We’ve just had this email from Jezz Vernon, at Metrodome:

We’ve had all kinds of delays caused by the BBFC – the UK censor, not that they’re disputing any aspect, merely that it’s been a long time being passed through due to the length of the series. We’ve all put long hours in on this, it’s proved to be an extreme challenge to keep 100% quality control on almost 16 hours of material, the whole purpose of changing the way we did the subtitling was to avoid some of the mistakes in Headmasters. So hard drives, DVDRS, subtitle tiffs and frantic emails have been flying between myself in London, Chris McFeely in Northern Ireland and Jordan Derber in Tokyo. Chris and Jordan are the two stars of the piece, they’ve both put in late nights and early mornings to get the subtitles in perfect form for the release. Chris even had to watch the entire series in something like 3 days flat, working around his day job – and we’re just about to send check discs over to him to watch the whole series again for a final QC.

So the new release date is set for May 29th, the title should be a PG, it’ll be 5 discs and the RRP is �34.99 – although I guess most people will be looking on amazon.co.uk or play.com for a discounted price.

Chris has provided an excellent commentary on 3 of the episodes and once again written a booklet with episode guide, background and a translation chart for the names.

For anyone that hasn’t seen Masterforce I can confirm that it’s a very special series indeed, my personal favourite so far.

The only sad news is that due to the costs we were incurring we had to make the decison to leave off the English dub. For those of you that know it, it’s a pretty poor affair, fairly laughable in places and really not of the expected quality. Done with ahandful of actors, limited budget and appalling translation – we know it’s a curio, but we just weren’t in a position to use it.

As far as we know there is no disc set in the world where the english Star TV dub and the Japanese audio exist on the same edition. So when it came down to it we naturally had to choose the Japanese dub, otherwise what would be the point of the whole exercise.

Of course this will put some people off, we’re genuinely sorry we couldn’t include it – but it just wasn’t an option eventually.

News on the 20th anniversary of the movie is that i’m trying to clear the decks and get my arse into gear. It’s still on the cards and we may even be a few inches closer to including Scramble City and Zone on the edition – so more news to come!

cheers

Jezz