laserwiz

"A swashbuckling Samurai saga that beats SHOGUN!" - Star Bulletin

Now, I bought a copy of this motion picture on video cassette that was released by Thorn-EMI Video, which means that the violence, beheadings, blood, and nudity are all intact as opposed to edited in the TV broadcast version.

The reason why I purchased it: I needed a test tape for VCR repair. For one dollar, you get an old tape where you wouldn't care if the machine decided to eat it!

Anyways, since I bought the tape and have also seen Shogun before, I figured I would give it a whurl. I have watched this movie and I'm glad I only spent one dollar on it!

While the premise of the story is certainly interesting enough, the low budget and TV-like production values doesn't do the premise any justice at all.

The acting feels badly forced at many points, which is also coupled with some rather claustrophobic cinematography, nervous direction, and snapshot editing. (It felt like I was watching a TV show that seemed to almost feel like "Hawaii Five-O" with all the pointless and quick zoom-ins to objects in the frame.)

The pacing felt somewhat uneven, perhaps to where it was trying to rush the story forward to reach the end sooner. This might explain the 92 minutes runtime on something that might have required up to 150 minutes to properly play in order to account for character relation to each other and their settings. In contrast, Paramount wisely produced Shogun as a television miniseries, as the original novel could simply not be condensed to even a four hour epic without losing too much. (Although, the re-editing of the miniseries with only a small helping of new footage in an attempt to make a motion picture out of Shogun was a very bad idea.)

There didn't seem to be very good interplay between the characters. The relationships that you may see develop in this picture tend to develop rather quickly and, therefore, unrealistically. The characters also seem somewhat simple and, in many ways, unbelievable. In concert with the atrocious acting, it made watching the characters about as appealing as watching a bad sci-fi movie without MST3K. In contrast, Shogun had characters that developed intricate interplay over a long period of time. They had shown themselves as complex individuals and continued to develop in the settings and with the other characters throughout the story.

Also, the one thing that caught me totally off-guard was the production company: Rankin-Bass.

Now, Rankin-Bass is a production company that is primarily responsible for children's programming. They had produced the animated version of "The Hobbit," "The Last Unicorn (1980s, ITC)," and "The King and I (1999, Warner Bros)," as well as producing various Christmas specials in the 1960s and 1970s like "Frosty, the Snowman" (Need to get to the north pole before melting), "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" (I don't want to wear a lump of coal on my nose!), "Little Drummer Boy," and "T'was the night before Christmas" (You know, the one with the singing clock to make Santa forgive a city for a letter written by some mouse who used "long words."). To those familiar with the 1980s, Rankin-Bass was also responsible for "Thundercats" and "Silverhawks."

Now, this did give a reason why the movie sucked as a whole: a production company with experience only with children's entertainment cannot hope to produce an R rated picture without creative difficulty.

Now, even though this film was co-produced with a British firm: Trident Films, the producer was Arthur Rankin Jr. himself. Jules Bass apparently did not have any involvement with this production.

Watch out for a cameo by James Earl Jones. Mako, Toshiro Mufune (who played in Shogun as well), and Sonny Chiba are other well regarded actors who starred in this movie.

If anything, try it for a rental and watch for yourself. This is assuming your local video store even has this movie for rent.

This movie does deserve some credit for at least trying to maintain a standard, although I would only give it one and half stars.

I might have given it worse, but watching REAL garbage like "Space Mutiny" and "Strategic Command" does make "Bushido Blade" and even "Xanadu" look decent. - Reinhart

This was a program that was developed for limited release on LaserDisc for showroom demonstration of the Magnavox MagnaVision VH-8000 LaserDisc player, which is the first consumer grade product to use a laser. All discs also came with a photocopied notice, citing a correction towards a claim made in the disc regarding wearout factors, which turned out to be essentially non-existent on normal playback, of a competing videodisc format, the needle-based RCA CED "SelectaVision" system.

The program begins with a bunch of those golly whiz-bang video graphics used in the late 1970s-early 1980s, showing off the exteriors of the Magnavision player and a LaserDisc, as well as clips of programmes that were either available or were scheduled for later release.

Then you have Leonard Nimoy talking to a flashing rock that makes golly whiz-bang synthesizer noises as a form of communication.

You have Leonard Nimoy demonstrating the Magnavision's capabilities with "the sharpest, cleanest picture", stereo sound, bilingual sound capability, frame-by-frame stop motion and pause, slow motion, and visual search, as well as how you'd be able to connect the player to a stereo and a television set.

The other side of this disc contains sales training, with Nimoy explaining technical aspects of how the LaserDisc player works. After that, you have two idiotic sales representatives from Magnavox giving idiotic sales advice to salespeople.

All in all, it's good viewing for a laugh, finding amusement at the now dated presentation and the hilarious sales advice being pitched to the viewer. It is a collectable disc as limited numbers were pressed and never made available for public sale, which is usually the case with showroom demonstration materials.

As for the player that this LaserDisc was advertising for, the VH-8000 and its later revision VH-8005 equipped with remote control, were crap. They were tempermental and unreliable players. The software that this disc also advertised were made by DiscoVision Associates, which also produced bad LaserDiscs.

By the time this disc was produced, which was 1980-1981, Pioneer had already came out with the VP-1000. The VP-1000 was lightyears ahead of the Magnavox players in terms of performance, functionality, usability and reliability. Even the demo disc for this Pioneer player was better, with none of the sleezy sales advice and cheesy production values that the MagnaVision demo had. To make it more embarrasing for Magnavox, the Pioneer players even handled discs that the MagnaVision players would normally refuse to play properly, if at all.

Hope this ends up being most informative to those interested in this little-known production that Mr. Nimoy participated in. As for why he did it, my guess was that Mr. Nimoy had a contract with Magnavox to be a spokesperson for a certain amount of time, so he was obligated to do what Magnavox asked him to do.

This is an old, but still rather impressive demonstration disc advertising the Pioneer VP-1000 LaserDisc player.

Even though it inaccurately depicts the VP-1000 as the first consumer product to use a laser, that honour belongs to the beleaguered Magnavox VH-8000, it goes through a brief timeline of the history of home entertainment, then goes to effectively advertise the features and functionality of this player. Entertaining, but in an educating sort of way as opposed to being unintentionally hilarious like the "Leonard Nimoy demonstrates the MagnaVision videodisc player" programme.

There isn't much to say about this, as it was just a demonstration feature with decent production values, although it is dated.

This disc is a collectable as a limited number were pressed and all copies were not originally available for public sale. The rarest copiees are made in the USA by DiscoVisio Associates, but the better quality copies were made in Japan by Pioneer. - Reinhart