Junkers Come Here v2 (Laserdisc)

In my original blog post for the 1994 OVA Junkers Come Here:Memories of You, I wrote, "The show was never released on laserdisc, let alone DVD." Well, I was wrong. The OVA was released on laserdisc and, thanks to the generosity of a colleague, WOWmd, Orphan is releasing a new version with much better visuals.

This fortuitous event is entirely due to my involuntary presence on Discord. As a technology Luddite and a social media-phobe, I refused to use Discord for a long time, preferring to stay with tried-and-true (that is, ancient and obsolete) Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Discord has voice chat, group meetings, graphics, and other features that I dislike; IRC is text only, which is as it should be. (I stopped playing computer games when text adventures like Zork went out of fashion in the 1980s.) But one of Orphan's newer team members refused to use IRC. He said he'd be on Discord and sent me an invite, so I could get in touch with him. And Inka Subs, with which we did several joint projects, only works on Discord. So now I'm in both worlds.

Discord has allowed me to meet a new generation of fansubbers interested in the back catalog, not just from Inka but from other teams as well (DarkWisper, LonelyChaser, etc.) Some of them have their own Domesday Duplicators and rip their own laserdiscs. They're happy to share, and this project is the result.

Junkers Comes Here: Memories of You centers around the four sisters of the Arimura family. Their mother disappeared on a trip to Paris, and their father died of a broken heart soon afterward. Now, eldest sister Haruka, 30, is the head of the household, having put her own hopes and plans on hold to raise her sisters. Next in line is Natsuno, an office lady in her 20s, obsessed with romance. Third is the nominal protagonist, Akimi, in middle school, undergoing the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Youngest is Fuyuko, 10, an elementary school student with no memories of her mother at all.

Akimi is trying to escape the constant teasing she gets at school when she encounters Junkers on a riverbank. When the dog starts a conversation, Akimi is gobsmacked. She takes the dog home to her sisters, who are skeptical or disinterested, until Junkers miraculously fixes a broken tree and swing. Natsuno wastes one of Junkers' miracles on her love life, and the family starts squabbling about the last one. Then, a TV news program reports about a "mysterious Asian fashion designer" in Paris. It's clearly their mother Misako, and the girls set off to France, Junkers in tow, to find her. There will indeed be one more miracle, although not the obvious one.

The improvement in visual quality is significant and obvious. New:

Old:

The original blog post includes the voice credits, so I won't repeat them here. For the original release, Iri translated, ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset, and Nemesis, Topper3000, and Uchuu QCed. For this release, WOWmd ripped his own laserdisc on the Domesday Duplicator, as well as the digital audio track, and Orphan's media maven encoded.(in honor of the digital origin, the audio track is FLAC.) I shifted the subs and release-checked. Almost nothing had to be changed. Even the typesetting simply worked.

Junkers Come Here: Memories of You is straightforward and heartfelt. It's a welcome dose of positive feelings in the midst of our daily horror show. Dogs are good for the soul, Junkers especially. The new version has substantially better video than the original release, so whether you've seen Junkers Come Here: Memories of You already or are new to the show, you should download this version. You can get the it from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net. No, Orphan doesn't have Discord-based distribution.

One Small Step for VHS Tapes (Hayou Tsurugi v2)

When Orphan released Hayou Tsurugi last year, I noted that "the tape had copy protection, which caused problems during the ripping process and may have contributed to audio sync issues in the encode." In another small step for improved analog ripping, that issue has been overcome, and Orphan is releasing a new, improved, and properly synced version of the show.

Since the Domesday Duplicator became available for ripping laserdiscs, and uncompressed capture was shown to be the best way to rip VHS tapes, progress on improving analog media capture has been slow. The Duplicator software (ld-decode) has continued to improve. A VHS analog, called VHS-decode, is making progress, but it's not ready for prime time. AI-based image cleanup has not panned out; AI can't cope (yet) with blended frames and other imperfections in source material.

However, one option for improving VHS tape capture has been available for quite a while - the time-base corrector (TBC). A TBC eliminates the timing stuttering and playback artifacts introduced by the mechanical instability of the VHS playback hardware or by copy protection. It's not essential with many tapes, but it's absolutely necessary to accurately capture tapes protected by Macrovision's analog copy protection (ACP). Although not common in anime, Hayou Tsurugi used Macrovision ACP. As a result, Orphan's original capture had both video errors (washout) and audio sync problems.

Recently, our media guru in Japan was able to acquire a working TBC at a reasonable price. When he tried it on the Hayou Tsurugi tapes, he got a capture with proper audio sync and without the awful washout that had afflicted certain scenes. Old version:

New version:

While the audio sync issues were fairly consistent (around five frames), they were not constant, particularly in the second episode. This is fixed in the new release.

I won't repeat my description of the show from the previous blog entry. It's still a routine sword-and-sorcery fest. For the original release, Iri translated, ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset (very little), and Topper3000, Uchuu, VigorousJammer, and ImAWasteOfHair QCed. For this release, I tweaked the timing, and Nemesis did a release check. If you downloaded the first version, you should replace it with this one. You can get the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news in irc.rizon.net.

The TBC won't set off a flood of new versions, because unlike previous improvements - the Domesday Duplicator and uncompressed tape capture - it applies to only a small amount of source material. Bakumatsu no Spasibo was also Macrovision protected, but it has other issues, so a new release isn't immanent. VHS-decode will be the next big milestone in the pursuit of analog perfection.