An Interesting Yet Unexpected Find
A few weeks back, I wrote a rather lengthy post about being able to see Mamoru Oshii's animated classic "Ghost in the Shell" (1995) at the Cine Core Movie Theatre in Seoul, South Korea during the spring of 2002. You can read that post at this link.
Well, a few days ago, while working on a post for my blog about another movie that I saw at the Cine Core Movie Theatre, I made an interesting discovery on my bookshelf.
I re-discovered that I did, in fact, purchase "Ghost in the Shell" on DVD while living in Seoul, South Korea. The DVD was in a stack of DVDs that I packed in a box from when I moved from Catonsville, MD to Phoenix, AZ. There are some important Korean, Japanese, and Chinese films in that stack of DVDs. I just might make a series of blog posts about them. Stay tuned.
While looking over the DVD, I remembered that I bought the DVD at my favorite CD/DVD store located at the Yongsan Electronics Market near Yongsan Train Station. While I don't remember the name of the store, the store itself was located inside the ET Land Electronics Yongsan shopping mall. Boy, did I really get to know the ET Land Electronics Yongsan shopping mall really well. It was the perfect place to go to on a rainy or snowy Saturday afternoon. I remember seeing several movies at the movie theater there ("Underworld", "The Matrix Reloaded", "The Matrix Revolutions"). There was also a multi-story LG Department Store. It was fun just to walk through and look at all of the LG-related gadgets for sale (TVs, DVD players, video cameras, cell phones, rice cookers, etc). Then, there was store-after-store consisting of desktop computers, laptop computers, video game devices, cameras, cell phones, and just about any kind of computer part that you could ever need. Along the sidewalk there were vendors selling all kinds of hardware tools. Then, if you were hungry, there was food. Korean street food to be specific. Sorry, if you wanted to go to, say, Taco Bell, Anthony's Pizza, or Robin Hood Sandwiches, you had to go to the PX area on Yongsan Garrison.
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| ET Land Electronics Yongsan and Yongsan Station Area |
Based on my research of the area on Google Maps, it looks like the CD/DVD store that I used to frequent at the ET Land Electronics Yongsan shopping mall is no longer open. I think it was a small, independently owned business. What made the location of the store kind of odd was that you could buy pirated copies of the latest Hollywood movies on DVD. I remember seeing U.S. military personnel going crazy buying up pirated DVDs to take back up to Camp Casey or Camp Red Cloud or Yongsan Garrison.
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| ET Land Electronics Yongsan Shopping Mall |
To be honest, I never bothered buying any of the pirated DVDs. When I had an apartment in Hannam-Dong, my roommate at the time bought "Kill Bill" on a pirated DVD. It was nearly impossible to watch. Someone recorded the film using a hand-held video camera while inside a movie theatre. As a result, both the audio and picture quality were poor. Besides, I was interested in watching South Korean movies. Nobody bootlegged South Korean movies.
Manga Entertainment Presents...
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| South Korean DVD Cover for "Ghost in the Shell" (1995) |
The cover of the 2002 South Korean DVD release for "Ghost in the Shell" features the awesome artwork from the creator of the "Ghost in the Shell" manga himself, Masamune Shirow. Yes, that is how the main character of "Ghost in the Shell", Major Motoko Kusanagi, looks like in the manga. Film director Mamoru Oshii's visualization of the character is quite similar to Shirow's. However, there is a BIG difference between the personalities of Major Motoko Kusanagi in the manga and in the movie. In Shirow's manga, Major Motoko Kusanagi has a bubbly, warm, and, well, sexy personality. She also has a sense of humor. In Oshii's film, the character is completely different. The Major is cold, calculating, and distant. She also is fully aware that the only thing that's not artificial about her is her brain. Hence, the title "Ghost in the Shell".
At the time, Manga Entertainment had the video rights to some of the best animated films that had come out of Japan in the 1990s. In addition to "Ghost in the Shell", Manga Video also released "Ninja Scroll", "Perfect Blue", "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honniamise", and "Macross Plus". While in South Korea, a co-worker lent me some animated DVDs to watch at night while on CQ (charge of quarters) duty at the barracks. I was hooked. As a result, I bought my own copies of Yoshiaki Kawajiri's "Ninja Scroll", Satoshi Kon's "Perfect Blue", Hiroyuki Yamaga's Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise", and Shoji Kawamori's "Macross Plus". For a while, Manga Entertainment seemed to be an important company when it came to releasing Japanese animated films in the United States. I remember that Manga Entertainment used to have a really cool website. Then, like competitors ADV Films and Bandai Visual, they just gradually faded away as streaming began to replace DVDs and videotapes.
The Korean DVD of "Ghost in the Shell" has the logo for Dawoori Entertainment on the cover. Thus, I'm guessing that Dawoori Entertainment licensed "Ghost in the Shell" for release on DVD in South Korea. The South Korean DVD comes as a two-disc set with one DVD the film itself and the second DVD containing all of the behind-the-scenes features that fans of "Ghost in the Shell" will just eat up. My guess is that the behind-the-scenes features are the same ones on the American Manga Video release. The only difference is that there are Korean subtitles. The Korean DVD also contains an interesting 16-page booklet that features short articles about the world of "Ghost in the Shell". The booklet also contains a short interview with Mamoru Oshii and ends with a brief article about Japanimation. The booklet is almost exclusively in Korean.
Lastly, the Korean DVD for "Ghost in the Shell" has a Region 3 encoding. What that means is that in order to watch the DVD you need either a DVD player that is configured to play Region 3 DVDs or a region-free DVD player. When I lived in Seoul and started buying Korean, Japanese, and Hong Kong DVDs, I bought a region-free DVD player made by Sharp Electronics (Remember Sharp?) from eBay. I remember having the idea going to the Yongsan Electronics Market on a Saturday or Sunday and trying to find a region-free DVD player. I probably could have found one. However, I never did it. Nowadays, the VLC Media Player has the capability to play DVDs from any region. It was a sad day at my apartment in Catonsville, MD when I discovered that my Sharp region-free DVD player no longer worked.
Technological obsolescence happens, right?
Here are some photos of the South Korean DVD for Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell".
One Last Thing...
I know that I have a copy of Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell" in a box somewhere in my storage unit in Surprise, AZ. I should go and see if I can find it. I have only read about one-quarter of the way through the manga. Everytime I start reading "Ghost in the Shell", something comes up to distract me away. It never fails. Well, guess what? That will have to change. However, it will have to wait as I am reading my way through Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" trilogy of books.
