Hanaukyo Maid Tai (In Praise of M.O.E.)

Over at Kiteseekers, I edited the BluRay version of Hanaukyo Maid Tai (2001). This short series of half-length episodes is one of several lightweight ecchi comedies from M.O.E., the tongue-in-cheek acronym for the Japanese anime company Masters of Entertainment. M.O.E. was also responsible for a trio of shows centering around a fictitious live-action superhero show: Cosprayers, Love Love, and Smash Hit.

Hanaukyo Maid Tai is an all-out harem comedy, in which 14-year-old Hanaukyo Taro suddenly and unexpectedly becomes the master of the vastly wealthy Hanaukyo family, the Hanaukyo mansion, and the mansion's horde of lovely and affectionate maids. Unfortunately, young Taro is allergic to girls and becomes rather ill at the slightest physical contact, except with the beautiful, calm, and nurturing head maid Mariel. (This situation was ripped off pretty much intact for the later Girls Bravo, with the mostly female planet Seiren substituting for the all female mansion staff.)

There's no pretense of significance or even a plot. The recurring characters - the head of security, Konoe, the oujo-sama from a rival family, Jihiyo Ryuka, the crackpot maid inventor, Ikuyo - are all tropes played strictly for laughs. Taro's trio of personal maids, known as Ringo (apple), Ichigo (strawberry), and Sango (coral), are mostly interested in taking the concept of "service" to an entirely different level. (They try to get him to "climb the stairs to adulthood," to use Kouko's phrase from Golden Time, for his fifteenth birthday.) Even Taro and Mariel remain pretty much stock characters, and their romance hardly progresses at all. The animation is simple and inexpensive, and the music is generic, except for the earworm opening song.

Nonetheless, I have a sneaking fondness for Hanaukyo Maid Tai, precisely because it is so unpretentious. It's mostly comedic, the comedy mostly works, and at 15 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome. It's neither self-indulgent or self-aware; there's no fourth wall cracking or gimmicks. It's cotton candy for the mind - enjoyable in small doses.

The series was remade in 2004 as Hanaukyo Maid Tai: La Verite. The remake adhered more closely to the manga and thus was subject to that most dreadful of anime comedy contrivances, The Serious Plot Development. I won't spoil you with the details (they're all in the Wikipedia article anyway), but suffice it to say that there is a Nefarious Scheme at work which explains the peculiar circumstances of a mansion full of willing servants. Personally, I regard the Serious Developments that occur in the last few episodes of most anime comedies as a blot, and for that reason I prefer the original series to the remake. I also prefer the original character design for Mariel, although La Verite clearly has better production values.

Kiteseeker's version of Hanaukyo Maid Tai is a vast improvement over the previous versions. The BluRay video is not surprisingly much better than the TV or BD rips. Equally important, the subtitles have been checked and are a lot more accurate; they're properly edited too. The timing is better, and the typesetting is completely redone. All in all, this is really the first decent release of the series. Kudos to the KiteSeekers' staff for all their hard work and care on the show.

So if you need a diversion and have 15 minutes to spare, download and check out an episode of Hanaukyo Maid Tai. It won't change your life, but it won't leave your tearing your hair out either.

A BluRay box set of the Cosprayers trilogy is now available. I'd really like to do BluRay versions of all three series, but for now, that will have to wait.

V2's Galore

In a previous blog, I looked fairly skeptically at the rash of v2's that were occurring at the time. Now, like the maids in the ending song for episodes 13-15, I must confess my errors: two-thirds of the Hanaukyo Maid Tai episodes have v2's in the batch. The changes stemmed from relatively few root causes.

1. Inconsistent romanization. It wasn't until episode 12 that I noticed a discrepancy between the romanization of Hanaukyō Tarō and Jihiyō Ryūka. The former had been romanized by dropping the long markers, the latter by standard romanization, with ō becoming ou and ū becoming uu. We'd romanized Hanaukyō as Hanaukyo because the title , "Maid in Hanaukyo," showed it that way. Changing Jihiyou Ryuuka to Jihiyo Ryuka impacted half a dozen episodes.
2. Inconsistent preview conventions. It took a few episodes to get the tag line ("Next time, we'll again serve our master to the utmost! Heart") correct. At the end, an error crept in about translating Tai, and it was copy-pasted through four episodes.
   

I'll be a lot more forgiving about v2's in the future.

Yawara: Back to the Beginning

FroZen-EviL just released episode 1 of Yawara! Does that mean we're going back to the beginning and redoing the 58 episodes done by Live-evil? The answer, alas, is no. This is a one-shot... probably.

The encoder for Yawara! is currently attending university in Japan, and he found a disc called Yawara: Special Selections. This consists of four random episodes, including episode 1. The attraction is that episodes have been remastered. So he couldn't resist encoding the first episode, just to see how it looked, and then he persuaded the rest of the old team to jump back in. This episode is the result, and it looks very good indeed. No more film burn at the scene changes, no more washed out colors, no more random jumpiness in the image. This is what Yawara! should look like.

Although the subtitles are from the R1 DVD, they were translation checked by kokujin-kun and then edited by me. kokujin-kun did full typesetting. Juggen, CP, and Saji checked the results, and Skr encoded. It was fun to get back to Yawara-chan and also to do a proper job on the amazing first OP and ED.

Will there any more? "It depends." If the Special Selections are going to be random episodes released as random promotions, probably not. But why would anyone go to the trouble of remastering Yawara! without more ambitious plans? Do these releases presage, perhaps, a BluRay version? Now that would be something to consider.

However, redoing Yawara! from BluRays would be an enormous undertaking. The Live-eviL subtitles are lost, so episodes 1-40 would probably use the R1 DVD subtitles. Episode 41-58 would need to be OCR'd from the Live-eviL releases. And then episodes 59-124 would use the current softsubs. The disparate sources mean that there would be serious consistency issues to resolve. And could the team be content with the simplistic typesetting that we used before, now that everyone has seen what real typesetting looks like? Hard to say.

All this is hypothetical. Meanwhile, here's a change to visit with Yawara-chan at the outset of her career, when a chance encounter with a purse-snatcher and a captured photograph of some white pantsu will change history. Enjoy episode 1!

Yamato 2520: An Unfinished Tale

Here is the incomplete OVA Yamato 2520. Dating from 1994, Yamato 2520 was Yoshinobu Nishizaki's attempt to create a new sequel to Space Battleship Yamato, but he fell out with Yamato's creator, the legendary Leiji Matsumoto, and the show was abandoned after three episodes. It was never released on DVD and never fully translated into English.

Yamato 2520 has been on my orphans list for years, ever since NT-Anime subbed episode 1 and abandoned the show, and DOMO subbed episodes 1 and 2 and abandoned the show. Erik of Piyo Piyo Productions, a laserdisc collector, had all the Yamato 2520 LDs and was willing to make new, pristine rips. I edited the existing NT-Anime/DOMO subs of episodes 1 and 2, and laalg supplied an original translation for episode 3. convexity translation checked all the episodes, archdeco retimed them to the new raws, and CP and Saji checked the results. As an added bonus, Tofusensei of Live-Evil found an English-language document describing what the missing episodes might have been like (not all script decisions had been made at the time).

Yamato 2520 was certainly ambitious. It featured mechanical designs by the famous futurist Syd Mead and a musical score by David Matthews (the jazz musician, not the pop star). Despite all the famous names, the show turns out to be a typical representative of 90s OVA animation: cheesy plot, cheesy animation, cheesy music, and a battleship-sized cargo of cliches. (As one reviewer said, "In the 1980s, Yoshinobu Nishizaki wanted to sequelize Space Battleship Yamato in the worst way. In 1994, that’s just what he did.") At times I felt I was watching a Stars Wars ripoff, with the evil Emperor Brone substituting for the evil Emperor Palpatine; a Dallos ripoff, with the Gorda ruins on planet Rococo substituting for the Dallos ruins on the Moon; and a Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney 1930s movie ripoff, with all the young kids rallying to say, "Let's get together and put on a battleship!" instead of a musical.

The translation posed a number of issues, primarily with transliteration of names. We've mostly followed the transliteration from the English-language treatment, although it's inconsistent in places. So planets Rinbus and Rococo rather than Rinbos and Rokoko; Salene Federation rather than Seiren; Brone rather than Blone; and so on. On the other hand, the heroine is Marcie, not Mercie; the "a" sound is fairly distinct in the sountrack. And the ancient civilization at the heart of the plot is Gorda, rather than Gouda as in the treatment. There's enough cheese already without confusing an ancient alien civilization with a Dutch food product. Between episodes 2 and 3, the unit of measurement switched from grues, whatever those were, to space kilos, whatever those are. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, after all.

The raws are very good, as you'd expect of a direct laserdisc rip. Episode 2 includes a curiosity at the end: an AMV of the "Theme of Amesis," sung by Caroline Reinhart. (She was also the inspiration for Amesis' character design; see the article "The Rise and Fall of Yamato 2520.") The song is in English, so no translation is necessary. The music is by David Matthews, the lyrics by Mattie Matthews.

This is my first exposure to the Yamato franchise. As an historian by training, I find the Japanese worship of battleship Yamato to be fascinating, mysterious, and a bit repellant. Yamato was indeed the largest battleship in the world during World War II, but neither she nor her sister ship Musashi made any useful contribution to the Japanese war effort. After seeing little or no combat, Yamato eventually perished in a futile, one-way suicide mission against the American forces invading Okinawa. I would recommend Russell Spurr's "A Glorious Way to Die: The Kamikaze Mission of the Battleship Yamato, April, 1945," as a useful supplement for putting the Yamato anime franchise in perspective.

Enough seriousness. Bring on the 2-D explosions and the 2-D characters. Enjoy Yamato 2520!

Bored

Things have been slack lately at Orphan Fansubs, ever since our full-time translator was pulled back into real-life. All of our projects are moving slowly, because the staff is both small and fully committed on other projects or in real-life. My work for other groups on two Adachi series, Hiatari Ryoukou and Miyuki, is also stalled for various reasons, so I don't have much to do.

As a result, I've worked on a bunch of recent shows, mostly to trade favors. For example, I "edited" Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai from Crunchyroll scripts, despite its moronic premise (singing idols become pro wrestlers? seriously?), because Orphan's timer is partial to anime eye candy. Little did he (or I) know that the TV broadcast would be heavily censored as well as witless. Perhaps someone will slap the scripts on BluRay encodes, thereby at least fulfilling the original intent of the project.

Another example is the current Seikoku no Dragonar. I'm "editing" that show to get the group lead to finish batching numerous BluRay encodes that are done and have been sitting on the shelf, some for as long as a year. For each BluRay batch released, I'll work on an episode. (He's two behind at the moment.) Otherwise, there's no excuse for this series, which shamelessly rips off both Dragon Crisis and Zero no Tsukaima without originality or added value.

[If I may digress for a moment... Groups that have inconsistent policies on batches really tick me off. I don't mind if a group never batches. I really like groups that batch promptly or provide updates on status, like Vivid. But groups that sometimes batch and sometimes don't, or batch after endless delays, irritate me no end. I want to get series off my hard drives and onto archival media when they're finished. That requires a definitive indication that  a series is in its final form.]

The only recent series I "edited" out of sincere interest was Golden Time, and what a disaster it turned out to be. I'd hoped that a show about college students rather than high school students might provide greater scope for characterization and real-life incidents. Instead, it was a textbook example of what might be called Light Novel Syndrome. Light Novels seem to substitute bizarre premises and arbitrary plot twists for organic development of characters and story. Sometimes, as with the current One Week Friends, the show can overcome these handicaps and provide a genuinely interesting experience. Golden Time did not. The male lead, Tada Banri, was totally generic, and his plight (memory loss and memory reloss) uninvolving and unconvincing. The female lead, Kaga Kouko, had no redeeming characteristics beyond her looks, yet she won out in the end, as foreshadowed in the OP and ED all along. The supporting characters were moved and paired in totally arbitrary ways. And it meandered for 24 episodes, prolonging the agony beyond all reasonable measure.

You will notice that I've put "editing" in quotes, because I don't consider the work I do on simulcast scripts to be real editing. It's more like QC. Partly this is because the shows are already edited, but it's also partly because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Dark Sage pointed out that the first couple of scripts for Golden Time were only lightly altered. He was correct, because those initial scripts were quite well done and needed only a small amount of touching up. Others have commented that the later scripts contain careless errors. They're right too, because by then the Crunchyroll script quality had deteriorated, but I'd lost all interest in the show. I only continued with it out of a sense of obligation. The same applies to Sekai and Dragonar. It's really difficult to put in a sustained effort on uninteresting scripts. In short, these lousy shows are turning me into a lazy editor. That's not why I got into fansubbing.

So I need help. Orphan Fansubs has a backlog of interesting projects stalled for lack of staff. If you're a translator, a timer, or a QC and would like to work on shows that are different (although not necessarily better) than the current otaku and fujoshi fodder, please give me a shout. Your help will be sincerely appreciated, and you'll be saving an editor from the deadly Sin of Laziness.

Maze TV Special ("The Fanservice Episode")

So here's another legendary creature from the ocean of untranslated anime brought safely into port: the special episode of the Maze TV series, aka, The Fanservice Episode. This episode has no relationship to any part of the storyline. It exists, as one of the characters says, as "an awesome treat for Maze fans looking for extra fanservice." It's really an excuse to show all  the female characters topless and to let the cast indulge in some yuri antics. Every character makes a cameo appearance, many in short sketches unrelated to the main story in the episode.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a trip to a cursed hot spring that causes everyone who bathes in it to suffer from personality reversal. (Does this sound familiar? Even one of the characters think so.) This occurs three or four times, so that the characters can undergo transformations into different sexual tropes and then try out "infinite diversity in infinite combinations." The male characters are mostly bystanders, and male Maze doesn't make an appearance until the very end, which is of course inconclusive.

The episode reached its exalted status as "the one that got away" simply because it was omitted from all DVD editions of Maze and thus never appeared with English subtitles or dubbing. The primary raw floating around the Internet originated from a VHS tape and is truly terrible. Nonetheless, the intrepid team at Orphan Fansubs was not deterred and vowed to bring this lost "classic" to light. Well, actually, the completeness fanatics on the team, like me, simply wanted to see Maze translated in full.

The initial translation is from an anonymous source. convexity checked and corrected the script, freekie from KiteSeekers timed it (thank you!), I edited and typeset it, and Juggen styled the OP and ED, which are taken from the R1 DVD rips. Some points to note:

• At the start, Princess Mill panics and worries that the episode will spill all the "secrets" of Maze, namely, that she's intersexual (a hermaphrodite), Golude's a lesbian, and Ranchiki is gay. All of these reflect the manga; the TV series glossed over these points.
• Transformed into a shy and demure girl, Princess Mill reacts to seeing bare skin by saying "I've lost my innocence." Literally, it's "I can't get married now."
• The female half of the Creator cracks a joke, saying that the result of setting fire to a toilet is "yakekuso," translated as "desperate burning crap." This is a Japanese pun: "yake" means burned, "kuso" means shit, and "yakekuso" is desperation. Not the most inspired localization, but the best I could come up with.

Just as the project was finishing up, a better raw surfaced, possibly a LaserDisc rip. While not ideal, it's not the blurred mess that the VHS raw is. Accordingly, we are able to present the Maze TV special with more of the important, ah, details clearly visible. Enjoy!

Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross

So at long last, Lime-iro Ryuukitan X Cross is complete.

This sequel to Lime-iro Senkitan has had a checkered history, to say the least. Released in 2005, it was started, and dropped, by no less than three fansub groups. Despite the availability of decent DVD raws, it remained untranslated and unloved until KiteSeekers added it to the backlog about three years ago. I joined KiteSeekers specifically to finish this orphan series.

Even with my constant nagging, progress was slow. Although the episodes had been translated, the translations were a bit suspect. Fortunately, Zalis116, who in the guise of ReDone Subs created the excellent DVD version of Lime-Iro Senkitan, agreed to translation check the scripts. It still took a year to finish the series, as higher priority was usually given to the Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream and Tantei Opera Milky Holmes franchises. Lolis trump historical mecha, I guess.

As a sequel, a drop in quality would not be unexpected, but it’s the shift in tone that’s more bothersome, at least to me. Lime-iro Senkitan was a guilty pleasure, gleefully mixing action, comedy, harem, and mecha with a healthy dose of eye candy to utterly subvert the tropes of the genres. The hero, Shintaro, far from being the usual ineffective harem lead, scores with almost every female who’s both of legal age and human. He never really takes the lead in the fighting; his role is coaching, mentoring, and sexual healing. It’s good, dumb, ecchi fun.

Lime-iro Ryuukitan, on the other hand, plays by all the rules of the shounen and harem genres. The lead is clueless about women, tongue-tied and embarrassed about emotions, and generally only good at charging head-first at the enemy. The girls are all in love with him, but none of them makes an impression on his heart of iron. Instead, he teaches them life lessons about believing in themselves as well as about wrestling wild animals and patching up scrapes and bruises. In the end, he is the HERO who defeats the enemy, and the girls are supporters. As a result, the show plays as a series of cliches, with only occasional flashes of humor to lighten the endless tropes. The villains, named Chiffon, Linen, and Cashmere (what are they, an 80s girl group?), have no personality to start with and don’t develop any along the way. It’s a big come down from the original.

I’m glad it’s finally subbed, and the Lime-iro series can be viewed in its entirety. Nonetheless, Lime-iro Ryuukitan serves to point up an important lesson about orphan series: when a show’s been dropped by lots of groups, it’s probably for a good reason.

Ranma 1/2 Live Action

If the Usagi Drop live action movie embodies everything that can go right in a Japanese live action remake of an anime, then Ranma 1/2 shows almost everything that can go wrong. I have a soft spot for the original Ranma anime franchise because of its unremitting silliness, even though it wore out its welcome long before the 161 episodes, 12 OVAs, and 2 movies were over and done with. The live action TV special has all  the stupidity of the original and none of the charm. It's sexist, homophobic, and, worst of all, not very funny.

The core problem, I think, is that cardboard characters and repeated tropes are tolerable (barely) in a cartoon but are off-putting in a film with real actors. Thus, the best live action shows are adaptations of slice-of-life or romantic comedy series, such as Usagi Drop, Nodame Cantabile, and Honey and Clover. The anime characters in those series are semi-believable, and that gives real actors room to work. In contrast, a slapstick comedy like Ranma requires actors to behave like cartoons, complete with cartoon-like special effects. In my view, that's only been successful once, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It's not successful here.

So you might ask, quite reasonably, why I worked on this. As has happened before, I got dragged in by the simple awfulness of the original subtitles. I couldn't bear to archive that mess.(For example, the first ten lines include, "I'll be more gental next time!" and "He's finially coming!") So I started editing, and then found I had to retime, and then found I need translation checking on a bunch of lines... it went on and on. It's been more than a year from when I downloaded the original version to the release of this one. I've had to watch the movie through three times, and I never want to watch it again. I will be more forbearing in the future. The world is filled with awful subtitles, and I don't have time to deal with them.

The raw is by Rabite-Asses. The original subtitles are by LuffyNoTomo, with additional work by zdzdz. I re-timed, re-edited, and did some additional typesetting. CP did QC, and convexity translated the lines that were missing or so clearly wrong that even I could hear it. If you have the raw, you can patch to this version. A link to the patch is in the torrent.

Anyway, I can't recommend this live action special. But if you do want to watch it, I think this version is an improvement over what was currently before. That may sound like faint praise, but it's all it deserves.