Do you have any information on non-English versions of the show? Names, where they air/ed, anything?
PoDW is currently airing in Bulgaria. Check your local listings to see if it's airing in your country!
» Frequently Asked Questions
Right here. Info on the fate/ending of the show, where to find the episodes or merchandise, and more! First-time visitors: your biggest questions should be answered here.
» Watch and Download
View streaming copies of the episodes!
- Stage6 (divx)
- YouTube
- darkwaterpirate.com (Flash)
Download hi-res copies of the 21 episodes via BitTorrent! The files total 4 GB.
- torrentspy.com
- myspleen.net
- demonoid.com
- torrentz.com
» Archives
2008 | 1 2 3
2007 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2006 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2005 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2004 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2003 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2002 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2001 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
» Categories
about the show · actors · analysis/commentary · animation · behind the scenes · buried treasure · by the fans · conventions · eBay · international · merchandise · music · personal · PoDW offline · PoDW on TV · PoDW online · press · silliness · site · the old blog · video games · where to find the episodes
» Meta
Yet again ripping off Cartoon Brew, but this was too fantastic not to post. A whole site devoted to (mainly tongue-in-cheek) dissertations on various animated series and movies! There’s nothing there on PoDW (yet? anyone?). But it’s a pretty hilarious read, with some real gems featured, and, on occasion, some interesting and insightful points. Check it out.
The first of the two PoDW VHS Yahoo! Japan auctions I won arrived last week (wooo!), so when I was at my parents’ house this weekend, I hooked up our VCR and checked it out. (I love how this was express-mailed and arrived in a matter of days, but the box of stuff that I shipped when I was visiting Japan in mid-March hasn’t arrived yet.) I’m mailing back and forth with the seller of the five individual episode videos, but he’s not being too flexible with my sorry-I-don’t-live-in-Japan-so-please-have-pity-on-me plea, in terms of shipping and payment; I’m concerned I may just have to give those up. Oh, well–at least I have this!
The video I received was the one I thought was “The Saga Begins” (the 90-minute edited movie version of episodes 1-5), when in fact it was the full-length Dark Water miniseries dubbed in Japanese. Sweet! It’s on a VHS, and in fair quality, but I will totally have it converted to DVD to rip clips from it. If people are interested in creating fansubs, I can help with the translations, though I’ve never done video editing myself before.
(And I will be converting my VHS copies of the English Dark Water miniseries to DVD, too. I think there’s a healthy amount of interest in what the show originally was over here. I only just realized that our local Indian grocery offers that service!)
It was surreal–it’s been quite a while since I last watched the episodes, so while I knew what would happen, I was focusing on listening for the dialogue, and it was almost like new all over again. It was a lot of fun!
Click the link below to read the full review (yes, I took notes, shut up–all about minor changes and Japanese cultural/linguistic notes).
(Thank goodness Wordpress saves drafts–my browser crashed when I was writing this this weekend.)
Here’s something else: the actual Japanese title isn’t merely Dark Water, but “Michi no Umi he Dark Water,” or “To the undiscovered/mysterious sea: Dark Water”. Neat, eh? It had a limited airing, on NHK-BS2 on satellite TV. I don’t think they aired all 21 episodes, based on the air dates I found, but I don’t know that for sure.
And it had unique opening and closing theme music, sung by Hironobu Kageyama, who might or might not have been Ren’s voice actor (there’s also a guy named Takeshi Kusao cited as voicing Ren).
- The opening theme is “Aisubeki no Senshitachi”, or Beloved Soldiers.
- The closing theme is “Senshitachi no Kyuusoku”, or Soldiers’ Rest.
They’re just as cheesy and generic as they seem from the titles–I found clips of both songs (scroll down to the beige box with two sets of links; in the second list, 5 is the opening theme and 6 is the closing–each will spawn a pop-up window). For those who can read Japanese, here are the lyrics for the opening and closing. Set your browser’s character encoding to Shift-JIS for these.) Look for them if you ever go to a karaoke parlor in Japan–you just might find them!
That’s all for now, but that’s plenty!
I just hit the freaking JACKPOT. An e-mail from a fan about Japanese releases of the show made me realize, “wait, if I can speak, understand, and type in Japanese, why not do a Google.jp search for Japanese info on the show?”
There isn’t a lot out there, but I’ve found Yahoo! auctions for videos, and totally original images of the Japanese video art, within my first 10 minutes of looking.
I think I may try to beg and bribe my friends still in Japan to bid on these for me, since shipping and bidding and everything are probably domestic only.
And…dude. On joysound.com (Joysound is one of the major karaoke machine/music providers there), there seems to be a JAPANESE SONG relating to the show, possibly sung by Ren’s voice actor, titled “Aisubeki Senshitachi” (”Lovable Soldiers”). Oh my god.
That’s about it for now. But that’s plenty! I only wish I’d thought of this while I actually lived there. Japanese VHS format is NTSC (I can’t remember if I tried playing videos from here over there or vice versa, though), so if my friends do consent to bid, win the videos, and ship them to me, hopefully I can view them here. We’ll see!
(By the way, I’m back from Austin and Japan; I’ve replied to all the messages I’ve received and kept an eye on my spam folder, so if you haven’t gotten a reply, please send your message again. Thanks!)
Banana Soychoo (psst! I just sent you a reply, but it bounced) writes in with a merchandise info request (bold emphasis mine):
“I used to own a pirates of dark water comic, it might have been #5 but i cant be sure. It’s the one where ren and niddler are in the belly of the maelstrom, and there is one part where they are running from the constrictus. What i’m really looking for is the other comic that was on the other side of it. It was one of those 2 in 1 comics where half way through it was the end of the other comic and you had to flip it upside down and backwards to read the other one….Could you please tell me(if you know) what was the comic on the other side?”
This is the first I’ve ever heard about this, but it sounds pretty awesome! If you have any info on this, please comment here.
And on that note: I’m going out of town for several weeks and then moving, so I may not have regular online access till April. (I’m attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas, and then I’m going back to Japan for 1-2 weeks!) If you’ll be at SXSW and want to say hi, please do drop me an e-mail.
“Noooo!” I can hear some of you wailing, upon the mention of the dreaded f_____ word. Well, that’s kind of all we have left, and people are still writing!
The first is a new FanFiction.net upload, the first new story there in over two years–it’s the beginning of a story set in the future of the PoDW universe. A crew of three rescues a stranger struggling on a raft…only to find that he’s Ren, the son of Primus, who’s failed in finding the final five Treasures of Rule and passes the Compass and the Quest on to this new group with his dying breath. I rather liked the Ren/Primus parallel.
The second is the product of a fanfic challenge, and is an in-progress series of short pieces rooted in an alternate universe: what if, after episode 5, Tula had joined up with Bloth, in order to learn his plans and to keep him away from Ren? Some of these short pieces (friends-locked on her journal, but public on the fanfic community where I originally found this) have a decidedly adult twist to them…as a woman aboard a pirate ship, certain sacrifices have to be made. I haven’t read them all yet, but I’ve liked the ones I’ve seen so far.
And the third is a cute play on Ren’s lovely looks, gorgeous blue eyes, and long locks of blonde hair–“Dude Looks Like A Lady”.
Oh, and another old one (from 2000, yikes): Dark Water in Neverland, a PoDW/Peter Pan and the Pirates crossover, done in round-robin format.
It’s also time to start posting some of this huge backlog of links I’ve been bookmarking for a very, very long time. (For the “omgwtf you obsessive scary woman” naysayers, I don’t spend hours a day scouring the web for this stuff…I find a new link every couple of months, bookmark it, and forget about it.) I think I’ve posted the really awesome stuff immediately, but there are still a few gems. Apologies if any of these have been posted already!
I first found out about Heritage Auctions through cels they’d put up for auction on eBay (strange that an auction site would put their items on another auction site, but maybe it was for the extra advertisement; it worked, in this case!). Through a random search, I came back to their site and saw that they have several dozen pieces of animation artwork currently for auction at the moment, in batches of two or three (usually the actual cel plus its accompanying clean-up animation drawing, but sometimes with an extra cel as well). If you’re interested in collecting animation art from PoDW, this seems to be the place to be. They seem to have consistently been selling PoDW animation art for a while now.
(If the direct link to the PoDW listings doesn’t work, go to ha.com and search under Comics and then Animation Art.)
Oh, yeah! As an update to the previous post, I got in touch with Alex, the Super Toy Archive webmaster (and a pretty big PoDW fan himself). He has a Hasbro catalog with images of the discontinued second line, which dispels several rumors that have been floating around: the biggest one is that there was never a Tula action figure. Even in this second line, they didn’t make one, which I think is surprising and also incredibly stupid. (Hello? Main character? So what if she’s a girl?) He’s offered to scan the pages in the next few weeks–I’m definitely eager to check those out and I’ll be sure to post them here.
Thanks to Nathan for sending this in! I’ve linked to (or…wait, I thought I did…) several subpages on Alex Bickmore’s Super Toy Archive, which has photos of rare toys and action figures, and which also sells some (okay, that’s what I linked to). It’s obviously been a very long time since I last went there, because when I did, all they had were a Zoolie test shot and the small and large Niddler plush figures.
Well, they’ve updated since then. There’s some Wraith concept art, which reflects the toy design and not the show design and which was probably done as a sort of style guide or model for the actual toymakers.
And, more importantly, there are images of two action figures from a line of ten unproduced Pirates of Dark Water action figures! (Someone else had sent in a rumor years ago that there was going to be a Tula figure in this unproduced line, but this is the first substantial proof I’ve seen of these figures!)
There’s Strant, Bloth’s loyal four-armed crew member who you may remember from The Darkdweller as the one who bullied Ioz around after Ren and Niddler escaped Bloth’s ship to go rescue Tula from the Darkdweller. Interestingly, there’s a promo image at the bottom that spells his name “Strand“, though it seems to always be pronounced as “Strant” in the show. The promo image also advertises the toy’s “Twin Spinning Arm Feature”…not unlike General Grievous and his 4-armed lightsaber thing, perhaps? (But this character obviously predated the Star Wars prequels by quite a while–it’s just a modern parallel, sort of.)
And there’s another Ren action figure–shirtless–with something called a “sea sled.” The author of the site points out that the action figures had been pretty faithful, but this one has some differences–Ren’s shirt and boots are missing, his clothes and belt are darker (I’d even say the color’s more faithful to the darker hues of the show than the first Ren action figure’s bright blue outfit was), his arm bands are a different model and grey-hued, and he has some kind of spiky armor covering his calves. And what exactly is that sea sled (attached to his left arm in the image at the bottom)?
This is intriguing. The Ren action figure in particular could be a clue to what the show’s creative team had planned for the unproduced episodes. The name listed at the bottom of these pages is in fact the webmaster’s name, so I’ll definitely be sending him an e-mail to see what other information he may have about this unproduced line of PoDW toys, which may give us all some new info on where the show may have been heading when it was canceled.
My resolution: to update this site sometime in the next 12 months. (And maybe rename it; I’ve begun the push to stop using the alias “Andorus” online in favor of my real name. However, “Smitha’s Pirates of Dark Water Page” just sounds silly, and the name format sounds pretty dated.) What’s yours?
Hope you all had a great winter holiday season! May 2008 bring good things for you and yours.
I think I figured out why some people keep thinking the site’s down: they’ve always been linking directly to http://piratesofdarkwater.net/index.html, which is not valid and has not been since I implemented WordPress. It took me this long to finally set up a redirect to the actual index site (index.php). Hello there, those of you who’ve been unfortunately locked out all this time!
Just to make this all as easy as possible, when you link to this site, please link only to http://piratesofdarkwater.net and DO NOT put any sort of /index.??? after it. Thanks, and sorry for the hassle!
Is there anything else that you find a little hard to find or use around the site? Any broken links? Any random inconsistencies that you may think are minor and inconsequential but that still stick out? Any suggestions or complaints or constructive criticism? I’m always open to them, though these days I may be fairly slow in fixing them, but please don’t let that stop you from suggesting anything you want! This really is my only truly active site these days, so regular and fresh feedback is very welcome; my Japan journal is slowly withering away now that I’m back in the US, I got rid of all my fanlistings, I update my portfolio a few times a year, and I only occasionally update my profile page–I don’t think I’ve touched the rest since well before I went to Japan. Crazy how that happens.