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Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance Director: Kenji Misumi Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: Unrated Running Time: 83 minutes Studio: AnimEigo Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2003-08-26 Buy from Amazon

Customer Reviews: Total numer of reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 "LW&C DVDs are full widescreen" Just so there is no confusion, the AnimEigo LW&C DVDs (and all our samurai DVDs) are full widescreen in the original aspect ratio. NOTHING has been chopped off or pan and scanned. NOTHING! The DVDs are 16:9 anamorphic encoded, and since the original films are have higher aspect ratios than this, they are letterboxed. The confusion arises from the fact that if your haven't configured your DVD player and TV correctly (in particular, widescreen TVs), the image can appear either squashed (the Toho logo at the start will be oval) or have the sides clipped off. What you have to do to get the best video quality is 1) if you have a widescreen TV, configure the DVD player so that it knows this, and configure the TV so it knows it is getting widescreen video. Be careful about TV modes where it displays a 16:9 image in 4:3 with the edges clipped. 2) If you have a regular 4:3 TV, make sure the DVD player is configured this way, otherwise it'll send out a 16:9 signal which will appear squashed on the TV. "Excellent quality - but not Shogun Assassin" This must be one of the best quality DVD transfers I've ever seen for an "old school" martial arts movie. The picture is crisp and excellent. "Sword of Vengeance" is part one of the "Shogun Assassin" version of the Lone Wolf and Cub movie that was released back in the 1980's and may be the version that most of us are familiar with. Shogun Assassin was dubbed in English, was faster paced, had a nice, energetic soundtrack and was frankly more entertaining. Sword of Vengeance is of course the Japanese original and is a great movie by itself. However, for those of you out there who are hoping to have "Shogun Assassin" on DVD will be disappointed. Sword of Vengeance is much slower paced and I found myself skipping ahead to the fighting scenes. Still a classic and a must have for any martial arts library. "best swordsman ever period" this is the epitome of the lone existential hero. lone wolf is one of the first heros who walks the thin line between badguy and goodguy. i'd rather say he is just a different degree of bad guy, not as bad as the men he kills. this first episode sets in motion the reason why lone wolf and cub are on the run and his sword is hired out. the sword play is very violent yet efficient. you won't see the long drawn out whimsical dancelike choreography of the wuxia-pan films. every move is meant to kill an opponent. in a scene where lone wolf is talking to a potential client, two men try to sneak up on him, an in one sweeping motion he draws, waves his sword around his head and sheaths it before his assailants hit the ground...damn see this one.... "Little things make a difference" People who have read the other reviews already know if this film is for them or not! But I want to give kudos to AnimEigo for a great job on the little things that would be missed by non-Japanese speakers. First - the use of different colors in the subtitles during conversations made it really easy to understand who is saying what! Second - the translation of many of the signs (i.e. the baby carriage banner) helped make sense of what was going on. And last, but not least, the additional translations of martial arts styles (Seagull, etc) and other Japanesecentric terms was nice, even though I knew much of them (i.e. sepuku). None of these makes or breaks the film but having them on the DVD makes the watching that much better! Having seen how good the first DVD was done I have already ordered and preordered the rest! "EXCELLENT TRANSFER" I was definetly shocked upon playing this DVD. The video and audio quality were extraordinary. I will have the complete set if this is an examplyof what the quality will continue to be like.