Yeah. Pokemon. I suppose I’m wasting my time and breath, but hey, it is a preservation of an original version of a movie!
Some time ago, well, a little over a year ago, I was given a copy of an HK that preserved the rare Japanese theatrical version of this movie. Obviously HKs aren’t the best of quality so I did the best I could to clean it up, the result was a 640x360, 700 MB AVI with a slightly shoddy audio track and a sharp and bright but rather grainy video track.
A little history on the movie might make it a little clear as to why.
For the US release, a lot of scenes were reanimated with CG at the request of the American producers. At this time there was no release to DVD in Japan yet. When the Japanese DVD was released, it was essentially the American edition, with the Japanese title card - and an additional 10 minutes of footage added to the beginning. The English dub was included on the DVD. (It is, btw, uncut. The only differences from the R2 to the R1 are the title card, credits and the aspect ratio; the R1 is pan-and-scan. The subtitle of the movie, “Mewtwo Strikes Back”, is the same in both versions, and is said to be a nod to “The Empire Strikes Back” - the Japanese titles match too - Mewtwo no gyakushuu, Teikoku no gyakushuu.)
Essentially we have somewhat of a Lucasized anime movie.
I decided to take what I had and combine my sources, so atm, I have a dual-audio OGM, with the Japanese and English 2.0 mixes. I can probably pull up some good comparison shots if anyone’s interested.
By the way…the theatrical short that preceded this movie was mostly unaltered…so less of a need there. A couple signs (one in Japanese) were painted-over, the title card and credits redrawn, no real biggie.
I might torrent this sometime with the improved audio and English - might wait until I’ve finished work on subtitling it, been doing that too.
I figured at least this one would be viable.
I decided to make changes to my RIC recreation project in order to make it more viable: it’s now pan and scan and contains some TV footage. The pan-scan was to integrate the TV footage better. Actually it’s a center-crop (720x480 -> 396x352 -> 720x480).
Current progress (8 chapters or about 1/3 of what disc 1 of the RIC DVD contained) - 18 minutes - covers to the prison scene (“Slasher Fogelstein’s a bedwetter”), which I took from the Donner cut. This is extremely straightforward and I should be able to pull it off without difficulty.