Piyo-Piyo Productions presents: Blue Sonnet 1-5 (w/extras) 9/23/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ https://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=2887 Project notes: Grandpa story time: Back in the early to mid 1990s, in the USA, anime was VERY hard to come by. There were maybe a dozen titles available, tucked into the general “Animation” section of the video store, if you were lucky. Yes, there used to be entire stores that sold nothing but VHS tapes – DVD didn’t exist yet, and laserdiscs never caught on in the US. Expensive too: One single episode of Bubblegum Crisis was $40. Most full movies cost like $30. One of the earliest releases on these shores was Blue Sonnet, released by US Manga Corps, who, sadly, are no longer with us. As the US anime market began to expand, they also released it on laserdisc. But Blue Sonnet never really caught on. When DVD came to be, USMC didn’t bother to reissue it again. And neither did anyone else. Blue Sonnet is what you get when you try to compress 19 volumes of manga into five episodes. Its okay, but stuff just kinda happens without adequate explanation. My feeling is, if you’re going to compress the plot, keep it SHORT, like a one-hour one-off. That way we can watch it, go “huh?” and move on. Or if you’re going to do something a bit longer, just do one complete story arc – it worked so well for titles like The Five Star Stories or Please Save My Earth! Five episodes of compressed plot is a bit of a slog. Its watchable, but not terribly memorable. Nostalgic though, if you’re an older guy like me. A lot of reviews I’ve read complain about the art style, but I actually like it – its 80s shoujo style, which I can very much get down with. Sonnet’s helmet is a bit goofy though. I considered capping the hardsubbed USMC laserdiscs as well, but decided to let it be. Better that somebody ganks the subs off the old VHS rips of Blue Sonnet and does a modernized softsub. The mastering on these discs was iffy. Rough pans and jitter throughout. Some line glimmer, and some preliminary rot artifacts on the second disc. But the picture quality is decent, and the cuts are clean. Unfiltered high-bitrate DVD conversion included for archival purposes.