A Technically Minded look at MVM’s FLCL Collection

Wondering why this blog hasn’t been getting as many page views as I’d like, I postulated to myself that perhaps the problem was that I wasn’t updating the blog. In order to remedy this, I started typing the words that you are currently reading.

So I’m going to be taking a look at that FLCL DVD set released in the UK a few weeks ago. I pre-ordered this one from Amazon back in January using a gift card. I hate gift certificates, but Amazon’s gift voucher implementation is (grudgingly) one of the best: When the FLCL collection was released and Amazon hadn’t received any copies (and still haven’t to this day), I cancelled my order and placed another with Play.com. Amazon automatically gave me back the credit for the gift certificate which I was able to apply to another pre-order I’d made without having to place the order again. (The contents of said order can wait for another post.)

We watched the series over a period of about a week. We do most of our viewing on a Yamada DVX-6700 (which, to date, is the best DVD Video player that I have used), but we had to watch the last disc on Brother’s iMac due to the general television area being occupied. It was Brother’s first time watching the series, but I’d seen it several times (in both Japanese and English variants). As such, I’m not going to bother talking about the show itself. Maybe I’ll get Brother to do a write-up.

First off, the packaging.

I'm not sure how to get the thumbnails to be precisely 554 pixels wide, so you'll just have to click on it to see the big version.

You probably can’t tell from the photographs, but the cover art has JPEG artifacts. I hate JPEG artifacts on the web, and I loathe them in the Real World. The result is a bootleg-grade cover that you would be ashamed to flaunt (unlike this lovely US boxset). (For the uninitiated: JPEG artifacts are a horrible effect of saving your images as .jpg instead of .png. Become enlightened.)

Each North American DVD release of FLCL was accompanied with a booklet featuring translator’s notes et cetera. This release came with a limited edition registration card.

One can tell that they went with a particularly cheap brand of DVD case. You know, that brittle-but-bendy texture that opens with a snap. Being a three-disc release (two episodes to a disc–they could’ve just use two discs if they wanted to save money), the case was augmented by one of those things that holds a disc on each side that clips to the middle of the case.

Except it wasn’t clipped on correctly. Removing the discs themselves from the centre section was a chore in itself; I always find these particularly awkward as I’m worried that I’m going to snap the disc in half.

Judging by the menu credits, the UK release appears to be a carbon copy of a Madman Entertainment release. I’m assuming that MVM (the UK distributor) thought that it would be more cost-effective to go with Madman (the Australian distributor)’s PAL encode than for MVM to do it themselves. However, half of that sentence will not make sense if you’re not familiar with how video (or my mind) works. Don’t worry about it.

Video-wise, the quality was as I expected. Some minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em quality flubs, but overall, no glaring audio or visual errors that I could perceive on our vintage four-to-three aspect cathode ray box.

Naturally, we watched the videos in English. Unlike Manga Entertainment’s horrible stance on sub vs. dub discrimination, MVM’s release comes with a full “signs-only” subtitle track, translating (most of) the bits of on-screen Japanese text that are unfeasable to be picked up by the dub. Honestly, you probably wouldn’t be missing much if they weren’t translated (not in this series, anyway), but it’s still something that I expect to see on all English-language anime videos.

Oddly enough, the subtitles on disc 1 are different from those on discs 2 & 3; they must’ve changed subtitle providers (or something along those lines) between volumes. The typesetting’s noticeably different in the later volumes, and the ending theme is only subtitled on the 2nd and 3rd discs. Also, the episode titles were expanded from their short, four-character Japanese forms for the English adaptation (e.g. FiSta = Fire Starter). Whilst volume one’s sign-only subtitles use the full-length titles, volumes two and three use the nonsensical shortened titles.

Another point of contention is that for some reason, the ending sequence of episode two has been replaced with the ending sequence of episode one. But only the video track has changed. This means that the narration for the episode three preview plays over the preview for episode two (which we’d just seen). This is a glaring error, and although the other episodes appear to have the correct ending and preview sequences, they’re all slightly–but significantly–out-of-sync (the first episode being the exception). I’m not sure whether to blame MVM or Madman on this subpar presentation. Maybe it’s just something that slipped through the cracks.

To sum up, you’re paying £18 for a modern classic with high production values packaged into a set with decidedly low production values.

And people wonder why no-one’s buying UK anime releases.