What are the Japanese and English Evangelion home video editions?

English Evangelion begins with ADV Films, which released the television series on VHS in North America from 1996 and later built one of the defining DVD lines of the early anime boom, including the Platinum Edition with remastered video and extensive extras. Manga Entertainment handled the two films, and for years a complete English shelf meant mixing two companies' packaging, logos and design languages.

Japan's reference editions came from King Records and later the franchise's own custodians: DVD boxes in the 2000s, then Blu-ray boxes that standardised the series and films in high definition. The Japanese Blu-ray box of 2015 set the master quality that later international editions drew on, while the Netflix streaming debut in 2019 introduced yet another English translation and dub, a reminder that Evangelion's English text has never been a single fixed thing.

GKIDS brought the franchise back to English physical media with Blu-ray editions beginning in 2021, including a standard edition and a large Ultimate Edition that reproduced the scale and extras philosophy of the Japanese deluxe boxes. Those releases restored the television series and the two 1990s films to print in English in high definition, using the original ADV era dub for the classic material alongside the newer one.

When comparing editions, collectors check four things: which dub and subtitle translation is included, whether the extended home video cuts of the later episodes are present, whether the song Fly Me to the Moon appears over the end credits, since licensing has removed it from some editions, and which extras survive. Two boxes with the same cover can differ on every one of those points.