Indigo League/Broadcast Season One (DVD/Blu-Ray)
BOX-ART
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DVD: There are three cases within an outer box. Each case within featuring renders of the characters & some of their Pokémon. The back lists each episode on the disc.
NOTE: Set one states, "EPISODES 1-26," on it, however, I'd like to note that "Beauty & The Beach" is omitted. Going by Japanese numbering it would be episode eighteen. An edited version of the episode was shown on KidsWB, but why it's not present on this boxset is unknown. Later re-releases of the Indigo League on DVD exclude "Holiday Hi-Jynx" but it is included here on the original 2008 set.
Blu-Ray: A single case is used here, with six discs inside you can flip through. The artwork is simple, with renders of Pikachu & the Kanto starters on the cover. The back has stills from the episodes with another Pikachu render. Beauty & the Beach is also absent on this set.
MENUS
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DVD: The menus are very basic & have, "Play All," and, "Episodes." There is no audio, however, there is some animation in the form of sparkles that move in the background. Character renders are also present.
Blu-Ray: Clips from the show play in the background with options to play all, and two sub menus for episodes and subtitles.
AUDIO
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DVD: The audio is encoded at a bitrate of 244 KB/s. Sometimes the audio can sound a bit muffled & at times quiet. Also, the background music overpowers the dialogue sometimes during action sequences and such.
Blu-Ray: Featured is a 2.0 DTS-HD MA 16 Bit track on all episodes. The quality sounds a bit more defined and less muffled, but nothing major.
VIDEO
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DVD: Each disc has about eight or nine episodes, which limits the bitrate a bit resulting in some slight blockiness during high action scenes. It's no where near as bad as some of the later sets. The first couple of seasons are from a composite tape source & suffer from dot-crawling & dull colors, which are all over the place and change from episode to episode. Some are dark & dull & some are bright and over saturated.
A remastering seems out of the question as there were about a hundred plus episodes mastered from film and then transferred to composite tape for broadcast. Most likely all of 4Kids material (IE. openings, credits, Who's That Pokémon, sequences, paint edits, etc.) was done on tape & would need to be redone or upscaled.
Blu-Ray: The video here is Upscaled, likely from the same tape source as the DVD's. The video doesn't look much better. Yes, a lot of tape artifacts have been cleaned up. Yes, the colors seem minutely better. The the compression is the only definitive improvement. At times during fast motion not all of the dot-crawling was filtered out. Two episodes near the end have this awful line doubling artifact that the DVD's did not.
EXTRAS
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The full PokéRap is included on both the DVD & Blu-Ray as an extra. On the DVD It cannot be accessed through a menu & you have to skip to the end of the last episode on the disc to view it. The Blu-Ray also has the weekly PokéRap at the end of each episode, as it was shown during premiere. Pikachu's Jukebox is also available on later episodes
Also included on the Blu-Ray, are the original bumpers that accompanied the premiere broadcasts, "We'll be right back after these messages," "And now back to our show," "Don't go away the PokéRap is next! " These are all absent from re-runs, VHS, and DVD releases.
The Blu-Ray also has who's that Pokemon quizzes on each disc and is made up of Pokemon from the episodes on that disc. There is also a who's that trainer quiz on the last disc, but is just the main human cast. It works sort of the way it does on the show, you're shown a silhouette, and when you click the next button it shows the full image with the name below. It's a neat little extra, and I was surprised it wasn't a complete copy/paste directly from show but, it wasn't quite what I was expecting when I first heard about it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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I really hate that after all this time Viz randomly decides they want to split the release in half & only do the first half on Blu-Ray. I get that KidsWB licensed the show every fifty-two or so episodes, but the first season is really meant to be the whole Indigo league. And while the quality certainly isn't reference on either format, it seems to be the best quality we're going to get! Even if the film still exists I doubt anyone, in Japan or stateside, will care enough to remaster the series properly.
TECH SPECS
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 9 DVD / 6 BD
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s) DVD / DTS-HD MA 16 Bit BD
SUBTITLES: English Closed Captions DVD / SDH BD
RUN-TIME: 21 Hours 40 Minutes (BD)
Pikachu's Christmas Vacation
BOX-ART
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Atop a snowy blue background with snowflakes, we have a render of Pikachu & a Christmas tree. The back also has a render of a tree, but with Pokémon playing in the snow too. In the center is a list of each "episode" with a brief description underneath. Interestingly, this is the only Pokémon DVD in the U.S to released by Platinum Disc Corporation.
MENUS
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A static menu with options to play all or select an episode is presented, along with a loop of the main theme of Winter Vacation. A render of Pikachu & Togepi on a sleigh in the snow along with a Christmas tree are also present on either side of the screen.
AUDIO
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A stereo English track at 192 KB/s is all that's present.
VIDEO
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The video quality is basically the same as what the main series was at the time. While this was released in the mid 2000's in the U.S, these shorts were made in Japan in the 90's. The colors are dull & dark, and there's lots of analogue tape noise. Despite the majority of the shorts being cel animated, some small sequences, such as interludes & credits, are digitally animated. The only difference is that these sequences have much better coloring. Compression is decent enough, but they could have easily maxed the bitrate out since the run-time is so low, about three gigabytes of data go wasted on the disc!
FINAL THOUGHTS
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More Christmas shorts are available, however they were only released on VHS in the U.S. In the other parts of the world, (Such as the U.K, Australia, Germany, France) all the Christmas shorts are available as part of the Pokémon Chronicles sets.
I love that they used to do stuff like this, but now they seem to avoid holiday specials.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 4:3/1.33:1 (Original Fullscreen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 1
DISC SIZE: Single-Layer (1.51 Gb)
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (192 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: None
RUN-TIME: 45 Minutes
Adventure On The Orange Islands
BOX-ART
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The cover features Ash and his various Pokémon on a blue background. The back has a description of the season, with more Pokémon renders. This set uses three slim cases, each with a different island scene on them. The back of each case lists which episode on are the disc.
A small side note this set & Battle Frontier are the only sets to use slim cases.
MENUS
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All menus are static with no music, most likely because because there wasn't enough room for bells & whistles. All discs have options to play all, select episodes, and turn on/off subtitles, with disc one also having a trailer for Pokémon 4Ever. With disc one's menu the episodes are overlaid on top of three islands for you to select, while discs two and three just have renders beside each episode along with options to play the episode from start to finish, start after the intro theme, or at the reveal of, "Who's That Pokémon?"
NOTE: On disc one the intro & credits are omitted from each episode, but are available to watch via the episode select menu. Discs two and three play each episode in tact.
AUDIO
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A 192 KB/s stereo track is included, it sounds about the the same as season one's audio. Quite muffled and dated sounding, but fine.
VIDEO
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The quality is essentially the same as the Indigo League, very inconstant & dated, except for one huge difference: Compression! Squeezing about a dozen episodes onto a single disc is too many! There is heavy mosquito noise present in every episode, along with some noticeable color banding at times, no doubt caused by all the compression.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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Thanks to Viz Media's compression, this is easily the worst looking box-set in terms of quality! Now, this season was released in slightly different packaging, but still with massive compression issues. In addition to this, two episodes featuring Jynx were removed! Purely because of the two missing episodes, I would recommend the original box-set.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 3
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (192 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: English
RUN-TIME: 12 Hours 40 Minutes
Johto League Journeys
BOX-ART
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Like the previous season, we have a render of Ash & some Pokémon posing over a magenta background. The background has a description of the season, with more Pokémon renders and tech. specs. below.
MENUS
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The menus are in anamorphic widescreen, with options to select an episode or play all. No audio is played, and menus are decorated with various Pokémon renders.
AUDIO
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A stereo English track is presented at 256 KB/s. I was bit surprised that despite the compression, they opted to used a rather high bit-rate for the audio!
VIDEO
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Similarly to the previous season we have quite a bit of compression here, not nearly as much, but still noticeable. Starting with this set it seems either Viz or The Pokémon Company have been editing the episodes, to remove or reduce over-scan it seems, but doing so in such a way that leaves undesirable artifacts. This weird edge smearing is present in all of the episodes except three or four. It's also worth noting that one of the episodes towards the end of the season looks as if maybe the NTSC transfer was lost and they were using a PAL version with LOTS of ghosting artifacts. Colors and contrast still have that unbalanced look the previous seasons have.
The episodes have the Pokémon Kareokémon musical segments after each episode that the original volume sets didn't. Also speaking of the original volumes the final two episodes, which were never released, are included here in this set!
FINAL THOUGHTS
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For the longest time the original DVD sets were all that was available, and they were so expensive, and I could never get this season, so It's nice to have it. However, the quality was a bit of a let down to be honest, the compression on the original sets is quite a bit better, but they just cost way too much and there's way to many of them to track them all down. So, I'll have to settle for this set as will most people since it seems no Blu-Rays are coming out either.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 4
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: None
RUN-TIME: 15 Hours 20 Minutes
Johto League Champions
BOX-ART
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Despite the back of the box saying that there are five discs, there are actually six. The rest is identical to the previous sets, Ash & Pokémon renders, etc. The set uses a purple and green color scheme.
MENUS
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The same style of menus as the last set are used.
AUDIO
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Despite the last set being Dolby 2.0 at 256 KB/s, this one was reduced to 224 KB/s.
VIDEO
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This set is similar to the indigo sets, average compression with none of that edge smearing the last set had. Lots of dot-crawl and mediocre colors/contrast, which is par for course on these first few seasons using tape transfers. It is worth noting that two episodes in the middle of the season look as if maybe the NTSC transfer was lost and they were using a PAL version with LOTS of ghosting artifacts.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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This season is really just more of the same, not all the different than the previous season. I guess that's why a lot of people dislike the Joho saga. The pacing is rather slow with a lot of filler, but frankly that's the whole series!
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 6
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: None
RUN-TIME: 20 Hours 20 Minutes
Master Quest Complete Collection
BOX-ART
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The artwork layout is identical to the previous sets, Ash & Pokémon renders, etc. The set uses a red and yellow color scheme.
MENUS
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Again, the menus are in the same style as the last few sets.
AUDIO
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English 2.0 at 224 KB/s.
VIDEO
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Like Johto League Journey's, the majority of the episodes on this set have a smeary line doubling effect. The final dozen or so episodes don't appear to have this effect. My hunch, is that the scaling of interlaced footage caused this effect, but since the final few episodes don't seem to be cropped & they don't exhibit the artifact.
With the show switching to digital, I guess over-scan was no longer an issue? I just don't understand why they didn't bother to edit the episodes with the previous set, but they did on this one.
Speaking of digital, the show switches to digital on episode six of disc six. "Here's Lookin' at you Elekid," and, "You're A Star Larvitar," both exhibit the line doubling artifact, but the rest of the episodes on disc six & seven do not. The episodes that come from tape masters look identical to the previous set, while the digital episodes looks quite a bit better. Colors & brightness get a huge boost looking very light and almost pastel in contrast to the more muddied/washed out earthy tones of the older film-to-tape transfers. The overall image is a bit blurry though. There's also some graininess to the image that you wouldn't expect from a digital presentation.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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With the original DVD release being split between two separate purchases, it was quite difficult to find them at a reasonable price with them being long out-of-print and all. I'd say this complete all in one set is great, and much cheaper than trying to find the original set. Even if it may not have the line doubling issue it's bound to have worse compression as the set was six discs as opposed to this sets seven.
This season marks the end of an era for the series. It's the last season to use cel animation, but also the first to use digital. It's the last season to feature Brock & Misty as cast regulars. It's the final series to be entirely dubbed by 4Kids. In Japan it's considered the end of the original series, even though I think most of the international community considers Johto the second series rather than part of the first.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 7
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: Closed Captions
RUN-TIME: 23 Hours
Advanced Complete Collection
BOX-ART
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The artwork layout is identical to the previous sets, Ash & Pokémon renders, etc. The set uses an orange and yellow color scheme.
MENUS
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The menus are very basic and have, "Play All," and, Episodes." There is no audio. Character renders are also present, with sparkles behind them.
AUDIO
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The audio is encoded at a bitrate of 244 KB/s. Sometimes background music overpowers the dialogue during action sequences and such, however, this has pretty much always been the case with the show.
VIDEO
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This is the first season to be colored fully digital from the get-go, instead of being traditional inked cels. As such, the colors look much, much better and are more accurate. Many people were upset about Jessie's hair changing from red to pink at the end of Johto, however, it was always pink; digital colors are just that much more accurate than the old film transfers ever were!
Comparing the quality to the single volumes, there are a few tiny differences. As far as bitrate is concerned it's about the same I'd imagine, instead of four episodes per one DVD-5 we now have eight episodes per one DVD-9. Over-scan has been cropped out removing any impurity's along the edge. This is a continuing trend with these re-releases since we're now in the high definition LCD era, I suppose.
There is, however, one small issue with the quality... Similarly to some of the previous season there's a strange edge smearing look that appears in every episode. It's most likely as a result of cropping and re-scaling the images horizontally. It's no where near as distracting as in the previous seasons fortunately.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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It's so nice to finally have the whole season in one box. I wish whoever is editing the episodes would properly scale the images to avoid the edge smearing, but it's a small detail flaw.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 5
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: English Closed Captions
RUN-TIME: 23 Hours
Advanced Battle Complete Collection
BOX-ART
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The cover features Ash & his Pikachu and May & her Torchic, who (SPOILER ALERT) evolved in the previous season, so I'm unsure as to why they're using this render instead of something that's actually from this season...ugh, I really dislike Viz Media & their inaccurate covers.
MENUS
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The menus are very basic and have, play all, episodes, and a setup menus for turning subtitles on or off. There is no audio and the only animation is flowers that spin in the background. Pokémon renders are also present, usually ones that will appear in one of the episodes on the disc. As with most of the recent re-release box-sets, the menus are anamophic widescreen.
AUDIO
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The audio is encoded at a bitrate of 244 KB/s which is slightly higher than the 192 KB/s the individual volume releases of the season had.
VIDEO
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While the quality of the first dozen episodes is pretty much the same quality we've had ever since switching to digital animation late in the Johto saga, starting with episode thirteen the show switches to a sharper clearer look. I read in an article online a while back, that when the show first made the switch to digital, the producers added a grainy blurred look to the episodes to make them seem more like the original animation that people were used to. They slowly lessened the effect making the show sharper and more modern looking and now the series finally looks as good as the Return of Mewtwo special released back in the early 2000's.
Note: A link to this article is below.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2016-12-09/why-does-pokemon-look-so-different-now/.109646
Comparing the quality to the single volumes, there are a few tiny differences. The episodes look quite a bit sharper and the colors are ever so slightly better. (Comparisons between these set's will be in the screenshots!)
Now, having about three hours or so of content on each disc is bound to leave the episodes looking blocky as heck, right? Well, honestly, it looks good. Unlike the older seasons which were analog and full of noise, even before compression, these newer seasons are digital and very clean resulting in better compression at lower bitrates.
Now, as with most Viz sets, here's the bad part. While previous sets suffer from weird smearing effects, only two episodes in this set have that. (Episode 13; the first one to switch over to the sharper look, and one other episode.) Aside from those, the episodes all look normal...aside from the constant ghosting artifacts in EVERY SINGLE SCENE! My theory is that they were either A: using PAL transfers, which obviously would cause blending due to frame rate conversion. Or B: Someone very poorly deinterlaced the 60 fields to make 30 frames.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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Again, It's nice to finally have the whole season in one box, but I wish whoever is editing the episodes would do so properly to avoid all these issues.
After this set I don't have any more full season sets. I have the first volumes of Diamond & Pearl & Black & White, but I'm not sure if I'd review them or not. But here's a short rundown: The Diamond & Pearl one looks nice & sharp, and while the Black & White ones are from an HD source they look awfully processed & soft. I don't think Viz did a great job with the early HD stuff & I wonder if they got better with later material.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 9
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (224 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: English
RUN-TIME: 20 Hours
