Ultraman addendum

Hmm... the DVD is a lot less shiny a few days later, if you know what I mean.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it in the sense that it's good cheesy fun so far. I have no complaints to the Ultraman Tiga show itself. Although, to be honest, I don't have much of a sense of nostalgia so much as a strong curiosity. Unlike many Asian kids, I did not grow up on Ultraman - it was, like ranger Sentai and Kamen Rider, a mysterious foreign idea to me that I encountered only in Chinatown toy-shops, etc.

In fact, my first real experience was with the recent big-budget remake and the "Ultraman Nexus" series (which is was geared more towards older audiences than the kids). I'm told Tiga was the first of the "new" Ultraman series yet pays homage to the old; I figure it must be a good "bridging" version for me to watch.


But what's making this DVD slightly painful is realizing what a lazy approach Funimation has taken to putting the package together. After a few hours with this disc, I'm starting to see the shortcomings of the product. First there's the no-so-great image quality I mentioned 2 nights ago. Secondly, I've discovered at least at least a couple of glitches. One kind is where the subtitles seem to get jumbled a bit (a line repeated, text misspelled). The other kind is bad quality-control - I've noticed a couple of places where the picture "skips" (as in digital encoding errors; blink and you'll miss it - I had to rewatch to make sure it wasn't my imagination). But the most ridiculous mistake...

[insert drumroll]

In the extras section is a "monster gallery" - a series of slides like a photo album, some with links to video clips of fight-scenes. You navigate with your DVD remote "skipping" back and forth. But when you get to the last slide, the cursor mysteriously DISAPPEARS! And since all the other controls are "locked" you can't hit your menu button to "escape" out of the still image on the screen. The only way to get out? You must "reboot" your DVD by ejecting the disc and loading it back in. In all my time I've never seen a DVD as badly authorized as this one. It's quite the DVD equivalent of that Ghost in the Shell CD I have...

Which is unfortunate because you pay a premium for obscure discs like this . You don't find these in big-box stores like Futureshop or whatever.

As a side note (speaking of mainstream) I noticed there's an awful lot of American-version Tiga material on the disc. It's the uncut Japanese-language-only version yet the DVD menu and transitions feature music and footage from the English version that aired on FOX a few years back. Weird. One wonders who exactly Funimation was marketing this collection to.