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2006-10-20

Movie Night - 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, Ep. 1

(Update: This video has since been removed from Youtube.  Sorry.)

It's time for another Movie Night...the first episode of 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, aka Marco.

The version we're watching is the fansub copy, provided by the Live-Evil group. They only subbed the first seven episodes, and haven't worked at all on the series in a year, so I'm afraid that's all I'd be able to show. Of course, I do have the entire series on DVD, and it's a terrific box set, but I don't know how to convert it into something that you could download or watch on YouTube. Ah, well, I suppose you'll have to shell out for the Taiwan DVD set.

I have this great hope that some company in America could release the World Masterpiece Theatre series, not only the Takahata/Miyazaki classics Heidi, Marco, and Anne, but other programs in the long-running series. The biggest challenge would be how to handle the soundtracks. It would cost a pretty penny to create an English-language dub, far more than almost anyone to tackle.

You could stay with the original Japanese soundtrack with English subtitles, but that raises the liklihood of losing much of your audience. Even though series like Heidi, Girl of the Alps and 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother are intricately complex and emotionally demanding, they are children's shows. They were meant for a young audience as well as an older one. Would you want to risk alienating those kids? Hmm. This is a difficult prospect. I'm firmly against ever dubbing foreign films, and I'm deeply critical of most of Disney's Ghibli dubs, but if I wanted to release the WMT, I wouldn't want to lose those kids.

Again, the Americans are the last ones to learn about anything. Marco has become famous and beloved throughout the world, just as Heidi and Anne of Green Gables have, and they all deserve to be seen here as well. Well, here's your first chance to see what the whole fuss is about. Make a little experiment out of it: watch with your kids, and see how they react. Let's see if we can capture their interest a little. Enjoy!

1 comment:

Chris Sobieniak said...

That was a cool episode!

It somewhat reminded me of having watched a cartoon as a kid I didn't think of as anime at all, but was something Nickelodeon bothered picking up called "Belle & Sebastian". Of course I now know the details of said show, but thinking about the circumstances for the time being, it's rather a shame hardly any of Nippon Animation's "World Masterpiece Theater" programs had managed to make it to he US airwaves in the 80's, apart from onr or two I've heard of like HBO airing a dub of Tom Sawyer.

Often with shows like this, I often say there is "wasted potential" in ever trying to get them released over here since the time might've passed on them ever recieving any kind of treatment they deserve.

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