Edoropolis Emporium

Just wondering if anyone knows how many volumes have been released so far. I've only ever seen Volume 1 advertised and it seems to have episodes out of order.

Yeah, Jade had the pirated copies being sold.

Truthfully, I'm the only person (pretty much in the world besides Saban/Disney) with every single ep on DVD.

Burkey

Ok, but I assume those are burned or something right? I'm talking about the official DVD:

Pizza Cats DVD (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0006UWUZ2/qid=1108988122/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl74/103-1808541-8575067?v=glance&s=dvd&n=507846)

Is there only one volume or are there more than one?

Guess there is only the 1 volume then.

Oh well.

Burkey

The pirated DVD Burke mentioned is the same as the "official" DVD in that link.
I'm surprised it managed to slip onto Amazon.com, because Jade Entertainment is already notorious for bootlegging.

Anyway, I'm guessing no newer volumes will be released, because Jade already used up most of the episodes they've acquired on volume one. Which would explain why the episodes are out of order.


Well, in English at least... (Grr... lucky French with their super-duper double DVD set...)

I see. That's too bad. I really wish there were official English DVDs of this show. That would be awesome.

Now don't you worry, that is a project I'm working on myself now. ;)

Burkey

Really??

How would you get the licences?

No no, I'm gonna pull a "Jade Entertainment" move myself.

That is, when I figure out my blasted burner. (And when I get my DVD's back)

Burkey

I'd gladly put up $100+ (whatever a box set costs these days) dollars for an official DVD box set.

When I get my DVD set back from a friend I borrowed them too, I'll burn copies of the DVD's.

Yes, I know how to rip, set, and burn DVD's now, so be patient!

Burkey

Oooo... I might have to join in on the illegal pirating game so I can get the episodes as well. ^^

Bidding starts at $5,000,000!

^_~ j/k

Burkey

Speaking of which, I have obtained some rips of the Jade DVD's courtesy of AdamOfTheTable...and they will be torrented and mininova'd as soon as I can find a decent tracker.

Yeah I finally got around to that. My first attempt at ripping a DVD, using the DVX software. Supersonic says it looks good though. Grab one of the DVDs for yourself though, those 5 eps are great quality.

I'll rip the whole, entire series soon enough, just botta pick up about 12 DVD's to do it.

Burkey

Are you doing a fresh rip from VHS tapes? That'd be a breath of fresh air, new encodes!

To be "pirated", wouldn't Jade have to copying something that already exists?  Maybe they paid for the rights to make their DVD.  Anyway, "official" or not, I wish they'd make a volume 2, volume 1 was well worth the $20.  I don't care who's selling them.  If there is an "official" non-Jade DVD, they need to actually sell it if they want to make any money.  Nonexisting "official" DVDs don't help anyone.

I'd like to know exactly how they set up releasing that. It must be an interesting story. If they paid for it, how did they get the owners of the content to allow their release? The owners must be feeling generous of late, actually allowing someone to license 5 episodes for DVD.

I noticed that volume 1 detail on Ebay that the episode are not in actual order, which is a shame as well as puzzling introducing "Pizza cats are only human part 1" too early.

A two disc edition would be cool with the other containing KNT episodes with english subtitles.
Sounds cool is it not? :)

You would think that since all these dumb dvd box sets are being released (like the stuff that sits in Best Buy for 5 years and is never bought) They would put out a Real Samurai Pizza Cats DVD.

I think that the only way to actually get it on dvd would be to, ahem, pirate it. Or buy the license to the show itself.
So, yay with the pirating, boo to JADE.

To "pirate" a DVD, you need an original to rip off.  I don't like that Jade messed up the order of the episodes, but at least they gave us SOMETHING. :O  You're so right about the stupid box sets that come out, a complete SPC DVD whole be so much better than some of the trash that does make it on to DVD (well, to me it would be better than anything ever put on a DVD).  Who ever is responsable for letting the SPC episodes sit on a shelf in some warehouse, not making any money for their owners, is a.... well, I'm not going to use that kind of language here.

OK, here's my problem.. I do have all the episodes on a full set of 12 DVD's, they're all in order and they're all in great clarity.

However, mass copying and shipping these babies is going to cost me a pretty penny.

I need some cheap way, that I can do myself, to release these eps to you people who I know you want them.

Burkey

Just find a friend with a DVD-burner, make 1 copy and ship it to me, adam, or tsuneko. We could take care of distro from there. :)

Burke: you should just make a few copies of it to send out to other people with burners who will can help make copies to send to eager fans.
Also, I hope you're planning to do this as a non-profit endeavor. i.e., sell them for what it costs you to make them. You don't want to get into any legal trouble.

I have a burner myself, I know to do it.

These DVD's are PAL format as well, so I have to change them to NTSC

Burkey

Was this from Europe (UK?) or Hong Kong? I heard stories about an SPC DVD set and a VHS tape set in the UK. I never found any info on it though.

Ok well If I'm correct your using 12 regular DVDs there, Im not sure if its cheaper over there, but what if you use dual layer DVD's they hold almost twice as much meaning you'll only need about 5-6 discs instead of 12. But like I said in the end its probably cheaper the way your doing it.
Also I was thinking you could compress the eps into something like a Winzip folder and spread them across 3 or so discs, so we would just have to extract them on our side, then again Im not sure if that would save that much space either ^^;

If someone could get these on line still in the DVD quality, then people could start making their own DVDs.  I don't know a lot about ripping stuff from DVDs or how to keep the quality at the original level, but I'm sure there are some people here who do.  It could even be done one episode at a time, since they are sure to be big files.  Once more people have them, it'll be easier for people to make more DVDs.  I know if I had them, I'd keep them all on my computer (even if I have to go buy another HD) and keep uploading them via P2P networks.

What you're talking about is sharing the decrypted DVDs in the form of VOB files. The files would each be GBs in size, but they would be 100% quality. When ripping individual episodes to VOBs you just have to click the right "chapters" on in the decrypter program. For the SPC eBay DVD I have, 2 at a time was an episode (1&2, 3&4, etc). The only problem is that sending those files will take hours if not a day per episode.

I've waited years.  Hours or days isn't a problem.  But like I said, I don't really know much about this stuff.  I do know that if it was out there, I'd download it and share it.  Even if it takes months and requires buying more storage drives.

If you have a high speed Internet connection and use a torrent or direct file sharing program (like the file send feature on AIM, Get Right, etc.) it should take a day or two at most,  I leave my PC on for weeks at a time downloading mutiple files up to 8 GB's in size, so I  have no problem doing it for the SPC DVD (and I'm sure most people here would like to get their paws on it). And If you need space to store it all just pick up an external Hard Drive for $90.

Actually, it might be better to go ahead and just make ISO images of the DVDs and send those. It'd make reproducing the DVDs that much easier. 4.7 GB each however. Sounds like he'd rather just mail them, but someone along the way will probably start sharing the full ISOs or VOBs of each ep anyway. As long as that isn't a problem...

If they are pal episodes that is an interesting revelation.

If you convert the frame rate to NTSC you will lose audio synch about 3 minutes into the show.

If you can just leave them as they are and rip them then encode them as they are - they should come out at about 250mb each episode.

as i don't know the resolution, it should be the same as the french ones - 688x512. as the french ones are pal also - but i've readjusted the frame rate so the americans can watch them on their DVD's without much problem. Encoding them to MPeg2 is easy.

neko

are you sure?  8O not that i don't believe you, but i'd like to ask for proof about this.

I am sure
in 2001, Disney bought Saban and renamed it BVS Entertainment
since then they are stuck doing strictly Power Rangers and Digimon
leaving shows like SPC abandoned!

Some French company was able to make a DVD set years after Saban was bought out, so someone must still have it.

I don't really believe this right off the bat, as Dinsey has made use of other Saban/Fox Family properties as well.

For example, The Tick airing on Toon Disney and Spider-Man The Animated Series having DVD episodes released by Walt Disney Video.


It's very possible that Saban gave Déclic Images the license to publish SPC in France prior to their buyout at the hands of Disney. A license which Disney legally had to continue to honor.

even so
I believe Disney has no interest on putting Samurai Pizza Cats on TV nor on DVD

That's true, Disney is not gonna make a DVD for a show that has such a small fanbase (they are all about profit).  Yet as the cost of DVD production goes down and the active fanbase grows larger we may someday see an real SPC DVD release.  The new blue-ray discs could fit the entire series on one or two DVD's and this would make releasing them much less costly.

The company which released the discs in france was Fox kids.

my box set has their logo everywhere.

neko

That's another reason why it's important for us to keep interest alive in SPC.

Maybe we can make them suffer
by sending them 100 mil. letters demanding to put the Samurai Pizza Cats on JETIX and on DVD

I noticed the Fox Kids logo too on the box art I've seen, which left me really puzzled at first, with the company being sold 2 years prior to the French DVD release and all. :O
But from what I've gathered on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetix), It's most likely that while still owned by Disney, Fox Kids  had not been rebranded in to "Jetix" in France yet.

Also of note, on all the photos of packing I've seen from the 2nd box set here (http://www.dvdanime.net/critiqueview.php?id_critique=1499), the Fox Kids logo has been replaced by the Jetix one, yet the Declic Logo still remains, as it was on the 1st box set as well.

This all pretty much convinces me that while Disney/Jetix own the rights to the show, Declic Images is the company licensed to release and distribute it on DVD in France.

I think I wanna be a lawyer now. :-\

Well there is always an option of perhaps getting a petition together and sending it to disney.. can't hurt anyways, heh. And, as far as distribution of episodes that already exist, the best method would be to either do individual torrents or a batch of 13-26 episodes a shot. I know it's been a couple years since I've done dvd -> divx, but even when I'd gotten out of it it was still fairly easy.. so I can only imagine now how it must be. Also, considering the average size of a 26 min episode these days works out to 130-150 megs and is still pretty much dvd quality, it shows that the tools have gotten far better then last I was into this stuff. If anyone wants help with encoding things, though, I am willing to help, I'll just need a bit of practice to get my hand back into it ^^ That is, if no one else is able to.  As for creating multiple resoltuions, for say, psp owners or the like, there are tools out there that make conversion of large sized episodes of things quite simple. For the psp owners, there's PSPVideo9 and for others I'd suggest PocketDivxEncoder, both make very nice re-encodes in quite an impressive amoutn of time (video9 about 10-15 mins for a standard 26 min ep and PDE takes about 5-6 mins on my machine - AMD Athlon XP 2500+ @ 1.7 ghz and 1 gig (1024 megs) of ram, everyone's milage will vary though)

I thought Shuki Levy and Haim Saban teamed up to do the backing music if my recollection of the closing credits are right.  Music rights are almost ALWAYS a seperate negotiation when dealing with putting any TV series out on DVD, animated or live action.

I sniffed around the two big publishing sites also one time for SPC music info.  I forgot which one (BMI or ASCAP) had the info, but WEA Music Group's publishing arm, Warner-Tamerlane was listed.

That's a few big loopholes Disney / BVS would  have to jump through, assuming Saban still holds rights to his own composed work through said publisher.

Thus why, in cases where music rights are too expensive to license, production companies often subsitute the music.  Happens a lot with TV series that have songs by real bands / artists.  To rip out the soundtrack of songs (Including the opening theme we all love) and replace it all with orchestrated dramatic music Disney cooks up....yeah, more dramatic, but it just wouldn't be the same.

I'm not sure how things like this in other countries are dealt with, but here in the U.S., broadcast and home video licensing are two completely different games, and audio and visual aspects are seperate aspects DVD distributors have to negotiate rights over.  Confusing, and utterly stupid IMHO.  Anime distibutors have to put up with the same junk, thus why sometimes some BGM tracks have to be replaced in some series with repeats of other tracks.

If any sort of 'petition' is to be done again, it should be hand-written, and only that in the form of signatures and letters.

Not trying to sound all 'doom and gloom' when it comes to our favorite furry (or are they metal...meh. ^-^;; ) felines.  Capitalisim stinks when it comes to the entertainment world.

[offtopic mode]
Yeah, but the paradox of capitalism is not showed only in the entertainment, but in the whole intelectual production of mankind. For example, imagine the cost for the production of one chair. The cost of two chairs is roughly twice of the one chair, so it's reasonable each buyer paying for his own chair. But what is the cost of a thought, of a idea, or of a story?  The cost is the very same, regardless if it is shared by one, two, thousands or millions of people. Therefore the immaterial product is the best one to make money from almost nothing. The artists must be paid, I know, but they earn only a few percents of the profit. The money goes mainly for whom do nothing to produce. Poor artists, poor fans.  (>:()
[/offtopic mode] Sorry for being off-topic.

The problem is nobody knows who created the Samuai Pizza Cats

Nobody translated the Japanesse credits to figure this one out?

What do you mean who made it? The original show idea?

The Japanese fans I've communicated with say there is no one person who created KNT, it was a group of people. I know Hamada Yoshimi drew some manga that had early versions of the characters and some stories, but he might only be the manga artist, and may have been working with others (writers, other artists, editors) even then.  Tenko is responsible for designing the characters in the form they appear in the animation.  I don't know who else might have been involved in the creation of KNT from the beginning.

Sort of like what CLAMP does....  They are a group who create manga, some of which have gotten turned into very popular anime series.

Seems like the same situation here with KNT/SPC, but the big difference is that little is known about the group that created it.

All this time I thought KNT/SPC was first an anime, and then had a few chapters of manga done to it.  There's other anime titles out there that started as anime, then they were developed into manga later.  This is not a common thing, but it happens.

I think Hamada Yoshimi's manga wasn't actually published until the show was being worked on, or was already out.  But the stories in it may have been out earlier in other manga or magazines, then collected together into the book I and a few other fans here have.

The BIG difference is KNT flopped in japan
It gotten low ratings during it's 2 seasons

is this true?  ?:|  i always thought the man that conceived KNT was Goh Mihara. but, now that you mention it, Goh Mihara might not be a person, but a group of people. i mean, there's Hajime Yatate, which is really a pseudonym for everyone at Sunrise. so, you might be right.

based on this, i'd say the group would consist of people like Satoru Akahori (chief writer), Noritaka "Tenko" Suzuki (character & mecha design), and Kenji Kawai (music composer).

I had a chance to bid on that manga, but waited...I haven't seen it since.  :(

Actually any anime that makes it to 2 seasons in Japan is considered to have done "ok".  New anime comes out so often there, it's only the most popular that can last longer.  There are tons of anime that come and go in Japan, that you'll never see or hear of here because it really did "flop".

theres a website called ioffer with the complete set on DVD for only 25$!!! :D

*facepaw*

that set is even more illegal than providing free downloads of the episodes.

the quality is great though :)

Once again, somebody paid for something we offer for free.

now ... do you want me to lay down a fresh innuendo? lol

Be my guest.

LOL, paying for bootlegs. Its much cheaper just to burn to disc., XD

As D-Mac said, this is probably because in different countries, Saban's shows are distributed to different countries. Hence why you would see SPC on ABC in America and YTV in Canada. On the side of the first set of my two French boxes, it has a FOX KIDS logo on the side. Tsuneko's second box has that too. However, I have a slightly later release of the second box so it says JETIX on the side, Everyone knows that JETIX is a divinity of Disney, so I suppose, Disney DID have some involvement in this.

FK

P.S. Long time, no post :D

hopefully they will

I'm telling you. Disney really needs to let some company like Shout! Factory (the guys responsible for Nintendo cartoons like Captain N, Super Mario, and Legend of Zelda, as well as Sonic the Hedgehog) or someone else do some justice in the name of the Samurai Pizza Cats, by letting THEM release the show on DVD, legally.

well, there might be a way to get it release: http://www.edoropolis.org/forums/index.php?topic=2500.0

cant you legaly make dvds by getting them on the internet? like burning them on a dvd

Only if certain companies have the rights to distribute said shows via Amazon.com.

no.
basic copyright knowledge.

damn i thought someone would have done that

Technically, I own the complete series of SPC episodes on DVD that were twice handed down; made from a fan's pure love and given in the same likeness. <3

But, I do not encourage purchasing any DVDs.

You're not allowed to refer to any person above you. It's a forum rule. Failure to comply may lead to an actual conversation or exchange of ideas.

Well you know what some people dont have the ability to take DVDS off of the internet som its the best option. Iam getting bashed just because Iam new. I thought people were supposed to be nicer to the new guy but I guess not. so if any of the older members said the same thing I did no one would say a thing.

actually, unless it was someone with ban-powers, they probably would.
you see, these DVDs are probably made by using encodes from this very site(!). and even if it was an old member, like cloud-boy for example, he would be called an idiot for buying something tsunekko offers for free.
so this has nothing to do about you being new, for we are treating you as an equal.

Nobody's bashing you, they were just saying it didn't make sense to pay for something you could get for free. But if you don't know how to burn the episodes to a DVD and want to pay for them, then I guess that's your business.