Manga Entertainment News from Wizard World

In an ironic move, Manga Entertainment confirmed at this past weekend’s Wizard World convention in Chicago that the special edition American release of the Shin Seiki Evangelion movies will contain digital overlays. Japanese text in the original Japanese version of the Evangelion movies will be digitally removed and replaced by English text. AD Vision performed this same type of digital editing on the first DVD volume of the Evangelion TV series then ceased doing so in response to overwelming fan criticism.

Furthermore, at least the DVD version of the movies will be copy protected with Macrovision encoding. Macrovision encoding reportedly does have a detrimental effect on DVD image quality.

Manga also confirmed that most of the explanatory material from the End of Evangelion movie program, commonly known as the “Red Cross Book,” which was sold in Japanese theaters that premiered the film, will be included as supplemental material on the American Evangelion movies DVD release. According to the report from Wizard World, Manga has completed the dubbing of the Eva movies and is now working on the subtitled version.

Manga representatives also speculated that there will be no re-mastering of the Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force DVD, often criticized for its unusually poor image quality. Apparantly Manga Entertainment’s English language distribution rights to the film will expire early next year, and the company may choose not to renew the license.

Source: Anime on DVD