The 1985 OVA Greed was always an odd duck, an amalgam of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with hard sci-fi. I was rather negative about it in my blog post about Orphan's first release, but it's grown on me (a bit) with time. It's not the best OVA I've ever watched, but it's not Twinkle Nora Rock Me! either. It's competent, if not exactly coherent.
This second release of Greed stems from problems with the first: it was encoded from a damaged laserdisc, and part of the ending was cut off. The source for this new release is also damaged, with serious bit rot, but that mostly affects the audio track. The release is complete.
Greed tells the story of Lid Kyle, a young man living in a dank jungle forest inhabited by ferocious monsters. His dying father tells him to undertake a journey north in order to fix the "distortion" that has twisted reality. Lid leaves the jungle and immediately encounters a desert area. There he meets a young woman, Kii Mi, and her small sentient pets, known as Weakies. They're attacked by mechanical monsters and saved by a large man called Baguda, who can transform, briefly, into a dragon. After fighting off giants, they enter a land of mushrooms and light gravity, where they encounter a mute warrior named Rongun. They journey through the land of the Innocents, fairy-like creatures, and end up in a kingdom dominated by machines that have gone mad. Its ruler, Mimau, completes their company. Together, they go to confront the ultimate evil in the universe, the reality-twisting demon Vailly.
Greed is episodic and at times incoherent - the translation checker, a Japanese native, said that some of the lines made no sense in Japanese - but the individual sections are interesting and at times original. The ending made no sense to me when I was first editing the show, but I see how it might work now. (Of course, I could be wrong.) And the voice cast is very good.
[Spoiler alert!] So what actually happens? Lid and his comrades discover that their world is a dome Vailly made from the greed and selfish desires of people in the universe. Individually, Lid's band can't defeat Vailly, so they combine their powers to form a super-creature. The creature does indeed defeat Vailly, but the dome doesn't disappear, because the band's greed to defeat Vailly makes it just as much a monster:
(Shades of Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet: "Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it! ") Fortunately, the tears of the Innocents break through their greedy egos and liberate them to be individuals again. The dome disappears, and its inhabitants fly off to his or her home world. [End spoiler.]
A lot of the work on Greed v2 was done by Orphan's Intrepid Media Maven, who wrestled for quite a while to get a workable encode out of the Domesday Duplicator rip of the rotted source. It looks reasonable. What couldn't be corrected was the analog audio track. It was clipped, with a strong background hum. I put it through Audacity's noise reduction filter twice and deliberately reduced the amplification to tame the clipping, but it still wasn't great. So I went back to the original release and extracted its audio tracks. I equalized the volume levels between the two audio tracks. Then I copied the initial bumper and the concluding song from the new audio track into the original audio track. I also had to insert a small split, to account for some extra frames at the side change. Finally, the initial bumper still sounded bad, so I used the bumper from another Pony Canyon disc with a working digital audio track. As a result, this release is a hybrid: new video and mostly old audio.
For the original release, Moho translated, laalg checked the translation, ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset (very little to do there), and Nemesis and VigorousJammer QCed. For this release, Intrepid encoded and shifted the script, and I did the audio editing and cleanup, fine timing, and release checks. Aside from timing and resetting the signs, and a few tweaks to chapter boundaries, the script is essentially unchanged.
Despite the bit rot, this version replaces the first. It's complete. It has better color fidelity. So this release of Greed is the one to archive, even if you don't intend to watch it again. You can get Greed v2 from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channel #nibl or #news on irc.riczon.net
This second release of Greed stems from problems with the first: it was encoded from a damaged laserdisc, and part of the ending was cut off. The source for this new release is also damaged, with serious bit rot, but that mostly affects the audio track. The release is complete.
Greed tells the story of Lid Kyle, a young man living in a dank jungle forest inhabited by ferocious monsters. His dying father tells him to undertake a journey north in order to fix the "distortion" that has twisted reality. Lid leaves the jungle and immediately encounters a desert area. There he meets a young woman, Kii Mi, and her small sentient pets, known as Weakies. They're attacked by mechanical monsters and saved by a large man called Baguda, who can transform, briefly, into a dragon. After fighting off giants, they enter a land of mushrooms and light gravity, where they encounter a mute warrior named Rongun. They journey through the land of the Innocents, fairy-like creatures, and end up in a kingdom dominated by machines that have gone mad. Its ruler, Mimau, completes their company. Together, they go to confront the ultimate evil in the universe, the reality-twisting demon Vailly.
Greed is episodic and at times incoherent - the translation checker, a Japanese native, said that some of the lines made no sense in Japanese - but the individual sections are interesting and at times original. The ending made no sense to me when I was first editing the show, but I see how it might work now. (Of course, I could be wrong.) And the voice cast is very good.
[Spoiler alert!] So what actually happens? Lid and his comrades discover that their world is a dome Vailly made from the greed and selfish desires of people in the universe. Individually, Lid's band can't defeat Vailly, so they combine their powers to form a super-creature. The creature does indeed defeat Vailly, but the dome doesn't disappear, because the band's greed to defeat Vailly makes it just as much a monster:
(Shades of Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet: "Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it! ") Fortunately, the tears of the Innocents break through their greedy egos and liberate them to be individuals again. The dome disappears, and its inhabitants fly off to his or her home world. [End spoiler.]
A lot of the work on Greed v2 was done by Orphan's Intrepid Media Maven, who wrestled for quite a while to get a workable encode out of the Domesday Duplicator rip of the rotted source. It looks reasonable. What couldn't be corrected was the analog audio track. It was clipped, with a strong background hum. I put it through Audacity's noise reduction filter twice and deliberately reduced the amplification to tame the clipping, but it still wasn't great. So I went back to the original release and extracted its audio tracks. I equalized the volume levels between the two audio tracks. Then I copied the initial bumper and the concluding song from the new audio track into the original audio track. I also had to insert a small split, to account for some extra frames at the side change. Finally, the initial bumper still sounded bad, so I used the bumper from another Pony Canyon disc with a working digital audio track. As a result, this release is a hybrid: new video and mostly old audio.
For the original release, Moho translated, laalg checked the translation, ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset (very little to do there), and Nemesis and VigorousJammer QCed. For this release, Intrepid encoded and shifted the script, and I did the audio editing and cleanup, fine timing, and release checks. Aside from timing and resetting the signs, and a few tweaks to chapter boundaries, the script is essentially unchanged.
Despite the bit rot, this version replaces the first. It's complete. It has better color fidelity. So this release of Greed is the one to archive, even if you don't intend to watch it again. You can get Greed v2 from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channel #nibl or #news on irc.riczon.net
Thank you for polishing these gems until they shine!
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