Piyo-Piyo Productions presents: Purple Eyes In the Dark 1/1/18 https://www.otakubell.com/ https://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=7235 This is a semi-animated music video clipshow for the manga Purple Eyes In the Dark. There’s no coherent story here, just lots of nice artwork. The music is a bit more of a mixed bag. I first saw this back in the pre-digital days. I got it on a tape with a raw of Cipher, which actually has a lot in common with PEID. A lot of PEID’s music is in English, sort-of. Some of it is a bit hard to listen to. The one track that stuck in my head, though, for the past 15-20 years, is Tell Her Tonight, which begins at 13:00. It isn’t what I’d call traditionally “good,” mind you, but its weirdly hard to get out of your head. Video quality on this disc was quite good: Clean cuts, surprisingly consistent framing, good picture quality. There are some rough pans though, especially at 2:15, ye-ouch! There was some dotcrawl, particularly during the “outline” scenes in Tell Her Tonight, which I corrected. There are a lot of pages from the original manga on display, which makes heavy use of screentoning, which leads to terrible rainbowing in video form. I was able to knock most of that out, but you may still find some during pans, as the derainbowing filter only works on still parts of the screen, and I didn’t feel like giving this the full smdegrain treatment I gave to Nine. If you feel real ambitious and want to give this the full smdegrain treatment yourself someday (good luck, it takes a full hour to process one minute of footage), I have included a high bitrate DVD conversion for archival purposes. -- -- -- -- -- Total side-notes about the almost entirely unrelated OVA Cipher, which I had on an Nth generation VHS tape along with PEID in the late 1990s: I’d love to get my hands on the LD for Cipher. Cipher is fascinating on the same level as the movie The Room is fascinating. It takes place in the USA and is entirely in... English? You can find clips on youtube, and you really ought to take a look at them. Its firmly in “Oh hai doggy” territory, and its just glorious. It mostly consists of music video covers of famous English songs – Phil Collins’ Against All Odds, Kenny Loggins’ Footloose, Deniece Williams’ Let’s Hear It For the Boy. But they paid for the rights (well, maybe, in theory) to one original song, and it was a song I had never heard before: Kamikaze by Thompson Twins. I rewound and rewatched the Kamikaze video over and over and over again – I was fascinated by it on every level, both the music and the video. It was a totally different tone than anything else in Cipher, and was more like something you’d find in Cathexis. So I went to try to buy the Thompson Twins album that Kamikaze was from, Quick Step and Side Kick, only to find that it was long out-of print in the US. So I brought the CD from Japan to the tune of $60. Turns out there was a good reason that album was out-of-print, it mostly isn’t very good. For some reason, Victor Entertainment is super-vigilant in keeping Kamikaze off of Youtube, yet you can find the rest of Thompson Twins entire library there – weird. You can find some live versions, but they aren’t as good as the original recording.