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Well, they blocked me on Twitter for pointing out problems...
I love Ghost In The Shell. Stand Alone Complex is one of the best sci-fi TV shows ever, and the Blu-ray that Anchor Bay/Manga USA has put out is a barely watchable release. All the extras are missing from the DVD release, and none of the episodes have chapter breaks. Those, I can get past and get along without. As long as I can watch a high quality presentation of the show, I can be happy with some stuff missing. However, the bare minimum of watching the show isn't possible on this release.
On the Japanese side, the subtitles are actually a close captioning track for the English audio, not a translation. And look, the dub script happens to be extremely faithful and well-written but it is not a translation. It doesn't translate the music, the signs, and if anyone on the English dub is speaking off-screen, but they aren't speaking in the Japanese version, there's a random line onscreen when it's actually silent.
But whatever, I care about the English audio more anyways. I love the English dub and I have the Japanese audio with a good subtitle track on the Korean Blu-ray. This release is the first time the English audio will be available on a home video release with a lossless track. At the very least the English dub fans will get a good release finally, right?
Sadly, that is also not the case. For some reason the English audio randomly cuts into the Japanese audio at random points in random episodes. I've even posted some examples on my Twitter feed showing this very error (and I'm including them on this review) and being very specific where they happened. Anchor Bay's response was to block me on Twitter.
This is a release that many people were waiting for years, and even the bare minimum of effort wasn't put into this release. And rather than fix it, the response from the distributor so far was to ignore me. I would highly recommend reaching out to Anchor Bay and telling them about the issues about this release. Hopefully, their response to you is better than mine.
February 2017 · Movies and TV · verified purchase