This is about this version :
BEAL-367
the movie is in widescreen. This is a real widescreen. It was made to be seen in widescreen.
Then, as usual for widescreen movies, it is in letterbox on LD.
Then you have yo zoom in if you have a widescreen TV. Like this, all the image is matching your TV.
In the zoom process, you loose definition.
And BEAL-367 is a more worst case, as the movie is even not matching the letterbox size.
Then you have to zoom twice to get match your widescreen TV.

I think you are describing a "window box" version of this film from what I recall in my days selling import LD's (black bars all around). Not sure why they did this sometimes as it wastes even more resolution. I owned a Japanese edition of Mary Poppins that was done this way and I ended up selling it for a domestic release that had AC3 encoding and a better transfer.

Anyway, in general we don't have much of a choice but to "zoom in" on all widescreen LD's since there were no mainstream anamorphic releases to take advantage of. Thus, I'll still take that instead of a P&S release any day.

Ah thanks now I get it; window-boxed. Like they were trying extra hard to make it look bad!

Just viewed my copy of Honneamise for the first time in a long time today. The opening sequences and music still give me chills just like when I first saw it at my anime club in the mid '90s..great stuff.

Well done analogue audio and a nice full colour insert.

Widescreen letterboxed. Looks fantastic unmolested on my Sony KVHR-36 16:9 CRT display.

I don't feel the need to have the image fill my screen completely. Letterboxed is ideal to me, I just use my DVDO's underscan to make sure I'm not missing any picture Also important to make sure that the image isn't stretched in any way of course.

There's no need for a Laserdisc "Classic", we already have the DVD. Onto being serious, I don't think there is any chance for this resurrection to happen and why would it?

This is not likely, but with the work on Domesday and ld-decode, I can see players becoming modernized. There was a comment about possibly even using a DVD laser in the recent interview (posted here: Interview with creators of the Domesday Duplicator Project). Even if that doesn't work out, I can see tapping the RF signal like the Domesday Duplicator does and then processing the signal with ld-decode inside the player, completely skipping the old circuitry.

I think the issue more and more in the future is still going to be mostly the mechanical side of things.

I also have that early “No Trimming” version of the Memorial Sound box. It is till this day the only disc I’ve ever seen like it. My theories at the time were:

1:) it was done to compensate for overscan, which was a much worse problem at the beginning of the 90s than it was by the end.

or

2:) it was done because it fit the Wide tubes of the day better. I’ve never used a Wide TV that old before but perhaps they didn’t Zoom as well as later ones did?

Both of these theories suck.

I think I have an issue of Animage where they talk about this release. I don’t read Japanese well enough to find an explaination for the weird overlay matted transfer but if I find it I’ll post it here for some help. It really is hard to guess what the heck they were thinking.

And yeah, forper’s version is the “worst” but if you’re a fan of this movie you’ll want all of them because they are ALL extremely good. The “best” one is the CAV AC-3 which is basically the Memorial Sound thing done properly. A normal letterbox. IIRC the one forper has is the only version that actually uses Bandai’s tacked on name The Wings of Honneamise rather than 王立宇宙軍/Royal Space Force, I think that’s true anyway. Anyway, it’s the only one I don’t have and that’s my justification for eventually buying when I finally do.

The real “worst” one is probably also the rarest, the US one.

If you post the article (scan) of Animage, I can translate you what they say.

Ok. I’ll do that if I can find it.

There is also some technical stuff somewhere on the jacket. Basically it seemed to just be describing the advantages of letterboxing rather than matting it all the way around but like I said I can’t read it very well.

do you mean on the obi ?
Nothing interesting on Obi, just :

obi front :
"A high fidelity lesadisc for the fan only"
"Royal space force, oneamise no tsubasa Memorial Box"
"Couleur, 201min, letter box version without cut (like pan/scan) Dolby surround stereo"
"5 faces in CAV / 1 face in CLV / 3 discs / BEAL-367"
"Won a prices in 1987..."
obi back :
"Version New Mother (?) (no cut (pan/scan), dolby surround stereo)
"New illustration for the jacket, and arts..."
"Pilot film 4min"
"1 min cut during the release of the movie, adding here"
"Original soundtrack, with exculsive illustrations"
"24 pages book with explanations and illustrations"
"3 disks (CAV 5 faces, CLV 3 faces)

Nothing about this strange format...

Well I finally found it, in a 1990 issue of Animage there is an article about BEAL-367 and this is part of it:

great, then here is the explanation :
"As they really wanted to show 100% of the original animation, they choose this size (adding 5% of black borders). Some TVs cut a little bit of the image left and right, then even in letterbox size, some people will loose this part of image.
They wanted that all people and all type of TV get 100% of the the screen. They knew that there will be a loss in term of resolution, but they prefered we get the original size."
Too bad for us^^ ! (because now, no one has this sort of problem with digital screens...)

Windoboxing.
I remember reading that they wanted to start re-releasing all the older 1.33 RKO films windoboxed.
At the time I thought it was really stupid and didn't think of re-buying any discs.
Some of the Looney Tunes box sets had the beginning titles like this but the rest of the cartoon was not, can't figure out why they did that for part of the cartoon??

Yeah, I guess my overscan theory was correct. With it windowboxed like that you’ll see the whole image, even on a 1989 Emerson.

I'm not sure if we're thinking of the same thing but I was going to start a topic about that. They did it for TV originally, I think, with many them being what looks like blue screen color. I've never looked into it closely but I think my most recent theory was that it was for the wide ones and they basically scaled it down evenly for the credits and then P&S the rest of the thing. It can be very hard to determine if a Loony Toon is matted incorrectly, even WB themselves screw it up one in a while, but my guess is that the title cards were too obviously wide to crop so they only scaled down that. This would be like how they used to compress the opening and endings in movies on TV, essentially creating Squeeze versions of the credits but P&Sing the rest.

As for why they did it that way...my guess is that they had the video guys handle it and not the projectionist side of things and so they had typical 80s video stuff to deal with. Like if your local Christian TV station had to telecine something. If their task was to make the credits readable then its possible they also went all no trimming on the credits because generic American TVs probably had even more overscan than Japanese otaku TVs. I'm %99 sure all these blue border credit Loony Toons were from the Turner era when he ran them every day nation wide in the 80s and had a bunch of new transfers done so it may have been TBS gear that generated the blue.

Yes, I think its the same thing.
On the Looney Tunes it was the box sets that had it most.
They were also different colors I thought?, blue or even red if I remember correctly.

I sort of remember seeing it on some films from TMC about 10 years ago, but those would have been black only.

But yes if you start the topic then I'll try to post pics as I have about 70% of my setup connected and need to run the TV cables and cables for the 2nd LD player.
Its only been a year but I think our living room will be setup soon

Yeah, I think there are several colors, probably the CGA pallet.