Goju Ryu Karate

Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect...
Review: Morio Higaonna's flawless performance of the Goju-Ryu Kata is nothing short of spectacular. He's certainly one of the finest practitioners in the world. PERIOD. The DVD is well put together, there is only ONE thing that I wish ~ and that is that had put in "chapters" for each of the Kata where the storyboard is. (They have a sign for example that says "Saifa" ~ but the chapter doesn't start THERE so you don't know which Kata you are watching! Instead it starts AFTER the storyboard, so you have to manually back up to find out! DUMB! DUMB! DUMB!). If they simply correct that, it's 100% perfect, as it is, give them 95% as you'll have at least 5% frustation trying to back up and find out what the heck you're watching!

Rating:
Summary: Good performance, but what's with the random sectioning?
Review: The performance in this DVD is excellent as far as I can tell, and those I've talked to who know more than I do don't have anything deragatory to say in that area. The lighting and setting is a bit annoying, but completely forgivable as this is a "historical" performance, and you can see all the detail you need to anyway. What really flabbergasts me is that there are no intelligently outlined scenes or "tracks" -- I should be able to look up where Saifa starts (or where the applications of it start after the formal demonstration ends), and click to that track immediately, instead of scanning through tons of stuff to find it. It's amazing to me how such simple and obvious markers (that wouldn't at all affect a viewing from start to finish) could have been left ouf of this DVD. The start screen is the most basic I've ever seen on a DVD (green screen!), so I have to assume that whoever produced this DVD did it as their first project. I hope Hanshi Morio Higaonna has someone reproduce this into a more usable DVD as a second edition, and then also preferably follows that up with well indexed DVD versions of his technical video series.