Story of Ricky Japanese-Dubbed VHS Opening With Rare Text Overlay During Prisoner Introductions
This was taken from a rip of the dubbed Japanese VHS release of Story of Ricky. As you might be able to hear, the main theme has been re-recorded for the Japanese language dub. Besides that, you may also notice some unfamiliar onscreen text during the prisoner introduction scenes which is seemingly absent in almost every version from the DVD era onward. So, if you watch the film in Cantonese or Mandarin on a DVD or Blu-ray release, chances are you'll see the film freeze on these three characters one after another for seemingly no reason because there's no text onscreen and no voice-over like in the English and Japanese dubs-- although some shitty remixes of the Cantonese and Mandarin tracks that were made years later do, in fact, dub in a voice-over reading the information that's supposed to be onscreen in an act of mild revisionism. The prisoner info might be omitted in remasters that are based on the negative because the text was likely overlaid during the subtitling process for the theatrical release and thus would not be present on the negative (not uncommon for some visuals to be introduced only after the negative was duplicated), but that doesn't explain why that particular Chinese text is retained here in this unsubtitled print used for the Japanese dub.
An interesting little mystery for all the loser geeks of the world.