Disney’s 1969 comedy-drama film, Rascal is an adaptation of Sterling North’s autobiographical memoir of the same name. Directed by Disney regular Norman Tokar and adapted by prolific TV writer Harold Swanton, Bill Mumy stars in this boy meets-cute Racoon tale, set in 1918 Wisconsin. Since the DVD version is somewhat aspect ratio deficient, and Rascal is not on blu-ray yet, I thought I’d take a quick look at the iTunes 1080p HD version – to see if it’s worth your time.
The Pioneer LD-V4300D is a single-sided industrial PAL/NTSC Laserdisc player. Given the mediocre results of my testing the CLD-925D I wanted a better PAL player. I’d heard good things about both the CLD-2950 and LD-V4300D, but the CLD-2950 is getting a bit long in the tooth.
Since the LD-V4300D is an industrial model, and was made until very late in the Laserdisc lifecycle, I thought it might be a better bet, longevity wise.
Spirited Away, in my opinion at least, is Hayao Miyazaki’s magnum opus, and having only been released on Japanese Blu-ray a few months back, I decided to give it a quick review. ‘Spirited Away’ (千と千尋の神隠し ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’) was released in 2001 to universal critical and commercial success. A heroes-journey tale of a timid girl whose family is sucked into a magical world, where she must struggle to save both herself and her parents. The original Japanese (and other Asian-region) DVD releases had several issues most noticeably a strong red/pink tint, as well as window-boxing the image substantially on all four sides. The US DVD release largely addressed these issues, although the image was a little red.