Treat Ai Right: The Viz Video Girl Ai DVD Petition

We, the undersigned petitioners and collectors of anime on DVD, wish to address several important issues regarding the forthcoming production of the release of the Video Girl Ai OVA series on DVD:

1. Redo the subtitle script.
When this series was originally released in North America by Viz Video on English subtitled and dubbed VHS, many fans of the series took exception to what were felt to be fast and loose translations that changed the traits of its characters for the worse ("Ore wa Amano Ai. Yoroshiku ne" (Japanese); "I'm Ai Amano. Pleased to meet you" (literal English fan translation); "My name is Ai Amano, Video Girl at large" (Viz dub and sub), to give but one of the many examples) and used too much clumsy and dated American slang. As nice as the idea would be, redoing the dub would not be financially plausible for either Viz or the fans. However, the subtitle script can be relatively easily redone so that it can be much more faithful to the original Japanese dialogue than it currently is, and we feel that it should be..

2. Proofread the subtitle track before authoring.
When the Viz Video DVD for the Please Save My Earth OVA series was released last year, it was the first time a legitimate English-subtitled version of the series was made available. Unfortunately, the number of punctuation and grammar errors (not to mention the odd spelling error, including one occurrence of a main character's name) in the subtitle script was appalling. We feel that Video Girl Ai's subtitle script should be carefully scrutinized before the DVD is authored to prevent this from happening again.

3. Do *not* hardsub insert song lyrics.
The inclusion of subtitles for Japanese vocal songs that played during the episodes was an excellent touch for both of Viz Video's VHS versions of Video Girl Ai (and, it should be noted, translated more faithfully than the dialogue was). However, the practice of putting non-removable subtitles on ("hardsubbing") a DVD release is seen by a wide majority of anime DVD collectors as undesirable (to put it basically). Since companies like Bandai U.S. have made lots of fans happy by making their secondary subtitles (lyrics, signs, etc.) removable on their DVDs, we feel that Viz Video and Pioneer Animation (who manufactures and distributes Viz Video's DVDs) should do the same for Video Girl Ai.

We look forward to your careful consideration of, and action on, these matters.