Blu-ray Review: 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' Collector's Edition

I finally received the Neon Genesis Evangelion Collector's Edition Blu-ray, courtesy of Shout! Factory and GKIDS. For this post, I decided to make a video instead of showing a bunch of pictures with text. The video can be found below. Enjoy!

'Evangelion' Officially Releasing in North America on Blu-ray!

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This is admittedly a late post after the news dropped, but GKIDS has obtained the rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion and its movies Death(true)² and End of Evangelion in North America and is releasing it on Blu-ray for the first time! There are three versions of this release: the Standard Edition (pictured above), the Collector's Edition (pictured below), and the Ultimate Edition which is only limited to 5,000 copies and is now sold out. More information can be found on the GKIDS website. I have preordered the Collector's Edition as it contains the old ADV English dub in addition to the new one. Once it arrives, I'll review it.

The snazzy Collector's Edition. Source is the same as above image.

I had discussed the bootleg Blu-rays previously, and after hearing what will be contained in the official release, I've decided to keep them. First of all, "Fly Me to the Moon" is intact, the ending theme that unfortunately will not be present in the rerelease. It also contains the original versions of episodes 21 to 24, Death(true), and then some. In short, I want to preserve some of the original material from the franchise.

Blu-ray Review: 'Neon Genesis Evangelion'

A week ago, I was browsing around online for home video releases of Neon Genesis Evangelion for the heck of it. Then I stumbled upon a link that caught my attention almost immediately. The website (that shall remain anonymous) listed a Blu-ray set of the entire Evangelion TV series plus the 90s films, all for $89. There were only 11 left in stock at the time, so I went ahead and bought it a while later.

Today I'll be reviewing the Blu-ray set itself, not Neon Genesis Evangelion. If I did, I would have named this post "Anime Review." I suppose in the future I can go over the series and films proper, but that's for another time.

As you can tell from the above image, this is a set of two Blu-rays. And I'll go ahead and say this right off the bat: these are bootlegs. As of this post there is no official physical media release of Eva in the West, excluding the Rebuild movies. There were DVDs made in the early 2000s, but those are now out of print and are outrageously expensive. And yes, I am aware that the series is on Netflix since last year, but it has a new dub and altered subtitles and excludes "Fly Me to the Moon" from the ending theme, because apparently Netflix can't get the rights to the song (despite the fact that they were willing to spend $100 million to keep Friends on their platform a while longer). Because of that, I prefer to stick to the original sub and dub. Ergo, why I bought this in the first place.