by Benjamin Haines » Fri Oct 13, 2006 12:03 am
Wow! This is fantastic news! I've been hoping for R1 releases of both of these films for so long, and now it's finally happening! Leave it to Media Blasters.
Regarding Frankenstein vs. Baragon, I definitely hope MB include the UPA English dub for this release, both to be able to hear Nick Adams' actual spoken dialogue and for collector's value. I know the US version has scenes not shown in the Japanese version, so if MB can obtain a widescreen print of this version and include it, that would be great. If that's not possible, then I hope they just do what they did for most of their other Showa Toho toku DVDs and import the special features straight from Toho's R2, to include those deleted scenes (even if they are cropped, it's better than nothing). It'd also be great if MB included the alternate ending, and even greater if they gave the main feature on the disc the option of being watched with either ending, just like Toho's release. The other special features from the Toho R2 would be awesome to have too (the separate trailers, the photo gallery, and hell, even the cast profiles), so I hope MB doesn't decide to skip on them like they inexplicably did for the massive image gallery on the Space Amoeba R2.
As for Latitude Zero, I hope MB just does a 100% copy/paste from Toho's R2 of the collector's box. It's probably too pie-in-the-sky to hope that MB might actually recreate the 3-disc box set in R1 form, but it would be perfectly feasible for them to release the Japanese and English versions together. It could just be 2 discs in one amaray case, just like MB did for their Versus DVD. If they do decide to make the bizarre move of just releasing one version, hopefully it will be the unedited(?), undubbed English version. But if they only release the edited, Japanese-dubbed version, then I'll just buy Toho's 3-disc collector's box.
But I have faith in Media Blasters. They've put out some positively great releases of classic Toho SFX titles in the past, and I don't doubt that these two will be any exception.
