Maple Town DVD Boxset Part 1 Overview

[Philip]

I got the first boxset and decided to put together a quick little review.

First off, the box art...

... is atrocious! Mabye the fact that Japanese DVD covers tend to have gorgeous artwork is affecting my opinion, but... Some character stock art cobbled together over a screenshot, with a green gradient? It looks extremely lazy. I guess it was too much to expect original artwork for this box, but I still feel they could have done a better job than this. Although, it looks a lot better than the art we have seen for the seconds box!

Oh, well... let's get to what everyone is really interested in, the content of the discs themselves. The first two discs have 9 episodes on them each. You can select which episode to play, but there is no scene selection option for them on the menu.


The third disc has 8 episodes and a trailer for the series (or the first episode). That is it in the way of bonus material. No textless opening or ending theme. Hope we get them in the second box.


The image quality is pretty good. Probably as good as we are going to get with a series this old, although I feel there would have been less degradation of the image if they hadn't squeezed so many episodes onto each disc.

Some more screenshots:




The most interesting part for me was probably the booklet that was included. It has 24 pages containing summaries of the episodes, character profiles and production art. Much of it we have already seen, but there was some stuff I hadn't seen before. Check out that early sketch of Patty with a ribbon on her ear, instead of the usual ear decoration:




Although I have a lot of complaints, and I feel that not a lot of effort was put into this release, I am very, very thankful that it exists at all. It is A LOT better than the previous Spanish DVD release in every way. It is clearly a budget release, and not that expensive compared to other Japanese DVDs (but DVDs are generally very expensive in Japan compared to in the west, so for many of us it may not seem that cheap). Retail price is 21 000 yen for one box, about US $215, but if you buy them from Amazon now you can get 27% off.

Hopefully they are popular, and you won't be able to pick one up on Yahoo Auctions for just 1000 yen only a couple of months later. ^^;

[Ryusui]

Holy crap I know that picture. The one with Patty wearing an ear ribbon.

Back when Gunheart and I were collecting Maple Town merch through Yahoo! Japan Auctions and Celga, one of the things we ended up missing out on was a copy of the original pitch for the show. There were some pics of the first couple of pages, though, which featured that exact pic of Patty (which, come to think of it, makes her look a little like Monomi from Danganronpa). Apparently, she was originally going to be called "Cathy" or "Cassie" (the kana キャシー are slightly ambiguous) and Ann was going to be the main protagonist. Oh, and the Hope-Rabbit family explicitly came "all the way from France."

...and reading the box more closely, it mentions the "Cathy/Cassie" thing at the end. Huh.

[Philip]

Ooh! That is really interesting! I'm a sucker for stuff like that. Hope we get another chance of acquiring that original pitch.

It's interesting to think what the series would have been like with Ann as the protagonist. Maybe she was the one who would have decided to become a nurse in the end? She seemed a lot more determined than Patty to do her best as a nurse in the railroad construction episode.

[Hanway]

Thx for review!
Well, that's definitely not a digital remastering, but looks like a very good digitization of original studio tapes. This is much better than inexpert filtration Spaniards did.