Piyo Piyo Productions presents:
Techno Police 21C
1/31/16
Another title rescued from the dustbin of time! You should check out the Wikipedia entry for this title - it has a interesting history and staff behind it. The short version: This was meant to be a TV series, but something went horribly wrong, and somehow after FOUR YEARS they only had enough footage for two episodes. I'd love to hear the story behind that one. In any event, they slapped together what they had finished and called it a movie - Because so long as you're going to release your unfinished product you may as well make your audience pay to see it, right?
How unfinished was this project? Well, check out the 07:26 mark - half the audience is only... well, half there. Several scenes are monochromatic, allegedly to save money. A number of sequences are mis-framed, including the first twelve minutes being shifted over to the right!
Is it any good? Well, I haven't seen it translated at all, but I have to say, at first glance, it looks like it might be decent despite its faults. One wonders how an entire TV series would have been, had things not been so bungled.
After the movie there are a bunch of ancient computer renderings from the show. If you ever wanted to see how computers circa 1982 performed, here's your chance. Spoilers: By today's standards, they were pretty crap. Kinda brought back memories of playing old text-graphic adventures on my Commodore 64: Borrowed Time, Mindshadow, Silicon Dreams, etc. Unfortunately, these were extremely jittery, and my de-jittering filter could only do so much. It looks terrible either way, so I rolled with the filtered version.
This title also had a lot of rainbowing. I knocked out the worst of it, but you can still find some here and there. If somebody out there wants to try to do better, I have, as always, included an untouched DVD conversion for archival purposes.
I have not, however, scanned the LD jacket and inlay, as my old Epson Expression 1640XL scanner was recently murdered by a cup of coffee.