Hong Kong Bootleg DVD Review - S-CRY-ED
Background
One of the best resources for information on these old Chinese bootleg DVD sets is the Import-Anime Forums, a website from the early 2000s dedicated to fans of these “import” DVDs documenting information about their purchases for other consumers looking to get their anime on DVD faster and cheaper. However, the site is not without its flaws. The review section for “Subtitles” was washed away by the sands of time at some point, and all reviews that use it have had their contents replaced with a duplicate of the Audio section.* If an upload even has screenshots, they will sometimes be incorrect, or not useful to determine the contents of the disc effectively. And in some cases, some discs and sets will just be outright missing from their database. This release is one of the missing ones. Because of this, I have decided to take matters into my own hands, and am here to review this set’s features and contents, in hopes of documenting this release, so that there can be any information at all online about it.
* This actually was fixed in the time since this post was written. If whoever maintains this site ever sees this, please know that I am eternally grateful for your efforts.
Box Specifications:
SKU: D0403
Manufacturer: Anime Cartoon/Manga International (Wondershow / ワンダーショウ)
Discs: 3xDVD9 (22,094,367,426 bytes total)
Audio: Japanese AC3 2.0
Subtitles: English/Chinese
UPC (for SEO reasons, as all HKDVDs have the same UPC): 498102822712
Click to see full-resolution (though still blurry) versions of the product photos
Video
The video on this disc is based on the official R2J Japanese DVD set, although it has been heavily compressed to squish the eight DVDs down to three. Occasional green Comic Sans watermarks for Anime Cartoon can be found throughout the disc in the middle of the frame. The bonus features include non-credit versions of all of the openings used on each disc, as well as the non-credit ending at the very end of disc 3, all of course ripped directly from the original DVD source. Since the original clean DVDs are readily available online, there is no particular value in the video on these discs, and even if the discs weren’t online, we are no longer in 2002, and can do better than this.
Audio
192 kb/s Stereo AC3. There is nothing to note here, as it is based on the Japanese DVD set. I have not checked the original DVDs for myself, but I feel confident in saying that there will be no difference in audio between the two DVD sets besides the compression.
Subtitles
All of the English subtitles on these discs have been stolen from the original TV fansubs that were released as the show was airing. I believe that some of these were typed from them due to some typos in the subtitles (“Form now on”), while others were OCR’d from them, as a specific line slips through in one of them where one of the opening lyrics becomes “Anime-Pixel Proudly Brings to you”. Sometimes lines will have missing words, or will be written slightly differently than the original line, but the base translation is very obviously from the original fansubs. The only things on this disc that I believe are “original” translations are episode titles, which have been translated from Chinese (sample: episode 3 ホーリー (Holy) was translated as “Altar”), as well as some random lines where their typist or OCR failed.
The timing and splitting of lines has been, in true HKDVD fashion, copied directly from the Chinese subtitles, resulting in the subtitles being difficult to read sometimes, as lines will be either too short or too long, or timed to the wrong line of dialogue entirely. Some subtitles are also missing, especially if the fansub used a fancy font (for example AnimeCo’s “radio” font). This is a disappointing outcome, as the subtitles are almost always the most interesting part of these releases. While I have not watched the entire DVD set from start to finish, it is a safe assumption that nothing in here is especially noteworthy. A list of which fansub was stolen for each episode has been provided below for reference.
| Episodes | Group |
|---|---|
| 1-3 | AnimeCoalition |
| 4-5 | ClearShadow |
| 6-18 | Anime-Network 1 |
| 19-26 | Anime-Pixel 2 |
1. In #6, the first two subtitles are original, “Special economy zone produced by tectonic plates’ hit.” instead of the original “The Muraji Special District is the first independent market in Japan to emerge from the cause of the immense distension phenomenon.”. The show name is sometimes translated as “Native Aite”. #17 and #18 are educated guesses, as my local copies of the episode are the Anime4Free and Anime-Pixel versions respectively. This does theoretically mean the discs have some value, but with how many typos and mistimed lines there are, it’d be significantly better to have the original files.
2. show title is translated as “Alter Users”
Comment
There really isn’t anything else to say about this release. The subtitles are bad, but not in a funny way, as you can get an even more “authentic” experience by watching the original fansubs as they were released. I cannot recommend buying this set, but it’s 2025, so there’s no reason to buy an HKDVD set anyways.