Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Tsugunaga Momoko - Momo OK Dual Subtitles/Dual Audio Release

By: The Incredible He-Hulk


An ICU-Subs & Hyakupa Inter-group Collaboration Project.


A new year brings about new possibilities. After all, new possibilities and opportunities are what the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions are all about. But if I had been told that the year 2010 held the possibility of a double-sized collaborative project between two H!P sub groups, I’m not sure I would have believed it. And yet, here we are.

This release was a rather interesting experience. Working with people who do the same type of sofk as you, but does it differently than you is always an experience worth having. It gives you an idea of what you do well, and what you could possibly do better. And, it teaches you that compromises oftentimes are just as satisfying as going your own way.

For this project we broke the tasks up along audio track lines. The fine fellows at Hyakupa handled the translation of the main audio track and we at ICU-Subs handled the commentary track translation.
I’m sure that 99% of you could care less about this next observation (you’re all probably screaming “Momo!!!” at the top of your lungs, right now), but this division of labor led to some rather interesting insights in to just how another sub group complete a project and what choices they make when working on their craft. Watching one audio track’s translation and then the other immediately afterwards shows me that all the H!P sub groups are different and you’ll get a slightly different experience from each of them. Not necessarily better or worse; just different. Each group’s work is distinct. It’s rather fascinating, to be honest.

And now a few words about the release itself…

If you’re going to double the groups, you need to double the fun, right? Well, Momoko is so lively, spunky, over the top, and borderline crazy, that she’s like two idols in one. And, if you’re going to double the groups, you need to double the content, right? Well, you’re not just getting an hour of Momo being Momo; you’re getting a second hour of Momo talking a mile a minute about what Momo being Momo is all about.
It’s a super-sized serving of idol craziness from H!P’s craziest idol.

No doubt about it, Momoko is a great idol (with a utterly unique skill set), whose talents work best when employed as a second fiddle. Momoko is an idol who makes other great idols even greater and pulls lesser idols along with her into relevance. She is the vital cog in Berryz Koubou because her massive personality encourages the other Berryz personalities to shine. By being over the top, ridiculous, silly and envelope pushing, she forces the other girls to raise their games and play along. Berryz just wouldn't work right without Momo.

In Momoko's second solo DVD, Momo Ok, we get Momo at her most manic, and her most self-centered.
We learn, without a doubt, that she is a jealous little idol. Momo is convinced she should be mentioned in the same breath as the all-time idol greats. Now, this is obviously partially a gag on her part, but any serious Momo fan can recount the impressive number of times Momoko has challenged other idols, compared herself directly to other idols, and talked smack about other idols. And she spends a large part of the video doing just that. No spoilers, but one idol is squarely in Momo's cross hairs for the duration of the main audio track. It's a totally awesome ride, baby.

And then there's the commentary track. Usually, for a solo DVD commentary, your star idol will always, always be accompanied by a wing-idol. This serves two very vital purposes: First, encouraging the main idol to talk by having someone to bounce conversation off of so as to prevent dead silence for portions of the commentary, and secondly, it's to give the main idol someone to talk about her DVD with so she just isn't rambling about herself, by herself, the entire time like a psycho.
Shockingly, H!P, for whatever reason, decided to just not bother with a wing-idol for Momoko this time, and the result of that decision is an utterly stupefying, mind-bending, rambling trip through the mind of Momoko that will leave you a twisted shell of your former self by the end of it. I'm not kidding. Make sure you drink a lot of fluids because you will swear you must be high on peyote.

Combined these two hours with Momoko are perhaps the most astoundingly bizarre that you will ever spend watching idols and the experience definitely earns my highest recommendation. It’s like idol crack, Jack.

And finally, in order to accommodate everyone on the freaking planet, we’ve decided to release this in four different formats. 404p XviD, 404p H264, 720p XviD and 720p H264. This is probably the only time you will see something like this, but we both do our own releases differently and we wanted every H!P fan to be happy. So, pick your poison.

Remember, because of the dual-audio/dual-subtitle track nature of this release, it is in a MKV shell. In order to manipulate this video and view it in it’s optimum state, I recommend having either the K-Lite codec pack, or the CCCP codec pack installed on your system and using Media Player Classic which comes built in to each codec pack.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_Lite_Codec_Pack.htm
http://cccp-project.net/
These releases also work perfectly well with the VLC media player, although I do not personally recommend watching this using VLC unless you have no other alternative.

These files have been tested on a variety of machines with a variety of different codec installations. They work without issue. So, if you are having any problems viewing this release, it’s probably you and your system that are the problem, not Momo. XD

click here to grab the release.

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