For those of you old enough to have watched Shogun on television, it has been released on dVD. 5 disks, 9 hours of program. Compared to the $350 they asked for VHS, $65 for the DVD set is a bargain.

Incredible production values. Very good acting (I guess, a lot of dialog is in Japanese) The lead actress spoke no English so all of her many English lines were memorized.

Catch it if you can.

I'm enjoying watching it now, but I'm a bit annoyed at the lack of picture restoration - there's some noise and dirt that should have been very easy to clean up if they'd bothered.

Also, it's all hacked together - removing all the opening and closing credits (apart from the first and last), and I think the opening is a hack version from multiple episodes so that all the characters appear in it.

This means that on each DVD there's 2 to 3 hours of solid material with no breaks. This makes it tricky to watch unless you intend to do the whole darn thing in one sitting.

So yes, it's a bargain, and the extras are great - but it's not true to the original and it's not user friendly.