Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Nadia – The Nautilus Story vol 1-3 Nadia – Music Videos vol 1-2 Nadia – Variety Video 7/2/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ https://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=40 Project notes: I probably don’t have to explain to you about Nadia, its a classic (with some flaws, see below). The TV series has been released in a dozen different languages that I know of, and is available on Bluray. The movie is available on DVD. But the rest? Laserdisc only, so that’s where I swing into action. Here’s a little breakdown of what we have: The Nautilus Story: Director Hideaki Anno was not entirely pleased with the final version of the TV series – he didn’t have full creative control, and had to insert a number of filler epiosdes, some of which are infamously bad. The Nautilus Story was his attempt to re-edit the entire series, giving the whole thing a faster pace and a tigher focus. The end result is almost six hours long, released as a three-disk boxset. It is my understanding there is new narration by Jean – I last watched Nadia almost 20 years ago (yes, I’m old), so I can’t really confirm what, if anything, is “new.” What I am comfortable in confirming, however, is that the video quality is NOT good. I am fairly confident that this was not edited together from the original source. I suspect the Japanese commercial release was dumped into an analog A/B roll editor and then dumped back onto laserdisc. There is zero attempt to reconcile different framing between episodes, it was moderately jittery, and a lot of scenes are very fuzzy (and it’s not a secret this time). I would regard this release as a blueprint for rebuilding this “Rebuild of Nadia” from Bluray sources. It would take a lot of effort – or a small team of people a little less effort. But I think it might be worth it. To help facilitate this, I have taken the unusual step of including the PCM WAV audio directly off of the disks. If there’s new narration, you’ll need that. And no, I’m not volunteering, I have a lot more laserdiscs to capture while I still have working players. The existing version included here could be subtitled now from existing scripts, which could then be re-adjusted when/if somebody does a Bluray reconstruction. Music Videos: It is unusual to have multiple music video collections from a series, but here we are. The only other example I can think of is Bubblegum Crisis (which, like this set, also had Youmex involvement). The picture quality is much better than The Nautilus Story, but still jittery, and again, no regard was given to framing differences. There are some brief live-action segments, and some karaoke versions of songs, making this a rather unique set. Variety Video: Just like it says on the label. Mostly live-action behind-the-scenes, and some animated segments. There’s some interesting stuff to see here. See: What a cluttered mess Studio Gainax was circa 1989, and that was BEFORE the police raid! See: Voice actresses being shanghaied into drawing cels! See: A young Hideaki Anno before he is eaten alive by crippling depression! See: Cringey live-action musical numbers set on actual naval vessels! See: A man with weird poodle hair! On purpose, probably! Filtered x264 conversions and unfiltered DVD conversions included.