I bought the Gunsmith Cats OVA called 'Bulletproof' awhile back off of Ebay for about $20. Since it's a rare find I thought it was a steal! Once it it arrived I watched it the same night. Not paying attention to the markings on the DVD case, I threw it in my DVD player and fired the thing up. The main menu looked pretty ghetto and had a purple red tint to it on a blue background and instead of a 'play' option, it just said 'Natural High' (At the time I didn't know what that was but I soon found out it was the title of the first episode of the OVA. What about the other two episodes?) No trailers or extras either. Just 'Natural High', scene selection, and language options. What was weird is that the only language options where English and Chinese. Chinese? What the fuck? I would expect English and Japanese but Japanese wasn't even an option, only English and Chinese. Strange, but I just figured it was some sort of weird release and thought that Japanese audio wasn't needed for some reason. So I watched it and while I do think the manga is far superior, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Kind of depressing there wasn't much extra stuff but whatever.
Fast forward to about a week ago. I was in Half Price Books with a friend and I noticed a copy of Gunsmith Cats: Bulletproof was in the DVD's section. It was the Anime Essentials release. It looked totally different from the DVD of GSC I had bought months ago. It prompted me to search around online once I got home to look if there where multiple releases of the GSC OVA. Sure enough, there was. But there were only two! The original one and the Anime Essentials one. Both of them had slightly different covers and even had an artwork insert on the inside, something my copy lacked. My copy also had a transparent case, unlike the normal and Anime Essentials cases, which where all black. The discs also looked slightly different. When I got home to look at my copy, I noticed that the text on the back was all in Japanese. Now I had noticed this earlier when I first got it but I didn't give it any second thoughts. Now I started to because the other two releases I had seen had english on the back. I looked on the different looking disc in my clear case copy and discovered that it had been published and distributed by a Hong Kong company called 'Anime Studio'. At first I thought this was some freaky, ghetto but official Hong Kong release I had picked up but after further investigation I found out here that this Hong Kong company 'Anime Studio' was indeed a bootleg company. No wonder my copy lacked any publisher markings and a different case sleeve. I wasn't mad though, I thought it was pretty interesting. Finding a bootleg copy of GSC: Bulletproof...and I've looked around and I can't find it anywhere else, so to me it's a rare and rather interesting find. So I bought the real GSC: Bulletproof in both its original release and the Anime Essentials release, for not much at all. Both in great condition as well. I popped in the original release and noticed the menu had a blue hue as opposed to the red one in my bootleg copy and that it had all three episode selections and not just 'Natural High'. Not to confuse, but my bootleg did have all three episodes but it only listed one, where as the real version lists all three and it's chapters. It also had a 30 minute 'the making of' and trailers and previews to other animes, another thing my bootleg copy lacked.
Here's some pictures of the differences between the two DVD's. Bootleg on the right, original on the left:
Front covers Back sides Bootleg on top The insides The intro that comes up instead of FBI Warning or ADV films Original menu Bootleg menu Language selection in the bootleg Chinese subtitles (with that machine gun idiot from the manga, Bucky)
Boy what a strange find!
↧