Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

Satomi Hakkenden, one of my all time favorite movies, and one that I have mentioned many times is now out on DVD.

http://www.kurotokagi.com/

I have never ordered anything from these guys before. Any feedback?

Stan Sakai wrote: I have never ordered anything from these guys before. Any feedback?

I haven't, but this site seems a bit suspect to me. I think that this is probably a site selling bootleg discs. I couldn't find any listing to for the original Satomi Hakkenden on Amazon.com.

I was wondering if that was the version you were looking for. I pulled up the last thread where you mentioned it, but the production year did not match.

I have probably bought close to a hundred DVDs from Corey at kurotokagi.com and have never had a problem.

As far as the legality of the DVDs, Corey and Merlin (samuraidvd.com) sell dvds of Japanese films with english subtitles which are not available through officially licenced distributors, films which I would never have had a chance to see otherwise.

There is a fine line between grey market DVD sellers offering fan-subbed movies which are unavailable anywhere else and bootleg DVD sellers who make and sell copies of DVDs which are readily available through normal channels.

Unfortunately, the demand or market for "samurai" films (with english subtitles) is pretty small, so the number of officially released DVDs in the genre is very few, limited mainly to the works of Akira Kurosawa, Hiroshi Inagaki, Kihachi Okamoto, Hideo Gosha (finally), Yoji Yamada, and the films in the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf & Cub series. The chances of more becoming available is also pretty slim.

A portion of their movies are recorded when they were broadcast on Japanese language television stations, others are from new unsubtitled Japanese releases to which they added newly written sub-titles.

Once in a great while, a disc will have a glitch in the recording / burning and not play right, but Corey is always quick to send a replacement copy when contacted. I wish exchanging bad copies of officially released DVDs was as easy.