Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon's “Electric Soldier Porygon”
Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon's “Electric Soldier Porygon”
As an Epileptic, I’ve been very outspoken about my opinions on the increased use of strobe lighting effects in American cartoons. Yet people have accused me of being a hypocrite: why do I continue to love Pokémon? My response often surprises people. That, in my personal opinion, morally speaking, th...
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What a great article!
I always thought the annoying dimming was some kind of copy protection scheme, like the old Macrovision from back in the days of VHS.
Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lots of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the "non-authentic" tapes I got never played right for me.
To get around Macrovision, you had to have a gadget called a genlock or time base corrector that repaired the video's frame signal so that a VCR could record it properly.
Genlocks and TBCs were also very helpful when dubbing unprotected anime tapes.
They didn't entirely solve the video signal degradation to the copy, but they did make the copies much clearer.
Generally pre-record original anime tapes from Japan weren't copy protected. I seem to remember that one or two that were, but I can't remember the titles.