Laserdisc buffs and anime fans on newsgroups such as alt.video.laserdisc and rec.arts.anime.misc were almost literally up in arms when Manga Entertainment issued not only one, but two terrible versions of Oshii Mamoru's 1995 hit GHOST IN THE SHELL on laserdisc.  The two Manga Entertainment versions — a CLV and a CAV version — suffered from several severe problems:

• An unstable picture frame. The problem is comparable to watching a movie being played from a projector which is constantly being moved back and forth ever so slightly.
• A high contrast setting and noticeable picture noise.  In particular, the black parts of the picture suffered because of this.
• An LD-transfer taken from a film print!  This is easily noticeable, as reel dots appear in the frame at regular intervals, and dirt on the film print is also visible.
• A low volume English soundtrack.  The original Japanese soundtrack on the analog channels actually has a higher volume!

The Transfer

"Beautiful," is probably a very fitting way of describing the transfer, which is sharp, rock solid, and with almost no visible grain at all (even the reds look great!). The picture occasionally looks a little bit soft, but hey, this is still great stuff!  The aspect ratio appears to be around 1.66:1, but I can't tell for sure because my monitor overscans part of the picture (don't you hate that, folks?).
The entire movie is presented in CAV, and is spread out over four sides. Both the side breaks and the platter break are perfect, or near perfect. Heaven!

The Audio

The quality of the sound is, as to be expected, quite high.  This is after all a modern movie, and almost all big-budget movies these days have drop-dead gorgeous sound it seems; GHOST IN THE SHELL is no exception.  The Dolby Pro-Logic soundtrack is no in-your-face sound experience, as it makes a very discreet use of the surround channels, mostly utilizing them for soft environmental noises like rain and such, but I have to admit I liked this.  It is nice to hear a good surround soundtrack that doesn't insist on shoving rockets, gunfire and snarling velociraptors down the back of your neck all the time.
There is no Dolby Digital (formerly known as AC-3) soundtrack included, but it is not needed. Instead, we get both the original Japanese soundtrack and the English dub in glorious Dolby Pro-Logic, the former on the digital tracks, the latter on the analog ones.  And yes, the Closed Caption subtitles are in English.  Unfortunately they are "dubtitles," meaning they follow the script used for the English dub (which differs somewhat from the original Japanese script).  Still, it is better than nothing.
The only problem I could find with the soundtracks is that the volume is a bit low.  This is especially true for the English analog track. Another curious thing I noticed is that the surround mixing of the "mind dialogue" between Motoko Kusanagi and her team-mates is different in the Japanese and the English soundtracks.  The English surround mix sounds more canned than the Japanese one.  This is not a gripe, however — just an observation.

The Extra Stuff

In addition to the movie, the box set also includes nine different trailers: a teaser with poor dubbing, two regular trailers and six TV spots, featuring an image song by Higuchi Saeko.  All of the trailers incorrectly portray the movie as an all-out cyberpunk action movie. The trailers for the PATLABOR movies were just as bad; it must be frustrating for poor Oshii-san to see his movies misrepresented like this.
Ahem!  Anyway, there is more!  In addition to the trailers, there are also the international version of the end credits, which instead of Kawai Kenji's haunting music featured a — to me, at least — boring and pretentious piece of electronic music by Brian Eno and U2 known as "One Minute Warning". The extra end credits are followed by a reasonably large still-frame archive, which contains mostly design sketches and pencil roughs.  This is somewhat redundant for people who bought the ANALYSIS OF GHOST IN THE SHELL book, but it is nice to have anyway.  We're not complaining!
Finally, the third LD contains a documentary about the making of the movie called GHOST IN THE SHELL - DIGITAL WORKS. As the name implies, it concentrates mostly on the computer graphics employed and how they were done, but also covers some of the various technical issues of the making the movie as well.  My understanding of the Japanese language is admittedly limited, but I still picked up much from this documentary.  It was enjoyable to watch, and it had a neat Virtua Fighter joke by Shirow Masamune.  It is funny.  Buy the set, and you will see what I mean.  Oh, and Scott Frazier is in there, too!
The liner notes deserve mention as well.  There are two sets of them, one of them is a glowing recommendation of the movie by blockbuster movie director James Cameron, with a really nice fold-out painting by Shirow Masamune inside.  The other one is a more traditional, but very well-designed set of notes with a large amount of textual information about the movie.

The Box

A technical review like this would not be complete without mentioning the actual box the whole set comes in.  There are good box designs and there are bad box designs.  Fortunately, this box very definitely belongs in the first category.  The three disks each have their own hardcover cardboard sleeve, with miscellaneous designs printed on one side, and relevant chapter information on the other.  The box they come in, is open on the right side, so access to all three disks is easy, and there is no need to mess around with a lid or anything.  It also looks very good on the shelf, with a very tasteful dark, almost black background and a brand new painting by Shirow-san gracing the front.  The cardboard is extremely thick and durable.  Great!

The Conclusion

I have pretty much been giving this box set a glowing review up until this point, deservedly so.  The only bad points I could find with this set were:

• The documentary on side five is 29 minutes and 48 seconds long, including the final copyright message, but the disk is in CLV mode! This was frustrating, because there are some scenes in the documentary that would have been nice to examine as stills, and the whole program could still fit on a CAV disk.
• The Closed Caption subtitles are based on the English dub script.
• The disk envelopes!  Why do the Japanese still use those awful, crummy, useless and utterly annoying U-shaped plastic envelopes? I mean, everything else about Japanese LD-releases is great (thick cardboard covers, good design, etc), so why do they still fail on this point? (OK, this is one of my favorite gripes, I'll get off my soapbox now!)

OK, you can all unholster your credit cards now. I'm done!

GHOST IN THE SHELL (Premium Box) Emotion / Kodansha Video, BEAL-921 ¥14800, 127 minutes 25 July 1996 GHOST IN THE SHELL (movie only-version) Emotion / Kodansha Video, BEAL-930 ¥7800, 91 minutes 18 Dec 1996 © 1995 Shirow Masamune / Kodansha, Bandai Visual, Manga Entertainment