Dances with Wolves [PILH-7001]
I own this box set since 2010 but I've only decided to watch it now... in 2013.
I've already "tested it" before, but as it's the uncut version of the film, you need to find 4 hours of free time in order to fully watch it.
But before you start watching it, you have to open the box set. And I must say, that's one hell of a packaging that Pioneer Japan made for us here.
You could think that a 236 min movie would fit on 4 CLV sides... but no, they had to put it on 5 sides.
You can find that also on the standard NTSC release ID3425OR. 5 must be a better number as 4.
Anyway, 3 Hi-Vision discs in the same box set, made this the biggest Hi-Vision box set ever. And if you want to keep your copy in a collectible condition,
you have to be extremly careful everytime you unpack it... and most of all, everytime you repack it in that darn fragile plastic sleeve with the precious
sticker obi (great idea, I tell you.)
The box set, when packed
The same thing unpacked. List of contents:
- Plastic sleeve
- Digipak cardboard cover (?)
- Digipak 1, holding 2 discs
- Digipak 2, holding 1 disc
Digipak 1, with protective cloth
Digipak 2, with a word about the movie in the inner sleeve,
a nice color insert, some instruction about removing discs from digipak and another protective cloth
Disc 1, side 1... here we go.
So, a little complicated, if you just wanted to watch the movie, but it's truly a beautiful item, each digipak having it's own glossy artwork, front and back.
You can see this edition was made with a lot a care (or love?) and almost 20 years later, you can still feel it.
Setup
In order to be able to view this discs, you need a few expensive items:
- A Muse LD Player (Pioneer HLD-X9)
- A Muse Decoder (JVC HV-MD2)
- An Audio Decoder (Pioneer SP-D07). Optional but helpful to get something good out of A-Mode encoded discs.
And, some company...
Video
This is a picture of my TV screen. As with almost every Hi-Vision LD, the titles, opening & closing credits are clean and sharp.
I've take photos during the first 2 hours of the movie.
I've tried to take some close-up photos with my camera zoom to show how good the picture is.
It looks better on my TV screen as on theses photos, but I hope it gives you an idea of the quality.
Some snapshots of the first hour (side 1) of the movie. Mostly daylight and quiet landscape views, perfect for Muse.
Some snapshots of the second hour (side 2) of the movie. In daylight...
...but also in the night, and surprisingly, the image quality stays almost as good as in daylight.
I've tried to show it on the 2 pictures below, but I'm not sure it's really noticable.
Then again, daylight, with a very good and steady Muse picture quality
Audio
This disc has no EFM Tracks. So the sound is only present in the Muse channel and has to be decode through the Muse decoder.
No sound will be heard through the RCA L/R Output of the player.
Sadly, no A-Mode (3.1) here, only the simple Muse B-Mode (2.0).
Although it suits the movie real good and does a good job, I find nothing special to say about it.
Overall
A beautiful and very unique Hi-Vision set and a clear Muse HD picture with very few compression artefacts.
A must have if you like this movie and own a Muse LD player.
One thing important though, with no CC, no LD-G, just japanese subtitles, it's not possible to get the meaning of the scenes where only native language is spoken.
Unless you can read japanese (I can't) or understand native language (I can't).
So if you're like me, you'll need to have the standard NTSC release ID3425OR in your collection also.
Takou.
and Dances had a cool Dolby SR film mix with even the softest non action moments it was driven with wonderful John Barry score. 
, and we got stuck with bluray 
, we could still have LDs today