ANI-MOVIES, *Gunbuster: The Movie

Evangelion's Hideaki Anno began his directorial career in Gainax's first ever solo production, the 6-episode OVA series Gunbuster. Each episode was about half-an-hour long which worked for the original VHS releases back in 1988, but when you shoot ahead a few decades later you might want to see the original anime, and since the sequel series of Diebuster was set to be released it was decided to do a compilation film of the original series. This eventually led to a double feature of compilation films of both series of each OVA series, but as the Diebuster movie managed to maintain most of the original footage, the Gunbuster collected movie left out a ton of material that were integral to the whole movie. The problem was the Sentai Filmworks had the Blu-Ray rights to Gunbuster: The Movie while Discotek Media released the full OVA series with bonus features including the only English dub the anime ever had. Sentai's release of the movie came out in the states a year before Discotek OVA Blu-Ray, so this would lead many uninformed American buyers to choose the correct one.

One of the main problems that people face when trying to discover vintage anime is that a good portion of it from the 80s-2000s were OVA as there most TV shows didn't start getting released on home video until around the mid-90s This is why the original Mobile Suit Gundam was reformatted into a trilogy of compilation movies since not everyone had VCRs to record the show back in the late-70s. Compilation movies were from this point done at first as an affordable way for those just dabbling into anime could enjoy the bulk of a series without having to shell out the entire amount for the whole enchilada. Numerous OVAs such as Macross Plus and Armitage III were compiled into single movies, sometimes with additional footage or a completely different English dub. Gunbuster was first picked up on VHS through US Renditions and later on Manga Entertainment, but didn't have it released on DVD, even though it was for a limited time released on DVD as a double-feature with the Diebuster movie. Sentai Filmworks decided to get the jump on everyone in America and released the compilation movie over a year before Discotek Media released the entire OVA series with the English dub and additional features. This isn't uncommon when it comes to compiled releases of OVAs in a English version as the 3-episode OVA series of Dangaioh was first put on three VHS tapes, but the DVD version was a dub-only release with the entire first episode left out aside from a quick rundown reviewing everything that happened in it, so anime compilation movies cut out a great amount of material and leave out a lot of the subtilties and character development that you would get from the full OVA series.

Gunbuster: The Movie leaves out at least an hour from the original OVA, even if that includes the opening and closing credits to the most of the episodes, the chibi feature at the end of each episode, and some of the unnecessary in-between bonuses like the karaoke scene where Hideaki Anno actually took out a few minutes to correct a mistake in some of the prior technical explanations they made, you're still missing out on some viable material that were ejected from the movie version. Depending on what wholesaler you frequent, the movie cut of Gunbuster is probably available at a cheaper price, but if you want to get the whole experience of this mecha classic then you should really just get the single release of the complete series.