I'll chuck in my Laserdisc of Mousercise to the mix too. More brilliance from the mouse house that they just don't do today.
EDIT 2: I think this was the VHS but I think it had a white part at the top and a yellow and red band across it? Perhaps around 1986/7? Anyway just look at that monorail! The only monorails I've seen that could rival it are in Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!
Quite sure these are not on iTunes (except for Stardust). Lucky for me I was on a Roulé wave before the robots epilogue'd and sent their prices skyrocket'ing.
Roulé-Scratché.jpg
Now.. only ROULE 301, 309 and the 2 TOGETHER to go.
But almost no Crydamoure to be found in Japan.
Julien
Very nice set of platters! I think I still have a couple of those laying around somewhere. I sold 99.9% of my vinyl decades ago when I stopped spinning. I definitely had Spinal Scratch, the two volumes of On Da Rocks. I also had Together, absolutely LOVED dropping that one. Great tune. I think even amoeba on Saturn owned a copy of Music Sounds Better... back in 96/97, Roule or the main commercial release.
Wish I'd kept them now. Though if we did that with everything we' have no room to live in!
It's not the end of the world. Great that it comes with the original box, mine was just the unit, the remote control and the power lead. Same with the VP50 Pro (that came with rack mounts too).
I don't think you'll see a leaps and bounds oh wow shazzam woahnelly difference in performance. Yet the subtleties are certainly there, especially with the comb filter the Edge has on board. I ran my CLD-D925 with both DVDO devices for a while and it was great, can't really fault it. The big night and day in Laserdiscs came recently for me when I imported a CLD-R7G.
Every time I spin a disc in the R7G and switch on the DEXT mode thing it makes me smile. I have it running over S Video up to the DVDO Edge. The combination of the two is superb. I didn't really believe the talk about it on the LDDB forums until I actually saw it for myself. Keep in mind though it also depends on how well mastered the disc you are playing is. Good audio, good picture and good kit and you'll wonder at certain times if you are watching something on par, or better than DVD (minus the horrid digital mosaicing).
Forget all of that for now else you'll end up down a rabbit hole. Enjoy watching your discs and enjoy your new DVDO Edge! :thumbup:
Out of every system I've had over the years, for me the PCE Duo R was the best. It was light years ahead of anything else out at the time. Even the original PCE was punching well above it's weight but was so very good.
Perhaps following that I'd go for the Sega Saturn. Blast Wind is one of my favourites. Such a shame it was originally called Inazuma Savior for it's release in game centres in Japan but it never made it.
The game had a couple of location tests and that was it. I was informed a couple of years ago from a dependable source that the head of TecnoSoft kept the original board until his death not so long back.
No idea if the board may ever get dumped now but we live in hope. Such a good game. Hyper Duel too. I had that on Saturn and PCB. Personally I preferred the Saturn version.
Neo Geo is pretty good though I'm not a fighting game fan. Baseball and football games and the rally titles were good though. Metal Slug series too of course, I had those on an MVS 1 Slot with unibios. Oh and the golf game with the guy that looks like Warren Cox from Brewsters Millions in it was great too!
Still, PCE for me by a country mile. Everything about it was brilliant. Not just the console but all the merch around it too. Winds of Thunder too, one of the greatest soundtracks to a game EVER. No contest.
Just a question that's circling my noggin' for a while and thought to ask. Is the site GDPR and PCI DSS compliant? I guess in terms of pseudonimisation and PII and all the rest of it I'm asking are database entries given the salt and pepper treatment and so on.
I imagine a SAR request would yield little given we all use usernames/pseudonyms and so on. But is financial and PII data looked after and how? Understood if the answer needs to be somewhat coy in terms of protecting the integrity of the site. I'm just curious more than anything. :thumbup:
I seriously thought you made that stuff up. Never in my life have I read a forum post with so many terms totally unknown to me. Reading it again...still looks like a gag, but there don’t seem to be any jokes.
Ah no, not my intention at all. My explanation of each acronym is a little brief, apologies I just knocked it up quick and dirty. Legitimate questions and no offence intended to anyone. :thumbup:
The good thing with the R7 is that it’s feature complete for LD - it has AC3 out, CLV picture memory, LD-G decoding, autoreverse and all that jazz so there’s no need, perceived or otherwise, to mess deeply with the player.
That is one hell of a lot cheese for you to get through, indigestion coming soon?!
If you get round to ABSOLUTION is it the 95 minute version or the 85 minute so-called directors cut included in the set?
Enjoy :thumbup: .
Have no fear, my stomach is made of cast iron! I will do a check on Absolution and let you know.
This is very much a no expense spared box set. As in, they spent nothing on it (apart from the lovely 3D diorama lid). The discs are all 'silvers'. No labels apart from the disc number and title on the inner rings on each side. Discs come in black paper sleeves too. The silver discs themselves are thinner than the waferiest (sic?) ham.
You get the most basic of menus. Select a film. Select chapters for each. That's it. No audio selections, commentaries etc. Mill Creek literally hoovered up a bunch of titles, ran them through a DVD authoring process designed in Microsoft Paint, churned out the discs in spindle packs of 50 discs and called it a day.
But this isn't the point of such a box set. You already know going in that this is how things will be. For less than 50 lids, and amazingly with zero heartbreak tax coming from the USA, I just got 200 (TWO. HUNDRED) awesome films of varying quality. From absolute crap to mediocre sub par crap. And that's exactly what I wanted and got. :thumbup:
From some of the reports I've read, there is a couple of nuggets of gold to be uncovered here in that a couple of discs do get original AR presentations and some nice soundtrack options. Most of it is just mass-duplicated garbage you find for 99c in the bins on petrol station forecourts along with reconditioned CD's by Sinnita, The Best of Pan Pipes, Boy George and Percy Faith. On a side note I think it was Percy Faith who wrote Theme From A Summer Place, one of the best songs ever written, so I'd actually buy it if I see it next time in the local ESSO station.
A few of the films on this list I've already seen on Blu Ray. Death Row Gameshow, for example. That's an excellent film, I watched it in February last year . Thought I'd seen The Disappearance Of Flight 212, but I haven't. Got it confused with a similar film starring Farrah Fawcett but now the name deserts me, if anyone can help jog my memory? Don't Look In The Basement! is another mega film.
Death Machines is in there too, that got a Blu Ray release on Vinegar Syndrome recently. I was watching some old Super 8mm footage of New York in the 1970's last night and saw Death Machines listed on one of the cinema marquees on 42nd Street. The tourist's footage was from the Summer of 1976 so the film would have literally been brand new then and just released! If you haven't seen Death Machines, just watch the trailer. James Cameron? Who?! Hell, just skip the trailer and go directly to 1m28s in to it. :thumbup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx3ayoLzkiw
There's a few here I am excited to see. Hustler Squad is on that list. It's a pretty obscure action film from the Phillipines, also known as The Dirty Half Dozen. Also you get Shadow Ninja, aka Killer Wears White. I watched a bit of it last night, terrible quality. One of those 4:3 transfers with the AR all messed up and from a 67th generation VHS transfer. It has an appalling dub as well, however I read somewhere that this version may be the very rare uncut edition (still need to authenticate it). There's copies out there on home made discs from a private collector but it has burned in Dutch subtitles (on the actual film negatives I think).
TNT Jackson is definitely on my list, I almost watched it last night. Saving it for another day along with Ninja Death I, II and III! You also get an absolute mountain of stuff from the legend Fred Williamson. Some superb and rather rare martial arts films as well. Wild Women of Wongo is on the list too, another one I heard things about and am curious to see. There's so much to see here and regardless of the dubious quality, there just isn't any other outlet other than perhaps private collectors film reels and boutique media companies that you can get this stuff. Nobody seems to care any more, it's all Marvel and DC and 257,000 Star Wars films and all the rest of it. It's boring. The real fun is digging through piles of absolute junk and stumbling upon a real gem. That's why I love this stuff. :thumbup:
EDIT 2: Forgot to mention, yer man that stars in Killer Wears White (aka Shadow Ninja) is the student Bruce Lee says "Kick Me" to in Enter The Dragon. Of course, Enter The Dragon was released in 1973 and Killer Wears White would not come along until 1980 so it's very early in Wei Tung's (credited as Steve Tung Wei in Shadow Ninja) career. Also, he was in Chinese Hercules starring Bolo Yeung which was also released in 1973! :thumbup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roY9SaqM0mo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u08kyhjTcCI
Note the quality of Killer Wears White in this video is about 8000 times better than the version on the DVD I have in this set.
EDIT: Yes it was Percy Faith who wrote Theme From A Summer Place. Absolutely whopper music. :clap:
Just watched the film tonight courtesy of Jeff. He's done well with audio, a nice DD+ track that sounds really good especially towards the end. Good job young Jeffrey.
What a crap film though. It's so far up it's own arse trying to be clever it ends up embarrassing itself. The main bad guy is about as threatening as Pope Gregory the 9th.
It all felt really dated too, and this is year 2000 effects we're talking here. Everything had a TiVo and Apple Pippin interface style to it. Also what's with the mid-90's 'tude style of acting for the main gang chasing Arnie? At times I felt like I was watching Double Dragon.
It's just not quality Arnold fodder at all for my liking. Glad i didn't buy the Blu. More fool the folks dropping $2500 on the LD of it too.
Agree with you takeshi666, I quite enjoyed Eraser. I would mark it down as the beginning of the end of peak Arnster. It's not a classic, but it's got enough quality Arnoldness to it to satisfy the fans. True Lies is perhaps 'true' peak Arnold?
Glad you got sorted out for the most part. So long as it all works and you are happy out then that's the main thing. :thumbup:
I would imagine that the HDFury Integral 2 would have sorted the issue out, but it's quite an outlay. I loved the Vertex 2, it was ridiculously powerful. Problem with the HDMI port failing so quickly made me question what the story is with quality control and components used. Savage piece of kit but again it's quite the outlay.
You've inadvertently reminded me I do need an HDMI Doctor 4K for something else though so thanks for that! :lol:
It's a mixed bag to be honest. It's basically 200 films hoovered up by Mill Creek and dumped on to the cheapest discs they could find as quickly and as cheaply as possible. I'd say quality control doesn't even appear in their company polices, standards or procedures. Buy IP in bulk and toss it out as cheaply as possible.
Again though it's not really the point when it comes to a set like this. Nobody else is going to do it in such vast quantities. More power to Mill Creek for keeping obscure work in print I say. Plus, some stuff is out there on the boutiques, so it's a nice little try before you buy step. You support Mill Creek putting out more box sets, more stuff gets kept in print. You upgrade to Blu or 4K and support the boutiques. It's a great value set I think.
Never took to Larry Sanders, but I'll maybe try it again some day. Similar to Seinfeld, I never bothered with it first time round. Somehow fell in to watching it about 10 years ago or so and ended up watching all 9 seasons of it. Love it now. Maybe Larry will get the same love some day?
Thanks list
