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As the Summer 2026 season ends, we review a title from…Summer 2026, as Gerald reviews The Ghost in the Shell, which for the first time directly adapts the original manga by Masamune Shirow.
Introduction (0:00 – 1:06:34)
Patreon has officially informed us that we need to switch over to monthly billing next month, which will also mark the point where new $1 tier members will no longer be accepted. You can stay on the $1 tier if you are already on it, but you won’t be able to rejoin it if you leave. In its place will be a new $3 tier, which will also grant access to our AWOmake episodes. As for anime, we talk about our favorites from the Summer 2026 anime season, which had multiple standouts so this takes about 35 minutes. Note that in the time since we made this recording, a second season of Draw This, Then Die! has been confirmed.
Then, you know we had to do it, because lately Stu Levy has been sending numerous emails and doing various video webinars beseeching fans to invest in Tokyopop. We thought for sure nobody would do this, but upon checking he has about as many if not slightly more investors than we have Patreon backers. Clearly, the history of Tokyopop has either been forgotten or is otherwise not as widely known among 21st century anime fans, so we take the time to recap that history here before Daryl reads one of Stu’s emails out aloud in its entirety so you too can experience a master at work. It is currently undecided whether a generative AI was used to compose this email or whether what we’re observing is just a case of Terminal LinkedIn Poster Brain.
Don’t forget, Patrons: the Fall 2026 Trailer Watch Along is September 26th at 3 PM Eastern! Join us on the AWO Discord, since we have no means of recording or live streaming such an event.
Review: The Ghost in the Shell (1:06:34 – 2:28:12)
Gerald reviews The Ghost in the Shell, a 2026 Prime Video exclusive adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s signature work that ran for 10 episodes and concluded just a few weeks ago. We compare this version to the previous anime adaptations, but with a general focus on Shirow’s original manga. Because Gerald still has his Studio Proteus edition from 30 years ago and Daryl has both a digital edition of the 2017 release and a hardcover edition of the 2023 release (both of which are censored), we entirely forgot that just a few months ago, Kodansha released a $140 MSRP Legacy Edition set of the Ghost in the Shell manga that is specifically advertised as “uncensored” complete with an 18+ tag on it. If you do buy that, please use the affiliate link we just provided since it looks like we have yet another version to buy someday!
That narration truly sounded like a LinkedIn post lol
Did you guys not know that there is a full series Blu-ray set with the dub and English subtitled coming out in Japan [$250 plus shipping, at a time when fans are having their imported otaku goods deliberately destroyed by inspectors? We didn’t even bother to acknowledge that as an option, but it comes out a few days before Christmas. —Daryl]
As of the announcement this morning, the upcoming Japanese Blu-Ray set of The Ghost in the Shell will no longer include either English subtitles or an English audio track.
So far, no US release has been announced but that may change soon.
Great episode as always, I bounced off TGITS episode 3 for the same reason I never made it through the original manga due to how dense the technobabble was.
The early 2000s SAC with Dai Sato writing has always been my favourite adaptation followed by the Oshii movie but maybe I’ll give this new adaptation another try. I also second Gerald on the PS1 game, it’s really good, was lucky enough to find the art book for it a few years back and the character designs aren’t isn’t too different from this new adaptation’s art direction.
As an aside, is it me or is there a sync issue in the latter half of the episode? There’s notable pauses and bits where someone is laughing at a comment yet to be made. [As I look at the file, it does appear that by the end I am about a half second or so out of alignment with everybody else, but I can’t easily see where this starts happening to fix it since it’s not there at the beginning of the review. There are no obvious gaps of space in the project, so if you have a timecode I can look more carefully. Maybe 2:06:15? There’s a delay in my response there. –Daryl]
I reuploaded the episode with the sync issue hopefully fixed, but I did it in such a way that I don’t think it’s going to force a redownload of the episode for everybody. You may need to manually delete and redownload the episode. For services like Spotify which download their own copy separately to inject their ads, I don’t know if I can fix their copy or otherwise get them to redownload it.
I won’t write what I originally wanted, which is a paragraph of agreeing with you about GITS manga’s shortcomings. Instead I will ask straight up: WHAT is wrong with the Standalone Complex Blurays? Do answer this, please.
Also, got the 2023 Bluray of Cowboy Bebop. Disappointed. Not with the video itself, or the audio, but with everything else. The paper artwork is an okay print, but only okay. For such a huge title, a sharper print, by a better printer, would be appropriate. Hell, nothing less than A+ for Cowboy Bebop! This 2023 release does not have dubtitles, which would have been great for such a legendary dub. How hard is it to add dubtitles for a megahit in the west like CB? And of course, turns out Crunchyroll was responsible. Cheap bastards.
We have said this offhand on the show a few times, but for ease of reference the following is what is wrong with the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex Blu-Rays released by Manga Video:
The framerate is wrong. They converted it from 1080i/30 to 1080p/24, which resulted in dropped frames. This issue is not present on the Japanese Blu-Rays. If you prefer to watch in Japanese, the English subtitle track is not actually an English translation of the Japanese audio. They’re basically captions for the English dub. If you prefer to watch the dub, there are sections where the contents of the English audio track randomly switches to being in Japanese so you don’t actually have the entire thing dubbed. None of the extras from the prior DVD releases got included. If you like to watch more than one episode at a time, well there are no chapter breaks within episodes.
None of this is acceptable, and there has never been a good US release of Stand Alone Complex on Blu-Ray. Even pirated rips are subject to this, because almost all of them (if not all) are either fully or partially ripping from the US release. Apparently, the best overall version is the impossible to find South Korean Blu-Ray release, which has correct video along with both English and Japanese audio, plus English subtitles. I don’t have that.