REVIEW: ‘Wing Chun’ [TV] (DVD – Tai Seng)

Tai Seng has become the leader in delivering Chinese-language TV series to North America on DVD. Their latest release is WING CHUN, a high-profile martial arts drama with an ensemble cast led by Nicholas Tse, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung that first appeared on ATV last summer. It’s featureless apart from trailers yet with all 40 episodes each running over 40 minutes and spread out on eight discs, this mammoth box set offers a whopping 28 hours of entertainment for an SRP of $59.95. That’s a little over $2 per hour. Not a bad value.

The first thing buyers may want to do is remove all eight discs from the case and place them in another location. The outside of the box looks nice but the plastic trays break easily, causing the discs to slide around and get scratched. My copy had two discs giggling around inside when I first opened it. (For the record, I use three-ring binders with sleeves for discs and a filing cabinet to sort covers and liner notes for my entire DVD collection to save space.)

The series was shot for high-definition video which means it should look pretty good by DVD standards. Unfortunately, Tai Seng performs the most basic transfer, not even bothering to make the show’s 1.78:1 aspect ratio formatted for 16×9 (widescreen) TVs. Image quality is adequate but could have been better. To be fair, Tai Seng probably has a small market for these TV series releases here and I’m thankful they make the effort.

As is often the case now, different actors speak Cantonese and Mandarin so it matters not which of the two audio tracks English speakers listen to. The Cantonese dialogue is recorded on set and is lower quality than the Mandarin dubbing. The difference is quite noticeable but only affects the Cantonese audio track.

Removable English subtitles are carried over from the Chinese release and contain all the same translations. Instead of printing “Wing Chun,” they state “Yong Chun” or “Liang Zan” instead of “Leung Jan.” This may be a little confusing for some viewers who are trying to follow references to Wing Chun history but it’s a common problem since no standardization of Romanized Chinese terms has yet taken place. There are a couple places where subtitles disappear too quickly or do not appear at all but this is rare.

A few trailers for other TV series are scattered on each of the discs.

Format: Region 0 NTSC DVD
Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Widescreen (1.78:1)
Audio: Cantonese DD 2.0, Mandarin DD 2.0
Subtitles: Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English
Length: 1720 minutes
Release Date: 2008.05.27