Caulifor wrote: Mon Dec 04, 2023 7:46 pm
Pretty sure it's already been more than a year. Volume 1 was released in November 2022 if I'm not mistaken. That's why I was wondering if things had gone wrong. I expected at least an announcement by now, not complete radio silence. But then again, I don't know the company so if people are saying they're usually slow, then I guess there's not much to worry about.
To quote what I literally just typed up a bit ago...
Scsigs wrote: Mon Dec 04, 2023 7:32 pm
Here's the thing. We have no confirmation of anything being cancelled. On top of that, remastering like this takes a bit. The best US releases to compare these to are the Discotek Blu-Rays of Digimon Adventure 01 (both dubbed & subbed). The people at Discotek used similar AI upscaling for both the US & Japanese masters to upscale everything to 1080p HD because the show was animated digitally, so no film masters exist. Currently, Discotek is working on Adventure 02, where they're upscaling the Japanese masters & recutting the episodes to match the English dub audio because the US masters are unfortunately too degraded for them to upscale with the AI software. On top of licensing not only 02, they've also the first 3 Adventure films (also producing new English dubs for them with as many of the original VAs as possible) & Digimon: The Movie. Adventure 01's releases came out on December 27, 2022 & July 25, 2023 for the English & JP dubs respectively. They've announce 02 & the movies. They have yet to put out a release date. It's now assumed 2024 at the earliest, I believe.
Digimon Adventure 01 had 54 episodes & they worked with 2 different masters for both cuts. 02 has 50. AB Groupe has to work with, in total, 153 episodes of original Dragon Ball. They put out the first 68 episodes, now they have 85 left to go. Properly upscaling something on top of the color correction of the footage so it matches the intended color pallets the animators used takes a lot of time. There's a reason Toei didn't do this themselves. On top of the money needed to pay the people to do the labor of scanning & cleaning up their film masters of 153 episodes of an anime from the 80s, the time needed to properly color correct everything would take a while because of how badly the colors warped over time. There's a reason why they let FUNi & AB handle these things for them. They don't want to bother outside of the movies & TV specials. Honestly, I'm fine with it as long as it's done correctly because. I also don't trust Toei not to fuck something up somewhere considering the movie remasters on the discs.
There's also absolutely no reason to believe Toei didn't approve them using the broadcast audio for the JP dub. Why wouldn't AB have gotten permission for it? Toei needs to approve certain things in regards to how their product is presented. It's stupid to worry without any reasons to.
To also add on to this, weren't they a bit rushed with the first release? Wasn't it stated somewhere that they literally had to make the decision between just putting the DBox masters just on BR & doing an actual remaster of the footage with the AI upscaling pretty quickly? And then they were a bit rushed to get it out? If after that they had to take some more time to do the rest, I wouldn't be surprised. On top of that, if the second set was cancelled or Toei got pissed at them using the broadcast audio, wouldn't the first either be recalled so they could replace it with the shitty muffled audio, or just outright discontinued? That would seem to be the logical progression of that to me.
Like, let's be completely real here, guys. Why would Toei give a single solitary shit that AB Groupe or any other company that licensed the older Dragon Ball shows use the broadcast audio for their home releases? With how Toei's allowed FUNimation time & time again to absolutely
destroy the visuals of Z with their shit remasters, I don't think they care much at all as long as they make money, otherwise
they'd do the remastering work themselves or pay another company to do it for them in Japan. And,
why is anyone assuming without confirmation 1 way or another that the hold-up is Toei being mad over the broadcast audio? Because Toei didn't want it? That's Toei not giving a shit to get the audio files because Toei is fucking dumb when it comes to the preservation of their older media. They are the Japanese equivalent to the BBC back in the 70s when they junked a bunch of their older shows. The difference, though, is that the BBC is actively trying to hunt down copies of episodes of said shows if they still exist & they gladly accepted the audio recordings fans made back in the 60s & clips. Toei actively doesn't give a fuck to have the highest quality audio. There has been nothing said about other companies using it. Someone's gonna probably also bring up that FUNi didn't use it for the 30th anniversary remaster set of Z even though Chris Sabat has it. Well, the people at FUNimation also actively ignored fan criticisms & tried to gaslight people into thinking their shitty remasters are actually good with their blogpost for that shit. If the visual fidelity doesn't mean a damn to them, why would the audio fidelity? FUNi only gave a damn when 1. they don't have to put in a lot of work &/or 2. they could make a lot of money. They didn't see the use in making a good remaster for that product, so of course they wouldn't use the highest quality audio they could.
Honestly, guys, use your heads here. You cannot apply normal logic to Toei. They're illogical business people who do not care unless money's involved.
