Anime Would you call this a rare find? (Astro Boy 1980 Blu-Ray)

[No_Life_King]

I got it off Amazon, it seems very legitimate. It cost me 90 bucks though.

 

[-------]

Yes, definitely, it's a classic. Take good care of it.

 

[Pearly]

That is Discotek, can confirm is legit. I own several of their titles and the price was because it was out of print. they are the kind of company that you need to keep an eye on their release if you want things at retail.

Also a warning ahead of time, sometimes their blu rays will not work on Multi-Region players, so if anyone is reading his that has a region free player, some of their discs will only work in a factory settings region A player and nothing else. This has only become more widely know since the US verison of the demon slayer movie blu ray came out, it blocks multi-region players. It seems to be a demand from the Japanese license holders and largely only seems to affect European buyers mainly as Japan and the US are both region A. It's also most commonly found on anime DVD's and Blu rays

But yes, don't worry, legit I want the 2003 series on blu ray if it ever comes out.

I had to get harlock arcadia of my youth at that price and Galaxy express 999: Eternal Fantasy as they were bothy out of print. though they can do quick short lived random reprints of random titles. i really wish I got appleseed in time but I did not. Money isn't always flush discotek, I'll give you my money if you f**king let me

 

[G.L.a.D.O.S.]

Seeing as it was mass-produced in 2022/23 by Discotek Media, I wouldn't call it rare. A good buy nonetheless, but not rare.

 

[No_Life_King]

That is Discotek, can confirm is legit. I own several of their titles and the price was because it was out of print. they are the kind of company that you need to keep an eye on their release if you want things at retail.

Also a warning ahead of time, sometimes their blu rays will not work on Multi-Region players, so if anyone is reading his that has a region free player, some of their discs will only work in a factory settings region A player and nothing else. This has only become more widely know since the US verison of the demon slayer movie blu ray came out, it blocks multi-region players. It seems to be a demand from the Japanese license holders and largely only seems to affect European buyers mainly as Japan and the US are both region A. It's also most commonly found on anime DVD's and Blu rays

But yes, don't worry, legit I want the 2003 series on blu ray if it ever comes out.

I had to get harlock arcadia of my youth at that price and Galaxy express 999: Eternal Fantasy as they were bothy out of print. though they can do quick short lived random reprints of random titles. i really wish I got appleseed in time but I did not. Money isn't always flush discotek, I'll give you my money if you f**king let me

I wish Dragon Ball had a good release like this, it's crazy. But I assume Tezuka Productions must have really taken care of their film, unlike Toei. Because holy, does this look amazing.

Post automatically merged: Apr 27, 2026

Seeing as it was mass-produced in 2022/23 by Discotek Media, I wouldn't call it rare. A good buy nonetheless, but not rare.

Yeah, not yet anyway haha. I would rather it stay in print ofc.

 

[Pearly]

I wish Dragon Ball had a good release like this, it's crazy. But I assume Tezuka Productions must have really taken care of their film, unlike Toei. Because holy, does this look amazing.

Discotek do an amazing job of the remaster process, so it's more so, discotek take what toei give them and do what they can, galaxy express 999 the series on blur ay looks amazing and thats a toei series form 78.

Funimation are just horrendously lazy when it comes to remastering and the sales of orange bricks and the later released upscales of these give them no reason to do a proper remaster. They did try to remaster it frame by frame back whe it was still quite expsneive to do so, made masterful work of the first 30 episodes I think and then canned the project due to expense.

Because of all this the best image quality we have are the recent blu ray releases of the original Z movies, toei actually masterfully restored these, and the Kai blu-ray releases are the best image quality for the series, not Z i know, but it's better than any other image quality for the series. the rest leaves a lot to be desired. Funimation could give us what we want but way too many people are watching botched restorations thinking that was how it looked on cartoon network. I should point out to these people, Gokus Gi is not red, his underhsirt is not black and his skin is not meant to be pink in the cell saga. Funimation are to blame here not toei. Even crunchyrolls retsoration of macross, the "robotech edit" and dub turned out spectacular on it's blu ray release.

The french have done a masterful remaster of the OG series, buut alas for licensing purposes, no english subs and funimation don't give a shit about the OG series having a blu ray presence.

Seeing as it was mass-produced in 2022/23 by Discotek Media, I wouldn't call it rare. A good buy nonetheless, but not rare.

You say this, but I've seen some discotek releases balloon to $300 or more when they are out of print for more than a year and half depending on demand. I wanted Appleseed at retail, but I opted to get Galaxy express instead and the cobra series. I now instead can get it for about $150 including taxes to europe, instead of around $50 including shipping taxes etc. I love discotek, but I also hate discotek, I get it, small boutique label and dealing with the expense of anime licensing and restoring what is often at times degraded footage etc, they work magic over there for a small team.

The individual galaxy express volumes reached stupid prices for a bit. Imagine forking out for those and then finding out someone got all three in a single set for $90 just 3 months later, a 9 disc, 113 episode remastered blu ray set of classic series. But paying around $150 for each of the three sets. I'd be screaming

I can imagine some of their catalogue can kind of stay around $100 or so, but some things can balloon massively and it's kind a hard to tell at times what may reach these prices. I had no idea people were lining up for the darkstalkers OVAs, but it seems they were.

 

[No_Life_King]

Discotek do an amazing job of the remaster process, so it's more so, discotek take what toei give them and do what they can, galaxy express 999 the series on blur ay looks amazing and thats a toei series form 78.

Funimation are just horrendously lazy when it comes to remastering and the sales of orange bricks and the later released upscales of these give them no reason to do a proper remaster. They did try to remaster it frame by frame back whe it was still quite expsneive to do so, made masterful work of the first 30 episodes I think and then canned the project due to expense.

Because of all this the best image quality we have are the recent blu ray releases of the original Z movies, toei actually masterfully restored these, and the Kai blu-ray releases are the best image quality for the series, not Z i know, but it's better than any other image quality for the series. the rest leaves a lot to be desired. Funimation could give us what we want but way too many people are watching botched restorations thinking that was how it looked on cartoon network. I should point out to these people, Gokus Gi is not red, his underhsirt is not black and his skin is not meant to be pink in the cell saga. Funimation are to blame here not toei. Even crunchyrolls retsoration of macross, the "robotech edit" and dub turned out spectacular on it's blu ray release.

The french have done a masterful remaster of the OG series, buut alas for licensing purposes, no english subs and funimation don't give a shit about the OG series having a blu ray presence.

You say this, but I've seen some discotek releases balloon to $300 or more when they are out of print for more than a year and half depending on demand. I wanted Appleseed at retail, but I opted to get Galaxy express instead and the cobra series. I now instead can get it for about $150 including taxes to europe, instead of around $50 including shipping taxes etc. I love discotek, but I also hate discotek, I get it, small boutique label and dealing with the expense of anime licensing and restoring what is often at times degraded footage etc, they work magic over there for a small team.

The individual galaxy express volumes reached stupid prices for a bit. Imagine forking out for those and then finding out someone got all three in a single set for $90 just 3 months later, a 9 disc, 113 episode remastered blu ray set of classic series. But paying around $150 for each of the three sets. I'd be screaming

I can imagine some of their catalogue can kind of stay around $100 or so, but some things can balloon massively and it's kind a hard to tell at times what may reach these prices. I had no idea people were lining up for the darkstalkers OVAs, but it seems they were.

Toei is still partially to blame. If you see their Dragon Boxes, you can see they let the film and colors degrade a bit. When it comes to Dragon Ball, I'm strictly manga only.

But even then the Viz release is flawed. It's no exaggeration to say Dragon Ball is cursed.

 

[Stare best girl]

It's no exaggeration to say Dragon Ball is cursed.

even here in Latinamerica, they use Internet rips for the dub instead of the original masters

 

[Pearly]

Toei is still partially to blame. If you see their Dragon Boxes, you can see they let the film and colors degrade a bit. When it comes to Dragon Ball, I'm strictly manga only.

But even then the Viz release is flawed. It's no exaggeration to say Dragon Ball is cursed.

The uncensored 3 in 1's are unfortunately made of poor quality paper that is kind of see through and the better quality paper is unfortunately censored.

I originally saw the OG dragonball in German, though I was an English speaker and trust me, the manga may have been censored but at least I understood what was going on a bit better

All film degrades over time, the remaster process is designed to fix issues with the film and such to restore it to it's original image quality. Simply due to chemical decomposition, no matter how well something is stored it can still degrade, it's a good thing that most movies that are important are at the very least getting scanned in 8K and such, that way we have the movies negatives in an extremely high resolution. That said if you just watched the raw 8K scan of any series or movies from the 80's it would be horrible to watch, hence the remastering process of cleaning away all the dirt and decomposition etc., basically all film looks degraded to some degree if it's a few decades old. The only bad case would be if entire chunks of negative rotted away and could not be restored.

The dragon boxes were an effort to try to leave the negatives as is, not touching up anything so that it accurately reflects what was on TV back in the 80's and 90's, so the skin is kind of pink and the blues look kind of green etc., at least from raditz to cell in the kai series they actually touched everything up to be accurate to broadcast colours and did an update soundtrack and recording since they lost the orginal audio. It may even by why they are stubborn about it, they did it with kai could be their reasoning for only remastering the movies to a degree that they can't be done better. The dragon box's were better than the orange bricks, yes, but that's about it. It left a lot to be desired in most ways and was only revered because it wasn't butchered like the orange bricks, so they were the best way to own dragonball, the Z arc, for a time.

They put a slight tint on the buu part of kai but the colours mostly look accurate depending on your display. For some it just looks kinda green, monitors apparently, also slightly cropped, so kai is also sorta not perfect either.

toei just seems to be difficult and all over the place with dragonball when it comes to this stuff.