I got me some SHINY DISCS

Well hi there, it's morning as I'm writing this! Exciting things yesterday: aside from me setting up this whole website thing (which admittedly is pretty exciting and I do hope people read this, haha) I also had some discs arrive! In particular, the 4K release of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, released by the US-based boutique blu-ray label KL Studio Classics, and also my long-awaited Oddtaxi blu-ray boxset from Japan (with English subtitles luckily).

I am kind of a Buying Discs fan, to be honest. These days, the ability to just Watch Something is pretty easy, since with streaming services and the like there is probably Something there to watch. But like, discs are rad! Being able to hold the thing you like and say "yep, it's all here in (hopefully) good quality in this nice box and my ability to view it doesn't depend on any sort of subscription". And then having them all organised on a shelf and having a library! It's just nice, haha!

So anyway! The Good The Bad and The Ugly 4K disc is kinda interesting for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's the US theatrical cut, and not the extended edition that was made about 20 years ago by recording new English dialogue for scenes that were previously only in the Italian cut. Their previous blu-ray had both cuts but the 4K is just the theatrical cut - although the extra scenes are present as deleted scenes in the extras section. Apparently a lot of people were not so much a fan of the extended cut - either because the scenes dragged on or because Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach sounded a lot older than they did in the rest of the film, so I guess given the decision of which cut to include that's why they went with this one. There's also Fun Times with the video transfer - essentially, it's based on a restoration done by the somewhat infamous Italian film lab L'immagine Ritrovata, who tend to have some odd ideas about colour grading, such that things tend to look unnaturally yellow. But for the 4K release, the publisher has essentially attempted to "fix" the grading and from what I've checked out, it turned out alright. Although likely as a result of the extra grading work that had to be done, unusually for a 4K disc it's not in HDR. Honestly it's kinda just super weird TBH but I'm glad there's an OK disc in the end.

Oddtaxi was a whole preorder dealio where the more orders they got the more features they added. So in the end we've had a release with CDs and figures and fancy packaging and subtitles. The packaging is pretty neat. And the discs themselves are fine, with decent subtitles. It is pretty hard to stuff up picture quality on anything that's recent and digitally-sourced, TBH, so it looks fine. Unfortunately the commentary tracks aren't subtitled but what we do have are the between-episode audio dramas, which ARE subtitled and we didn't get in the Crunchyroll stream! So that's cool! Honestly, I am due a rewatch of this show. The stream up on Crunchyroll includes a dub now so I wonder if there'll eventually be a more regularly-priced US (or even local) release of the show that includes that.

Anyway, yay discs. Maybe that's a subject I'll continue to write about here. I mean really the concept is I can write about whatever I want here whether anyone's reading or not. Honestly I need to work out how to let go of the "caring if anyone is reading" thing considering I very deliberately don't have any analytics set up here, or even a comments section.

I do want to try and write posts fairly regularly though, maybe it'll count as like a diary thing? Who knows, we'll find out!