Another collaboration with Kineko Video—been a while since I've done a movie film scan release, and despite my snail pace I've been itching to do another one of these too, so believe me when I say I'm happy about this particular release :^)
Today on the menu we have Shakotan Boogie—a 1987 live-action film adaptation of the manga of the same name by Michiharu Kusunoki. The manga chronicles the misadventures of two Japanese teens who are into lowriders, known as "shakotan" in Japan. Given the type of manga that the source material is and the company that produced this, this movie's plot is kind of all over the place. I don't mean that in a bad way or anything, it's just how these manga film adaptations in the 80s are typically made—Igano Kabamaru & the first Be-Bop High School movie kinda fall under this same category too where the movie seems like a compilation of various chapters adapted into film. I enjoyed watching this regardless but be warned in case that type of movie isn't to your liking.
Anyways—a copy of this movie was listed for sale online back in 2021. Didn't want to waste any chances, so I went & grabbed it. This wasn't scanned until mid-2024 I believe... the movie was later finished with timing & translation in Sept. 2024 but I did absolutely nothing with it until a few months ago where I finally got off my ass and began editing this movie & sending it out for both TLC & QC.
The film copy I got does have your fair share of wear & tear throughout, with the occasional scratching & dirt marks—it's more noticeable during the reel changes but I'd argue it's pretty minor throughout the movie and it's not super bad to the point of it distracting the viewer. Colors are pretty good too, which I consider impressive given the condition this was in! Worth noting though that there is one spot in the movie past the 1hr mark where it skips for like 2 frames—not too jarring, but unfortunately I can't do anything about that.
The audio is a completely different story, though... for some reason, there were multiple points throughout this movie in which there would be very loud audible buzzing heard in the background. Re-scanning the movie did fix the buzzing in some spots but introduced new buzzing in other sections where it previously wasn't heard before and the whole thing began a mess to deal with—so ultimately it was decided to mix both the film reel's optical audio with audio from the movie's VHS version. I would have preferred LD audio but copies for that go up for way higher than what I would prefer to spend, so VHS was the preferred option here.
I think that's it. Not sure what else to add here. This movie never got a DVD release and whatever is on streaming over at Amazon JP uses a shitty tape master, so this is probably the only way to be able to see this in HD at all for now.
You can grab this release at the usual spot.
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