Majo demo Steady... v3?

Ever since Orphan released Majo demo Steady (My Steady Is a Witch) two years ago, I've wanted to do a version with better video (the original raw isn't cropped properly) and audio (only one channel is actually present). The road to a new version has been paved with frustration. Orphan and its friends bought three copies of the laserdisc, and all were rotted. By the time a good copy surfaced in California, we'd lost our US-based Domesday Duplicator capability. However, thanks to outstanding work by Intrepid and Rezo, Orphan has now released a new version, with much improved video and actual stereo audio.

The key to the present release is a feature of ld-decode, the Domesday Duplicator software, called stacking. The software uses an odd number of releases to do dropout correction, based on majority vote. or median values, or something like that. This allowed Intrepid to get quite a good encode from the three rotted discs.

Unfortunately, stacking doesn't work for audio, and ld-decode's handling of CX-compressed analog audio is still pretty poor. There's no digital audio track on the discs; the digital tracks contain the original soundtrack. Rezo captured the analog audio from the best of the discs on a laserdic player and then filtered it to get rid of some of the artifacts. That track (in FLAC!) is used in the release.

Majo demo Steady is a 1986 ecchi sci-fi comedy. It begins with a classic anime plot hook: Hisashi Seki, ordinary working guy, wakes up one morning to find a naked, and very amorous, girl in his bed. (This is carrying the Sudden Girlfriend Appearance trope to a whole 'nother level.) Because he's a grownup, and not an anime harem lead, he's happy to take advantage of the situation, to their mutual satisfaction. However, the girl's appearance leads to all sorts of increasingly strange phenomenon. 

The cause lies, sort of, in Jungian psychology. The girl, whom he has named Asami, is from a parallel dimension where people's ideal partners - the anima to their animus, or vice versa - reside. Asami's longing has allowed her to cross dimensions to be with Seki, but her presence in his world upsets the natural order. She goes back, and Seki must venture to her world to save her. The lovers are reunited. However, matters don't turn out quite as they hoped.

I should mention a couple of points. First, there is a lot of nudity. (All those who object, please raise your hands. Yeah, I thought so.) Asami spends most of her time without clothes, and Seki joins her in that state whenever he can. Second, there is a lot of under-the-covers sex, never shown; this is ecchi, not hentai. And third, there's a subplot about Seki's boss, Sugiyama, who is gay and lusts after his subordinate. This part starts to look a lot like typical anime gay-bashing, but it takes an unexpected turn. Sugiyama too has an ideal partner in the parallel world, and he is allowed an unexpectedly upbeat ending to his quest for love.

The voice cast includes:

• Mitsuya Yuji (Seki) played the leads in Yousei-Ou, Hi-Speed Jecy, and Hiatari Ryoukou, all Orphan releases, as well as Touch. He has  appeared in many other shows, including Oz, Ranma 1/2, and the Stitch! franchise.
• Takahashi Miki (Asami) is best known as a singer (she sang all the songs in the show). She had featured roles in MAPS (1994) and Tenamonyo Voyagers. She appeared in Doukyuusei: Climax, an Orphan release.
• Kokontei Shinsuke (Sugiyama) has only one other anime credit.

Kobayashi Osamu, the director, is not well known. There are a lot of songs in the show, all of them sung by Takahashi Miki. The OP, ED, and one of the insert songs appear on the image album. Most of the rest are on Takahashi Miki's album Dress Up. We've only subtitled the insert songs that are more or less complete.

Moho Kareshi translated, and laalg checked the dialog, added more signs, and translated the songs. ninjacloud timed the original and retimed this release. I edited and typeset. BeeBee and Nemesis QCed the original release, and Rezo did a release check on this one. Intrepid did the video encode, and Rezo created the audio track.

Majo demo Steady is not a world-shaker, but its heart is in the right place. If you'd like a light ecchi comedy with sci-fi overtones, it will do quite well. This release is a substantial improvement on the previous one. You can get the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.