At some point in the early '90s (sadly, before letterboxd, so I'll never know exactly when) I had to figure out both the timer and the long play settings on our family VHS deck to record this off TV. Understandably, Channel 4 (still the newest of the 4 TV stations in the UK at the time) didn't want to fill 4 hours of prime time TV with a Japanese movie, but they were good enough to start it at something like 1 am and play it through the night. I'd read about this as being one of the best films ever made, so as a budding film nerd I didn't want to miss my chance to see it - I don't think our local video shop carried a single non-English title at that time, unless they were in the special adults corner I wasn't allowed in. To the best of my recollection it was the first time I'd seen a film, or possibly anything, that wasn't in English, bar a few lines of Star Wars.
By today's standards, the quality must have been awful. I the brightness constantly fluctuating, there being loads of damage to the image, on top of the standard VHS distortions and low fidelity blurriness - lowered further by the need to use the long play settings to make extra sure I didn't miss the ending. I wish I still had it to compare to the stunning 4K HDR restoration I just watched, not least because it would be a great reminder that we can get awfully hung up on making sure we see the 'best' version of a movie, and it's easy to find places to debate endlessly how well the grain is captured or if the gamma levels are set right, but at something like 12 years old a doubtless terrible copy of this movie absolutely blew my mind. I'd never seen anything like it, and it might as well have been science fiction for all the continuity it had with my every day life and the world that had been shown to me in movies until then. Samurai were undoubtably really fucking cool. ittedly much of the (not even subtle) social commentary went entirely over my head, and I probably didn't gain a greater understanding of it until A Bug's Life came out, but lord what a gateway drug this was. Foreign films would remain pretty hard to get hold of until the early 2000s brought a multiregion DVD player into my life, but I can only be thankful that Kurosawa managed to transfix young me to such a degree that subtitles have never been a barrier (something the English speaking world seemed bizarrely scared of until Gen Z decided they needed them on everything even if it was in English already) and planted a seed for the love of all things Japanese. It really is a joy to revisit it, and it's a film that just keeps on giving in new ways as I get older, but even though I can understand all the ways it tells me that samurai could be real arseholes they still remain really fucking cool.