Wasn’t sure what the first article on the new FBR would be. I figured an anime review (and in fact I was in the middle of working on one.) But then I saw an image in my head and knew what it had to be. That image is right above, from Superman vs. The Elite

After all the discussion about Man of Steel (which to be honest, I still haven’t seen… Just no drive to want to see) more and more people seem to be having a discussion comic fans have rolled around and had hundreds of times (who am I kidding, thousands, millions, it never ends.) Is Superman relevant in our darker world? Is he just a boy scout no one can relate to anymore? Does Superman need to be gritty? Continue reading →

We’ve been gone awhile (combination of being busy and wanting to improve the site before relaunching it.)

We hope you’ll give the new FBR a chance. We’ve changed the theme to hopefully be cleaner and a bit easier to navigate, along with having a nice ‘Features’ area that should show our newest and most important articles and reviews.

We’ve switched comments over to Disqus and you can post as guests if you want.

As far as staff goes, I’ll be here as always writing and going over materials with everyone else. Justin is back doing our web work again, and hopefully will join in writing when he can. Alex is back to helping with editing. We’ve also added Logan, a helpful guy with a great love for mecha to write reviews. I’m talking to a few other people who hopefully will show up before to long.

We are still cleaning up, but since everything was basically done decided it was time to launch. The first article of the new FBR should be up within an hour or two, and we are also working on a small stack of anime reviews for upcoming products and a few older releases.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to let us know.

 
Introduction by Marc- We get to welcome a new staff member to FBR today.  Heath will be writing some editorials and reviews for us in the future.  Many Dragonball Z fans will know him as Hujio, from one of the premiere American DBZ sites, Kanzentai.  For his first article he wrote up a little history of DBZ DVDs, including some of his personal thoughts on the matter.  I actually asked him to do this prior to his first review because a lot of the more casual DBZ fans out there don’t get why the announcement of the American ‘Dragon Boxes’ are such a big deal to many of the more hardcore DBZ lovers.  So I’ll pass the dragonball over to Heath for his initial post at FBR.
 

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Am I the only person curious how Funimation will do Nerima Daikon Brothers?

ADV’s three volume release had quite a few really good extras (I don’t think anything would beat the live action NDB).

ADV’s 3 disk thinpak had none.

What will Funimation’s version have?  I hope they keep all the extras in what will no doubt be a 2 disk thinpak box.

As everyone knows Toei started doing stuff OnDemand via Direct2Drive.

After getting a few of these, and being underwhelmed by the horrid video quality, I now need to ask this very serious question.

Is Toei USA committing fraud?

I show you this screenshot that is on the Pretty Cure sales page.  This is supposed to be a screenshot from the show, to be used as a gauge on the video quality, to help you decide if you want to buy it or not.

Relatively nice picture quality isn’t it?

So what is the problem?

Well… here is the same picture, taken by me, from the first episode of the series, as it is available to buy.

Ignore the credits, afterall, it would be fair for them to use a scene from the opening, but remove the credits to help people gauge the video quality.

Compare the actual picture quality.  The resolution is bigger, but let’s ignore that.  The screenshot they have as an example has bright vivid colors and is very clean.  The episode itself has rainbowing, artifacing issues, is pixelated, and may have very well been copied from a VHS tape.  Compare stuff like the girls’ hair, the sunlight, the pipe in the bottom left.

This is dishonest advertising at it’s worst.  This is an unacceptable way to do business, especially when you are trying to sell a show with an extremely niche audience anyways.  The video quality for Toei OnDemand’s other three shows: Digimon Adventure 02, Slam Dunk, and Fist of the North Star, is also very poor, but the screenshots from those shows are at least accurate in showing that.

I suggest fans of Pretty Cure and anime in general vote with their wallets and not purchase episodes of the series to show this isn’t acceptable.

So what do you think?  Is Toei USA committing fraud by being dishonest like this?

Since I know a few people out there (myself included) are Ben 10 fans I thought I would go over an issue with the Ben 10 Season 4 DVD set.

The “Secret of the Omnitrix” movie (all 4 versions of it: Red, Blue, Gold, and Red w/ trivia popups) are on the second disk of the Season 4 set. Continue reading →

Welcome to The Fanboy Review.

We’ve launched TFR as a place to report the news of, review, and just talk about the kind of stuff we like. I previously reported news at WtW News (and in fact still own it), but because it was a Digimon site it was hard for people at other sites to take the news we broke seriously. With WtW merging with another site it no longer made sense for non Digimon news to be reported at the site.

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