Orgy of Forgotten Adaptations

ORGY OF FALLEN ANGELS is, by far, one of the greatest erotic OAVs of the 1980s. It's loaded with psychadellic style, ceaseless sexual brutality, and a story I affectionately call it "I Spit On Your Loli".




I'm not sure what the heck these are, I just know that the kanji title - 堕天使たちの狂宴 - is the same as it is the above anime feature. Sadly these covers are too blurry for me to pick out the creator's name on the live action tapes, but the original manga artist, Dirty Matsumoto (I kid you not!) either worked on, or was adapted into, a few vintage Nikkatsu Roman Porno films back in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

All of this is largely my associate's realm of expertise, so I'll have to ask him what he knows about these two features... once he gets his computer fixed.

They could be totally unrelated - let's not forget that there were two completely separate "Lolita Anime" shows kicking around in 1985 - but I'd sure be excited if there were a live action bloody loli-rape feature to go with the animation I fell so head over heels in love with a few years ago.

From the FUNi Frying Pan into the FUNi Nuclear Fallout

Geneon DVD

FUNimation Blu-ray

I have not doctored these images in any way. You're not high... well, not that I know of. Either way, you drugged up hippies you, the facts are what they are; FUNimation's 1080p upscale actually has less fine detail than Geneon's 480i DVD. Let that sink in for a moment.

FUNimation managed to create a High Definition Blu-ray with less detail than Geneon was able to keep on DVD. FROM THE EXACT SAME SD SOURCE MATERIALS.

Kentai's inner child.

FUNimation upscaling shows animated at 480i is all well and good, I guess. The problem is that they're nuking the source tapes in DNR and then over-sharpening the edges to compensate. I know, I've done it myself, but there's a big difference between me doing that to a crumby 20 year old LD transfer and FUNimation doing it to a Digibeta of a show that was clearly supposed to have a layer of digital grain in the first place.

FUNimation has been slathering all of their upscales in similar filtering, which gives us transfer like...

Witchblade!

Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid!

And Tsubasa Chroni-

... oh my gosh, that's so terrible I can't even rag on it. CLAMP's Tsubasa Chronicle, for whatever reason, sets the bar so far underground on shitty HD transfers that FUNi would probably have to fill their AVISynth plugins folder with steroids and mining equipment to ever surpass it.

Oh, I know what you're thinking. "Lay off 'em Kentai! How good can a stinking SD upscale even look?" For the doubters, I have three and a half words for you:

DIEBUSTER: THE MOVIE.

Sexiness has a New Head

R1 Collection DVD Cover

I'm a whore for high quality packaging, as we've been over. A well done DVD cover is a thing of beauty, and this right here may well be the best cover I've seen all year. If only it'd been a steelbook I think I might have had an instant jizzgasm.

Anime licensors in the US moving to "complete" season sets was largely hailed as a positive - we get the same content faster, cheaper, and it doesn't take up as much room on the shelf. Perfect, right? I personally always feared - and rightly so, I'll add - that we'd start getting shafted on packaging, and that the shafting would only get harder as time went on. First we got 3 disc thinpacks. Then we got 2 discs in each thinpack. Then we got stackpacks... I don't want to discuss this devolution any further. Suffice to say, if DVD packaging gets any worse, I may start throwing it in the trash bin where it belongs.

Not only are we now getting 13 episode shows in a normal sized 2 disc keepcase, but most of the time we aren't even getting interior cover art. Getting anime fast and cheap came at the cost of collectability, and for the seven guys at the Anime on DVD forum who still give a shit, that's a real shame. English dubs also took a hit, but thankfully I could care less.

Section 23 is "Neo ADV", the shakily reformed remnants of the company that imploded when their Japanese partners left them floating in the water without any titles, money, or credibility. They've consistently released anime DVDs with interactive menus and basic special features - something I can't say for their Switchblade Pictures line - but they've generally had less than inspired cover art, and by consistently releasing shows with little more than subtitles the releases feel... empty. On the other hand, the entire Skull Man TV show will cost $40 MSRP, and if I'd known I could have saved the time and money of downloading and burning 7 custom DVDs I may have just waited.

Despite hating poor ol' Ishinomori I watched an episode or two a while back of this Bones remake. Fucking loved it! Started downloading the fansubbed R2 DVDs, but never actually watched them, knowing I'd have to wait god only knew how long for the next volume. When the release was finished, I'd amassed a leaning tower of similar DVD-R fansubs, and as it stands I still haven't finished... well, damn near any of them. Much like Kannagi and Mnemosyne, odds are I'll finish watching the R1 due to my horrible apathy towards staying current.

What's the appeal, anyway? Watching every show the minute it airs?

Japanese cover the above is based on.

Hininden Fukkatsu-Hen!

HININDEN GAUSU was produced in 2005, a time when all animation studios had moved onto digital, but weren't necessarily animating up to the digital standards we've come to more or less accept as the norm today. Particularly for cheap pronographic titles like this, making sure that the DVD would look stunning on a modern 1080p HDTV was about as far from Studio Arms' general focus as one could possibly imagine.

Still, Cthulhu and the rest of the Great Old Ones put me on this planet for a reason, and if restoring an obscure, unfinished, animated ninja porn epic wasn't it, I should probably consider killing myself now.


What you see above is the before/after of a lovely little dot-crawl eating filter I've experimented with a few times. The results are stunning on the most stubborn of analog cross-talk, and even the shimmering rainbows on the outlines seem to have ebbed.

While recordings I make myself are tempered by my DVD recorder's surprisingly powerful comb filter, anything sourced from DVD either does or doesn't have dot-crawl. There's nothing I can do in hardware to fix a finished transfer, and the fact that I've gotten results this dramatic are encouraging.

Unfortunately, it also creates bullshit like this every now and again...

Being a temporal filter, it freaks out when the chroma flashes randomly between very dark and very light, so it has to be turned off on certain special effects - particularly lightning flashes. This means I'll literally have to encode two separate transfers and then cut out the "bad" parts later. It also creates some really freaky looking artifacts on the crotch mosaics, but as seeing those brought pixelated vaginas to a whole new level of creepy, we won't be showing any of that.

Space Soldiers Unite!

DOWNLOAD A LITTLE STARSHIP LD CLIP...

And why? Well, why not?

As you can see, the issue with my Starship Troopers 2 LD isn't the size of the rot errors so much as it is the frequency of them: the poor disc is literally covered in a constant flurry of digital dropouts, and while I can try my best to remove them using tools designed to remove film damage, there's no way I'll catch everything - or if I do, it'll probably have some pretty severe side-effects. I'll just have to experiment and see what strikes me.

Naturally, even if I filtered the crap out of this transfer the Kentai DVD would look better than this low-bitrate sample. For one thing, the LD transfers have pretty clear 3:2 pulldown, so a progressive transfer should be easy enough to create with a manual IVTC. For another, this would have to be denoised even if I weren't going to be removing "digital dirt", which should help immensely. Odds are I'll drop on a fine layer of digital grain afterward, but I can worry about all that once I decide how to best get rid of this monstrous bug infestation.

At least the third episode looks perfect.
For a vintage LD, I mean...

Kyrie Eleison

Kentai Films VHS Restoration

DDM Internet Download

Unfortunately, the "Viva Pinks!" label VHS was in such poor shape to start with that all I could do was blur, boost, and upscale it. The results you see above may not look like much, but they still crush the source VHS by a wide margin, and that fact is pretty terrifying if you think about it.

VHS was always a pretty nasty video format, and while I'm not above doing my best to make it look better I have no unrealistic expectations that it'll ever look "good". Japanese distributors who offer streaming and downloadable pornography - and more interesting Pinks, while they're at it - are lucky enough to start with archival quality transfers, and as such, there's literally nothing I can do to compete with them in terms of resolution, clarity and contrast. For better or worse, digital outfits like DDM heavily compress the videos for quick download, but even the artifacts from that are typically not as bad as the increased chroma noise found on analog tape formats, to say nothing of the loss in resolution. DDM and pals deinterlace their videos in a really unpleasant way, but the fact is there's no "perfect" deinterlacing solution on titles that have no 3:2 cadence, they just go with the easiest BOB method: it works, it just isn't pretty.

If I could, I think I'd gladly give up recording tapes for re-encoding internet downloads. The compression artifacts on a low-bitrate 640x480 WMV file do suck, but they're hardly any more invasive than the noise on even a decent looking VHS tape. The bigger problem is that most stores like DDM don't take credit cards not issued in Japan, so if you're a Yank like me you're simply SOL on the whole thing. Sokmil has no qualms taking money from us round eyed monkeys, but the majority of their wares are pointless gonzo garbage with hilariously awesome titles - like The Fiendish Fellatio Inferno.

Worth fapping to? Perhaps... but certainly not worth restoring from ex-rental VHS.

Gritty or Gooey: The Lesser Or Two Evils?

This download is for 22 seconds of Maryuu Senki in various states of digital repair. One clip is with Digigrain, the other is without. Recompressed to "DVD Quality" no audio. Should open in any program that'll play DVDs.

CHECK IT, BEFORE I WRECK IT.

I'm still not 100% sold either way. I do like the 'look' of the grainy clip, and it helps break up the large flat areas of blurred out DNR victimization, but it also gives it a faux texture it probably never have had when it was shot on (I presume) 35mm.

While I detest the use of "fake" grain on any new telecine in place of the natural grain on the print, what I'm starting from is a heavily damaged analog transfer. At that point, any small and relatively granular bit of motion is closer to 35mm than LD... but it still isn't really the look of film. That was lost long, long before I got involved.

Should I simulate the look of analog film grain by creating random digital noise, or live with the way analog video looks once all of the distortions have been filtered out? As always, comments on these comparisons are more than welcome.

A New Lease On Maryuu

Original DVD-RW Recording

Kentai Remaster (WIP)


Kentai Remaster - Now With Digital Grain! (WIP)

The slight cropping on all 4 sides is a side-effect of the film judder stabilzation filter. It doesn't actually zoom the film in, but it does make the film shift left and right and up and down completely at random, so you sort of have to zoom the print in slightly or it looks like the edge of your video is having a seizure. I'm not sure if I should keep it or not; on the one hand it keeps still shots nice and comparatively steady, but it sometimes adds jerky movement to pans that were once just fine. The judder isn't Vampire Hunter D or Evangelion bad, but it's still easy enough to spot that if I CAN get rid of it, I'd like to.

The dirt/scratch removal filter, as you can see, is the kind of magic I thought existed only in fairy tales and acid trips. The only flaw is the fact that it likes to eat tiny white stars in the background during the ninja-oni fight, literally only giving them back when the camera stops moving. It's a little creepy seeing them blink back on after the sky was pure black the entire length of the shot before. Not helping matters are the LD's crushed black levels, which means that there's next to nothing I can do to try and separate the stars from film damage: on a black sky, a moving white dot looks like film damage, and even if I were fixing these scenes by hand (fat chance!) I'd have some difficulty picking out what is and is not. I'll simply need to re-watch the problematic bits and decide if missing stars, or dirt and LD dropouts are the lesser of two evils.

The Digigrain(TM) is an issue I'm currently straddling the fence over. On the one hand, the DNR I used to erase 20 year old LD rot has worked wonders at removing the layer of static-like haze over... well, everything. On the other hand, it now looks a bit too 'plastic' and out-of-focus for my tastes. Maryuu Senki, when devoid of anything resembling grain, like almost like a modern digital animation project rather than anything shot on 35mm film. The results I'm getting from Grain Factory don't quite look like "real" film, but a lot of the plugins designed to do the same thing are even worse at it, and grain is tricky to express in still form OR heavily compressed video, so I'd be better off posting a DVD clip - but I'm too lazy to do that right now.

Particularly since I'll be cramming all 3 episodes on a single DVD-R, heavy grain probably isn't in the best interest of the encode, but what I have here looks vaguely similar to the fine grain I'd expect to see in an OVA of this era/budget. I may tweak the grain further, see if I can make it look less "sharp" and just a bit heavier without actually obscuring outlines or gradients. Digital grain is an art unto itself, and it's one I'm still a mewling babe at, but I suppose there's never been a better time to learn...

UPDATE:

To give you an idea of what I meant by crushed blacks...

The rental VHS of Maryuu Senki I saw before I had the LD has the same "crush", so I'm certain it's a problem with the master.

One big issue with 1980s telecines was weak contrast, which caused blacks to be washed-out and have very little shadow detail. My theory on Maryuu Senki is that whoever made the transfer saw how bad the whole thing was, so they used a proc-amp to crush the levels down until that charcoal gray became actual black. (Something I'm doing myself for Vampire Hunter D, if you remember.)

Sadly, this is a problem with the whole feature, not just the outdoor scenes:




MARYUU HENJOU has similar inky-as-all-hell-black look, bu the art design is generally better, so there's simply fewer scenes of bitch black sky with white stars poking through at random. MARYUU SHINDEN has fantastic levels all across the board, with strong blacks, but makes up for doing something right by being both the noisiest and most film-damaged riddled of the three.

Troopers Drop A Rotten Deuce

宇宙の戦士　STARSHIP TROOPERS

This is the 1988 Bandai LD, and is actually the second copy of this episode I've gotten my hands on in the last year or two. The good news - well, I think it's good news - is that this first volume looks fantastic, and is ripe for both further restoration and subtitling. The last copy I had was so affected with LD rot that it literally became unwatchable at about the 30 minute mark. God help me, I've seen worse, but it was still in no shape to restore for DVD.

The bad news (worse news?) is episode 2...

Rotten as a weeping cheese;
it's stinky, but it's still pretty edible.

Lots of random chroma noise and small horizontal dropouts randomly flicker through the entire feature. Imagine a very dirty 35mm print, except the dirt is binary distortion. (And there's dirt on the actual film print, too.) I could probably manage at least some of it with filters designed to remove film damage, but after the beautiful and rot-free first episode, seeing crap like this constantly flicker through the second part is a pretty major disappointment.

I'll check out Episode 3 tomorrow. 100+ minutes of this schlocky, boring, war-mongering intergalactic faggotry is quite enough for one evening. I may adore Verhoeven's Hollywood spoof of the material, and I can't say Heinlein's book isn't written in a way that makes it more interesting than it ought to be, but I just can't say enough bad things about Sunrise's anime adaptation. And so, just like Riki-Oh 2, Star of David, and so many other atrocities that haunt my fever dreams, I face my fears and demons... by making them look pretty. If only Freud could see me now!