Princesses of Power, or, Things You Can Buy in Germany · 6:16pm Jun 26th, 2018
Okay, bear with me here.
It may come as a shock to some of you that I am a lifelong fan of the Girl Cartoon aesthetic. I was watching Lady Lovelylocks unironically in my prepubescent years, long before this whole Pony thing began. One of my faves is the incomparably schlocky and often cringeworthy distaff entry in the Masters of the Universe brand, She-Ra Princess of Power. Unfortunately, US distribution rights are tied up by Mill Creek who issued a Complete Series DVD like one time back in 2011, and by now they cost their literal weight in precious metal on the open market.
Much like the Tales of Equestria books I need to complete my collection, some things are much easier to obtain in Europe, and guess where I'm going to be in a month! You don't have to guess, I'm going to GalaCon in Ludwigsburg. My German is ramping up to travel status thanks to Duolingo but is nowhere near good enough to answer fine details, so, I turn to my blog--sphere...
https://www.amazon.de/She-Ra-Princess-Power-komplette-Serie/dp/B007CZAUM4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530036312&sr=8-1&keywords=She+ra
1. Is this in fact a region-unlocked complete series (both first and second seasons) on DVD? I am confused, as the American release had nine discs and I doubt there were that many special features. I live in Region 1 so I would need it to work there.
2. Are any locals coming to Galacon that I could reimburse for this to avoid injurious international shipping?
I am going to Galacon this month, I can also speak English. And you’re probably find many many English speaking people there too because a lot of people from the UK come to Germany just for that.
Says All regions, and has english and german voiceacting (but german subtitles, no idea if you can turn it off or not).
Reading some of the comments, it seems the episodes arent in chronological order in some cases (might not be, you cant generally always trust in all comments but its a more neutral review then nostalgia filled "omg its great" 5 star ones i guess).
Apparently lacks any extra content that you can get if you get individual dvds of the episodes ?
It directly says "Komplette Serie. Über 33 Stunden Laufzeit, verbesserte Bildqualität" on the cover. Translation: "Complete Series. Over 33 hours runtime, improved image quality".
And one of the comments seems to confirm it's the whole show. ("knapp 16 € für die komplette Serie sind echt ein Schnäppchen" = "the whole series for just about 16 € is really super cheap".)
>"Die Folgen sind NICHT CHRONOLOGISCH, sondern NACH INHALT geordnet!"
93 episodes - but apparently NOT sorted chronologically, but by ... "theme", apparently? Whatever that means.
... except it also says "Format: Dolby, PAL, Box-Set, Full View" at the top, don't the US use NTSC?
Then again... 16,85 € seems a pretty good bargain if it's as rare as you say. Or used for 9,99€.
So I'd say... just risk it. If it turns out it doesn't work ... not much money lost. Or, just use a PC. That'll probably work, given the right software.
I found the same problem myself - in the UK, we got a release of the first half of the series and never the second one. I bought what I suspect is what you are looking at myself as it was the only way fo me to get the latter half of the series. (Though I have not actually watched it myself yet, but it does (according to the folk on amazon.co.uk where I bought mine from) indeed come with English - a lot of non-UK specific DVDs from Europe do, actually. You might have to deal with the menus and episode titles being in German, but that's not a huge issue - a lingual inept like myself should be able to manage it, after all!)
I am not sure if it is region free - I long ago knew that to get a region-free DVD player, one only had to buy a cheap one and find the unlock code online; a necessity, sine the UK DVD market is... Shoddy at best. (Even with stuff like pony. I bitterly regret buying season 1 from the UK release, it was just crap, the episodes completely out of order and nowhere on the DVDs, or the cover a listing; I bought seasons 2 through 4 as US imports, which were not only in order with episode lists, but actually CHEAPER. And for other things - e.g. Earthworm Jim - i have been forced to buy from Australia - literally the other side of the world.)
Heck, if all else fails these days, most PC software doesn't give two flying frags about regions (and if it does, you just download one that doesn't.)
Regioning was a horrible, horrible, horrible anti-consumer idea, a system explicitly designed for companies to to try and screw every one with that never should have been allowed to happen and the people that came up with it need to have their souls set on lightning. (And when I do finally take over, they absolutely will, regardless of their mortaliy state, because there's little place to hide from an irate necromancer.)
Ahem. But I digress.
So, yes, I would say that - given that there is probably no other option - go for it and if necessary, worry abotu dealing with any region problems later.
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Yeah, the PAL is probably going to be a problem, hm.
This made me feel good for not having forgotten so much of the German I'd learned. I thought I was worse than it turned out to be. Far as I can tell, it's definitely listing PAL so you might need to pick up a cheap DVD player out there and bring it home with you. Maybe a outlet converter too, since I hear they are slightly different as well.
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That was exactly my impression as well.
Luckily the difference between a PAL and NTSC disc is not as bad as the difference between the associated broadcast standards. PAL DVDs have a 720x576 resolution, instead of 720x480, and they run at 25 fps instead of 29.97 fps. When the 24 fps animation source is prepared for an NTSC disc, the framerate difference is usually corrected via a 3:2 pulldown process called "telecine" that mixes additional frames out of the existing fields — but the difference to the PAL standard is so small, that they usually take the shortcut of just speeding up the source by ~4% to get from 24 to 25 fps. Be prepared for the English audio to be slightly higher pitched than you remember from your childhood, unless you watch it on a computer with a media player that allows you to override the framerate set in the MPEG2 stream of the DVD.
Poser. Real fans of the Girl Cartoon aesthetic watched Rainbow Brite.
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Unless you intend to watch it on an ancient CRT TV with an equally ancient first-generation DVD player, there's a very good chance that a region-free PAL DVD will work just fine for you, apart from the 4% speedup I mentioned. A DVD player and TV manufactured in the last decade or so will likely have no problem.
The analogue PAL and NTSC broadcast signals were very different, and consequently so were any VCR tapes made of them. They needed completely different decoders, and a TV that could run at the correct refresh rate (50hz or 60hz), which was linked to the frequency of the country's AC lines.
But since PAL and NTSC DVDs are both identically encoded MPEG2 video streams, with just slight differences in the vertical scaling factor and framerate, the electronics inside a DVD player and modern TV usually have no problem handling either format seamlessly. I have used non-region-locked NTSC DVDs imported from the States in several different DVD players, connected to different TVs without problem, and there's no reason why the reverse should be any different.
Drugs are bad.
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3rainbow5me
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... I was more a fan of She-ra and Jem and the Holograms, myself.
You know what you can’t get in Germany?
A goal against South Korea
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SHOTS FIRED