(Maris) The Choujo - Dual Audio

So... a dual audio version of Maris the Choujo, that is, an updated release including an English dub track. You may be asking yourself, "Has Collectr finally lost his marbles?" The answer is no; that happened years ago. However, my initial distaste for dubs has softened over time, as I documented in this blog post. If a dub makes an anime more accessible to an English speaking audience, that's all to the good.

The origins of this release stem from an Internet pen-pal who uses the handle niki. He's been extracting English dubs from 90s VHS tapes and synchronizing them to Orphan's releases. This must be a fairly tricky process. VHS tapes are analog, and player speeds can vary. Orphan's sources are also usually analog and are ripped on different VHS or laserdisc players. Getting an audio track to match the particular idiosyncrasies of our release is audio editing magic, at least to me. niki has produced English audio tracks for Fire Emblem, Amon Saga, Hitomi no Naka no Shounen: 15 Shounen Hyouryuuki, and other shows.

I would have left the tracks as do-it-yourself muxing projects except for one other development: Orphan is working on more Rumiko Takahashi releases. I wanted to start this mini "Rumic World" festival with something completely different, and a dual audio release of Maris the Choujo, the second OVA in the series, fit the bill perfectly. It's no secret that I loved the show, and I'm happy to have an excuse to bring it to an audience again.

I've already covered Maris the Choujo in detail, and I won't rehash the release post here, except to provide a new screencap of Maris at her best:

niki created the dub track, which is taken from the 1994 US Manga Corps VHS release. I created a signs and songs subtitles track to go with the English dub track. The new release is about 120MB bigger, so don't bother downloading it unless you really want the dub. (There's a patch available to convert single audio to dual audio, if you prefer.) This release is available from the usual torrent site and from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.