overdrive wrote: Sat Nov 02, 2019 12:22 pm
To make a serious debate, we must first analyze the situation. Toei Animation, as creator of audiovisual material, and Selecta Vision, as distributor, are companies. If it is obvious, but any person or entity that has created a company needs to obtain benefits, it is another obvious.
After these obvious, doing a reshooting with the subsequent remastering work is really expensive for Toei to seize all its capital to edit a material that was not intended for high definition use.
Now, my thought or illusion is to think that Toei works on the real mastering in HD of the material, but in the background. This would entail an extra cost to their annual budgets and financing ... the way to support those expenses could be to sell material with low production costs and a high sales and acceptance rate. In this way, they could bear the expense and gradually do a high resolution digital conversion. Surely I am naive, but I would like to think that Toei knows that this franchise is and will be profitable, therefore, I do not think that this possibility has not been thought about, and it is not necessary to be a Nobel Prize to value this economic formula to pay for it.
Although it is possible that Toei is not really a company involved with its product and is only interested in selling what it sells. Who knows?
Ok, if I read that right (corrected the "he" after Toei in that second paragraph to "its" since Toei's not a person, btw), you're assuming Toei's using the Nintendo method of creating or releasing new things that make a lot of money to fund other projects like a remastering of Dragon Ball. That's not likely. For one, Toei is a company that wants to make as much money possible for very little work. They're also a company stuck in the past that continually makes stupid mistakes.
1. To bring up a shortlist of stupid decisions that I know of, they didn't keep the original film masters for the Sailor Moon TV show (which is why every remaster outside of the Italian DVDs is really bad or just not that great).
2. They gave One Piece to 4Kids rather than a company that would actually respect the product simply because they wanted to force its international popularity to replicate its sales in Japan rather than let it happen naturally with letting the audience find IT rather than the other way around & have a new Dragon Ball Z on their hands & 4Kids could get the series on American TV stations plus they had previous success with Pokemon & Yugioh, even though they didn't actually WANT One Piece, but got it anyways in a bundle with 2 other shows they ACTUALLY wanted to license & forced them to dub it with a VERY cynical & aggressively half-assed dub that failed big time. A decision that sunk any chance of One Piece had at the time to become popular in the US & is only finding success in the last several years now that FUNimation have been treating it as it should've been from the start & caused the downward spiral that drove 4Kids to bankruptcy (along with other stupid business decisions that I won't talk about right now).
3. They let FUNimation produce TERRIBLE releases of DBZ called the Orange Bricks that cropped the series into fake 16:9 widescreen rather than keep it in the original intended 4:3 that cut off important bits of the images, applied HEAVY DVNR that deleted lines of animation thinking they were damage to the film in an attempt to also remove the grain because old things shot on film shouldn't have ANY grain for some reason, oversaturated & overly bright colors that make your eyes hurt, & other bad things. They've allowed FUNi to do these things 3 times, only the most recent release doesn't have the cropping! Which
obviously makes up for the sins of the past!
Sigh.
4. They rushed Super into production only 4 weeks before it was supposed to air, largely using rookies in the animation industry to put it together rather than the standard 6 weeks, which then fell apart on them 5 weeks in, which damaged the reputation of the series before it could really get off the ground. They also have NO want to actually make the series, as a whole, good & internally-consistent with either itself or the previous shows or the 2 movies Toriyama wrote himself, or the characters (mainly Goku) would be less flanderized & more like how he is when Toriyama actually writes them for the ones that are, the episodes would be better planned out (the Future Trunks Arc, while a fine idea on paper, botched a lot of its ideas in its execution & felt like the writers had NO idea where the arc was gonna go, plus was filled with a LOT of overly-hyped moments that didn't live up to said hype & had terrible pacing). Plus, Future Trunks had blue hair, which is a discontinuity because he had purple hair originally & his younger alternate timeline self still does, but he's supposed to have the same hair color as Bulma, who has blue hair in every anime adaptation but Path to Power, so they just recolored his hair, continuity & logic be damned. No, I'm not letting that one go.
5. Then there's the Crunchyroll &, now, the official FUNi subs of the newer movies, which are done by 2 different teams of people. But Toei, for some reason, is enforcing a policy that the terminology of the Japanese version be altered to be consistent with the English dubs rather than the previous subs because they think dub-only fans will be too stupid & pig-headed to be able to adapt to different names for characters & attacks for a dub they know were changed in the DBZ dub. This not only includes alternate names (King Kai rather than Kaio-sama), but also spellings (Frieza rather than Freeza). This makes NO sense whatsoever. You might as well have FUNi include an alternate subtitle track that's for the dub script like Disney did for the Studio Ghibli movies when they had the licenses to them.
If Toei really cared about delivering a great product rather than simply making money, they wouldn't do these things. Yeah, they're a company that makes money, but there's a happy medium companies like them NEED to find or else they're not a company worth supporting. A remaster of the shows CAN be done & done well, as FUNi have shown us with the Level sets & if Toei budgeted & scheduled each arc well, they COULD have it done in a few years for a reasonable price overall, but they're not even trying to do it, nor do I think they will in the near future. They've shown no inclination to want to start. They did a remaster of the movies, which brings me to...
6. When they remastered the 4 DB & first 13 Z movies, they introduced censorship into some of them to have some of the characters not flip the bird...even though they're home media releases of old films that people already know have scenes like that. Even more unnecessarily confusingly, they have uncensored versions of these movies that stream on Netflix & Amazon Japan. Why? I have NO idea. It makes no sense. Did they do it for money? Did they do it to appear more PC? Was it because of new regulations in Japan? I don't know. I don't know.
I forgot about that one, but it's another problem Toei has that I find utterly baffling & stupid. So, I don't expect much from them nowadays.
