https://nyaa.si/view/1933534
Fansub credits can be found in the link above.
Godzilla 1984 had been on my watchlist for a while now—much like most other things on there, I've never really got to it that quickly due to the number of vinyl & fansub projects I keep involving myself in. Such is the life, I guess...!
Last year I finally brought it upon myself to sit down and get to this movie for once.
The verdict? I thought it was okay. Certainly better than the OG though, that one's a borefest.
However...
The subs I used for watching were from the official US BD that was released in 2016, now out of print. The subs didn't appear to look bad to me at first, but I wasn't a fan of how the lines were typeset and timed. I contacted Yume again for his assistance on re-timing the whole thing, but during the process he had found that there were actually various lines that were mistranslated or just not subbed at all. To make matters worse, the folks over at Criterion—who, at the time of me writing this, have the movie licensed but only available on their streaming service—re-used these very same BD subs for their release of the movie, too!
I figured at this point that I might as well just get the subs fixed in their entirety while I was at it.
Here's what you can expect to see in this release:
- Re-translation & re-timing
Don't get the wrong idea—the whole movie isn't re-subbed from scratch! There are lots of lines from the US BD that were kept intact, but likewise, lines that were missed, mistranslated, or looking funky in general have been fixed by Yume. According to his notes, easy lines weren't a problem for the OG translator but they seemed to have struggled a bit during wordy dialogue. Some Russian lines were also left out, but thankfully Yume managed to get those subbed too.
The JP BD had JP captions included, so these were used for reference by Yume throughout this movie.
Also, lots
of lines in the subs were re-timed and/or re-worded in order to try
& make them stay on-screen for a little longer, as I felt that they
were too short length-wise. This also includes combining two lines into
one for various bits of dialogue throughout the movie. Yume & I made the decision to have the non-JP dialogue in this movie timed to their speech as opposed to being timed to the subs on-screen since the original on-screen timing of those lines aren't the best.
- "Takero Morimoto" & "Ground Self-Defense Force"
The name of a JP news broadcaster whose name shows up on-screen around the 25 min mark of the movie—due to the way his name was inserted into the subs alongside the dialogue, it resulted in the whole thing looking like a three-liner on-screen. Takero's name isn't mentioned again in the movie after this, so I deleted it since I don't deem it important enough to warrant staying on-screen.
Likewise, this is a similar situation for "Ground Self-Defense Force"—written on the JP army's
tanks/helicopters, this line was repeated several times throughout the
movie whenever these would show up on-screen. I deleted these too since I don't think keeping them is a must.
- On-screen text timing & adjustments
Some newspaper headlines show up halfway in the movie—these have been typeset thanks to Windii! Some other specific on-screen texts in the movie, as well as the title logo, have been typeset by me too.
Self-explanatory. It was previously unsubbed, probably because it's sung in English. My motto is to generally sub everything—even if it's already in English—so that hard-of-hearing people don't feel left out.
Thanks to sergiocampa &
Kitsukishi, Spanish subs are included with this release! These might be
the first ever Spanish subs, but don't take my word for it. I admittedly
haven't searched it up all that much, so I could be wrong.
- Lossless 2.0ch Stereo LaserDisc audio
I painfully stitched the LD stereo audio to this release. The 5.1ch track was left out, which I'll explain later.
I had actually gone and bought both the JP LD & BD releases of the movie—the LD for its digital lossless 2.0 stereo mix, and the BD for some extras. I was concerned that I had sorta bought the LD for nothing since the JP BD happened to contain the 2.0 mix as well, but I did a comparison of the two and I can happily say that the LD was not bought in vain: despite the BD having the 2.0 mix, it seemingly lost quality throughout the years and has more distortion in several spots than in the LD version.
When this project's re-timing was begun, the lines were originally re-timed to the US BD's 5.1ch track—the LD 2.0ch audio wasn't stitched in by me until much later. When I had begun my final watch of the movie, I had realized that the 5.1ch track actually moves around lots of dialogue and placed them forwards or backwards by a few seconds. Ultimately this meant that I would have had to create various sets of subs—one for the 2.0ch audio, and one for the 5.1ch audio.
In the end, I just stuck with removing the 5.1ch audio and re-timing some lines to the 2.0ch audio instead. I don't know if it's because I didn't use the
right equipment when listening to it but the sound quality of the 5.1ch audio wasn't very good anyways—dialogue on it doesn't sound as clear as the 2.0ch
track and some silent sections got awkwardly muted out with a video
editor in a way that makes it extremely noticeable. It's very jarring. I don't know if the JP BD's 5.1ch audio is better, but I have no experience with stitching those to movies, so I didn't bother with it.
The US BD had the English dub included but I removed it for this release. It's a fucking travesty to listen to and nobody should be subjected to it.
That should be everything. Here are some final notes:
-Despite me having bought the JP BD of this movie, I used the US BD as the main video source. Maybe my eyes are deceiving me but I swear it looked like the JP BD had a green tint to it... the US BD didn't have it, so I stuck with that.
-Realistically speaking, I probably won't be able to get to this for a while, but I'd like to put out a v2 release of this movie someday. The JP BD has various extras I want to get subbed, and I actually also want to go & stitch in the audio from the movie's drama-hen LP release...but all of that takes time and I am just simply too busy with other projects at the moment.
-Criterion announced a physical release of Godzilla vs. Biollante back during 2024's final months, set for release this year. Toho is also set to release Godzilla 1984 in 4K for the first time this year as well. Naturally, people are suspecting that Criterion will announce a physical release for this movie once the 4K is out... I too suspect this will happen. Criterion's Biollante release is only using 5.1ch audio (no 2.0ch stereo), so there's a possibility that their Godzilla 1984 release might go down that same route, too. Even if they end up putting it out with a completely new translation, I'm still proud of the typesetting done for this release and I'm absolutely certain their release won't have neither that nor the Spanish subs. Having said that, I will not be removing my release of the movie even if they go through with announcing their own version, unless it actually turns out to be an improvement over mine sub & translation-wise.
Enjoy!
