Video:

TV rip. The DVD-RAM logo appears at the start of every episode. It's not only apparent from the terrible quality, but also from the wierd advertisment thing that always plays after the theme in nearly all other TV rips too. The video quality is rather terrible. The lines are soft, and sometimes hard to make out in certain scenes. The most glaring problem is how there's a terrible 'imprint' thing over a video. For example, if the scene is just Conan standing completly still, you'd see Conan in the center, then to the right, another faint version of Conan, then another even fainter. If Conan moved, so did these 'ghosts', so it's apparent and noticable throughout the entire episodes. It becomes an unavoidable issue that was a pain. There was no pixelation in this, or other compression artifacts, but the rest of the video was pretty terrible anyway, so it's not that important. Overall, bad TV rip. All the openings and endings are intact however.

Audio:

Regular, plain, nothing I can go into detail about. Sounded fine, no muting or noticable pops, distortions, or drop-outs, so you should be all set for this release.

Subtitle:

Typical HK subs. The timing and translations for the MOST PART are correct, and easy to understand, but the names get mutilated (like Megure becoming Mokuba). Sometimes they specifically named an actor (or a title) to a videotape that played a role in the special, but it never showed up in the subtitles. There was the standard akward grammar, wierd structure here and there, but not too bad. I was able to understand the mystery just fine. The font is the one that looks like a Times New Roman bold, with a thick black border and a yellow inside. This is the kind I prefer (over the old block typewriter AV otherwise uses). Easy to read, and a good size.

Comment:

The cover is a nice looking picture of a collage sort of thing. The back follows a template used by other Conan AV Specials. The colors are really bright and contrasting, so it looks good up on a shelf, etc. The content was dissapointing. Contrary to what the cover and this listings' title says, it is not a movie!!! It's not even a TV special! It's just a two-parter episode thrown onto a DVD. The episode was dissapointingly flat and I didn't get into it at all throughout the whole thing. Sure it kept my attention, but I wasn't as captivated as a regular Conan episode usually is able to do. Some of it was rather obvious, and the ending didn't seem like it would have worked. Normally I wouldn't care if one episode was bad if this was a set with the rest of the season (like it should be) but this is only 2 episode labelled as a 'special' and a 'movie', and totally not worth it. I highly reccomend Detective Conan. Just not this DVD.