Quote Originally Posted by Kam
Awesome woochifer! will defn be picking this bad boy up then. i've found a few stores that sell the hong kong versions of jet li's and chan's movies (generally region free coding so play in all dvd players). if you want i can send ya the link (found them off of ebay) and have purchased a few of chan's and li's movies from them with no problems. just got jackie chan's The Myth which was released last year in asia but, to date, has no release scheduled for the us. will post a review soon as it gets here. also The New Police Story and tons of other asian titles that you generally cant find here, (or when you do, is the butchered version) they have in the original versions with subtitles.
thanks for the info!!
You're more than welcome! (Didn't you used to have a Bruce Lee avatar?) I saw this set at Best Buy back in October when it first came out, and I just thought it was nothing more than another shoddy repackaging of the Bruce Lee movies. The packaging certainly doesn't suggest anything different -- slim Amaray cases and no mention of the original Cantonese language tracks on the box.

It wasn't until I started cataloging my DVD collection on the DVD Aficionado site in December that I found out that this new set indeed presented the original cuts with the original language tracks using the correct titles. I'm somewhat disappointed that this new set does not pull together the treasure trove of bonus features included with the Legends series DVDs in the U.K., but having these movies now in their rightful spot in my DVD collection is what I've wanted ever since I first bought a DVD player, so I'm a very happy camper!

There were also a few specialty DVD stores in my area that used to stock the Chan and Li titles, but most of them have gone out of business. I bought a lot of the Chan and Li DVDs from Hong Kong when Tai Seng (the U.S. home video distributor for most of the major HK studios) still had the rights to those titles. But, when Dimension Films acquired the U.S. distribution rights to most of Chan and Li's older films, Tai Seng could no longer distribute the HK DVDs in the U.S. legally.

And what Dimension has done with those films has been an absolute disaster. They've chopped up those films, and dubbed, rescored, and retitled them. In this day and age where you have an increasingly sophisticated U.S. audience for martial arts pics, and proven box office success for these films in their original language, it's inexcusable for Dimension to try and make a quick buck by shoddily marketing these genre classics like they were still 70's era grind house fare.

Some of Chan's recent releases find their way into Chinese book and video stores, but they're only sporatically available and disappear altogether once the U.S. release comes out. (A few years ago, I saw The Accidental Spy at a Chinese bookstore, but balked at buying it for $45; now all I ever see is the butchered U.S. version)

I know that there are some mail order vendors that sell the versions out of Hong Kong, but I've had bad experiences with some HK DVDs. So, I've been somewhat wary of buying HK DVDs without knowing anything about the video quality, since DVDs of these movies can come from any number of different sources, some of which are more scrupulous than others. I will probably order the Jackie Chan Police Story boxed set from YesAsia.com, and see if other vendors have other DVDs available that I can use to plug the holes in my collection. I've been waiting for some of the Chan DVDs to get remastered (the video quality on my copies of Project A, Part 2 and Police Story 2 is mediocre), but I just noticed that the newly remastered Armour of God boxed set is now regionally coded.

My office moved to a different location and I just found a specialty DVD store nearby that stocks Asian titles, so I might pay a visit there after work today.