The king on DVD?

[EvilGenki]

yeah, I found info on the net and it was released in 2003. Most of the sites that were selling it did'nt have an image of the box. My expectations were too high, and I was disappointed with what I bought. It really makes the series look awful..Im sure Tezuka Productions made a better disc.

[Haruka-chan]

Heh i have the first 3 dvds....they look so bootleggy and the series looks/sounds awful. AC3 is a sound codec (decoder) that the DVD players needs to have to play the disc ^_^

[EvilGenki]

hah! At least I wasn't the only one who bought a DVD..Is there a better quality DVD set out of Leo the Lion?

[O2Destroyer]

Oh my goodness...

...just saw the Jungle Emperor Leo (1998) DVD and felt I better put my 2 cents into this thread, along with a lot of questions.

Regarding Kimba (the 60's series), obviously we have the Rhino set. Not that Rhino did a bad job with it, but I'm wondering how much was cut for NBC. Never mind it is only half the series. There's a Japanese release, but like Astroboy, it's about $250 a box, and it doesn't even look like there are English subtitles. Nice.

Is the Jungle Emperor manga available at all? I had no idea I was going to get into this so much, and now having seen the movie, I'm even more compelled to want to read it, if not everything I can get ahold of by Tezuka. One beautiful thing this has going for it, unlike Astro Boy is that it apparently does have continuity throughout--a bad thing for TV shows I suppose, but a great thing for comics.

Back to the movie anyway...so, some reviews do not seem compelled by Tezuka's writing and seem to think he is dated--somehow the self sacrifice at the end is too 50's or something. I don't understand. Personally I think our attitude toward stories and heroes tends to go in waves. For a long time we've had nothing but anti-heroes or more sophisticated characters who are sometimes heroic and sometimes not. For me, the Spiderman 2 movie was sort of a return to form, where Spidey really was, if only for part of the film, the old fashioned 'good guy'. It's hard to say that kind of idea ages, it just isn't always appreciated.

I'm sure Astro boy's 'robot with a big heart' mentality is probably a turn off to a lot of people, what with Astro Boy being so relentlessly good, but I'm realizing more and more that's what I love about Tezuka--he sticks to this vision and always makes it interesting, where so many of the 20th centuries do-gooders were often such a bore.

So here we have Jungle Emperor Leo, and while I don't know if it is a GREAT movie, I think it feels like a good adaptation of Tezuka. It had no problem having fun and being cute while also enveloping the characters in tragedy. Knowing I'm probably never going to be able to put down $500 and learn Japanese to see the big box sets, being able to see the beginning and the end was extremely rewarding. Hell, just seeing at the beginning of the film that Leo/Kimba has been successful and accomplished his dream was enough to make the film worthwhile; never mind the reward of seeing Mustachio and Leo team up for a good portion of the film.

[jeffbert]

Upon checking Amazon.com, I see that only German versions of Kimba have been listed among the 80 titles by Osamu Tezuka.