Help: looking for... 'My Neighbor Totoro' - Laserdisk

Is there anyone who has the laserdisk of the Fox English dub for this movie? The R1 DVD is in mono and I would like to know if the laserdisk is in stereo. If so, I would love to get my hands on the PCM track for my personal restoration project.

I swear I remember reading somewhere that the Streamline dub wasn't done in stereo. Can anyone else confirm?

Oh man I hope that isn't true otherwise I would have to rely on a complex lossy process of stripping and mix both the Fox and Disney dubs :c 

I would be interested in tracking this DVD down to determine the audio quality for the streamline dub, if I can't find the PCM laserdisk track.

It was most likely done in mono. The music and effects track Streamline received was in poor shape to begin with and the voices would be married to it. There would be no way to improve on it, unfortunately.

I figured. Thanks for the information.

http://www.dvdcompare.net/comparisons/film.php?fid=8918

Comparing the Fox R1 and the Buena Vista R2 with this site, the latter is said to have a stereo track for the Troma dub. Since Streamline did all their dubbings in mono due to poor M&E materials, I don't know how accurate the specs are for the JP R2. The poster could've confused "Stereo" with "Dual Mono", or mixed it up with the 2003 Disney dubbing (as that was 2.0 stereo in all the recent DVD releases). 

Does anyone have that disc to check if the Troma/Streamline dubbing is indeed stereo? If its the case, than it may be an upmix from mono, or Disney could've grafted the dialogue portions from the Streamline dub onto a stereo M&E track (Unlike Toei, I'm sure Studio Ghilbi keeps all their M+E tracks in good shape, as the 2003 dubbing used it unless they changed the songs and effects). 

(to elaborate on the term "M&E", it means "Music and Effects")

Sorry for the double post, but I'm certain that the Fox Video Laserdisc was also mono (abit uncompressed), since they got their source from Troma. This source was directly ported over to the Fox DVD, with lossy compression.

That is very interesting. Now I'm more curious to hear that R2 DVD. I would also greatly appreciate it if someone could confirm if the track is in stereo.

I have the Region 2 Japan DVD and can confirm that the English track is in dual-mono.

Here are the audio specs from the back of the case (translated from Japanese):

1: Japanese (2.0ch stereo)

2: English (2.0ch monaural)

From having watched the English track, I could tell it had not been remixed. The music has the same muffled distortion as on the R1 Fox DVD.

Figured it was dual mono as opposed to stereo, since the source for that was pretty poor to begin with (and Disney/Ghilbi wouldn't have dumped money in fixing the old Eng dub when they had the new one out).

Interesting someone wanted this at all. I do have the LD myself, and can vouch that it is mono anyway (I suppose it’s merely the optical soundtrack. I suppose the lack of a Dolby Stereo logo during the end credits should’ve been more than an indication that a stereo track wasn’t produced (since this was originally made to run on an airline that probably didn’t need to have a stereo soundtrack at all).

Even the film poster doesn’t promise that either!
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-F4tB_JKNnT4/VNrjZ5pLuSI/AAAAAAAAJVc/T1Kqvl6B5Cs/s1600/totoro%2Bposter%2Bus.jpg

I just fished this out from a DVD, but I recorded a short clip from my LD anyway for anyone to check out.
http://www.mediafire.com/watch/ub4wpaytdusa28e/_VCR_20100108_221948.avi

nightstalkerpoet said:

Grabbing the preview right now. Would LOVE a high quality audio capture. Even if you just got me the raw wav files I could put it together.

Hi, did you happen to get all the pieces and put this together? If so, I would love to talk to you about getting a copy.