The first DVD Sony released of their animated Godzilla: The Series show, based off the 1998 GODZILLA movie. This DVD was controversial as it came at a time when full season releases were already the norm. It was hoped that it might have just been a sales test and a full season release might come later. If that was the case, the Monster Wars was a bad episode block choice as it makes far too many references to other episodes and would really depend on someone having already watched them to grasp what's going on. Regardless of intent, instead of a full season release two additional three episode discs were distributed before Sony gave up on the series and so it stays with nine episodes in total on the format. Back story aside, this particular release falls very short in just about all areas except for having a decent audio presentation.

Considering there is only around 70 minutes of video, movie and "extras" together, one would have hoped that Sony would have given the maximum amount of space to the content and produced a stellar looking transfer. Sadly, no such luck, as the video quality here is horribly compressed with little apparent care taken to its appearance. At its worst, this causes the video to look blurry, lacking in any sense of detail. There is a lot of artifacting present, especially on the reds, and the overall presentation looks like something you would find with an online source rather than a retail DVD. For whatever reason, the exception to all of this is the show's intro, which looks amazing on all three episodes with no overt signs of compression, great colors, and lacking in the huge amount of noise present in the episodes themselves.

Godzilla: The Series is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

The disc has a no frills audio presentation that gets the job done taking into account the source material. The audio is presented in a two channel surround format, which is slightly odd to see a two channel surround but that's how its touted. In reality, its more like a stereo presentation in terms of directionality, but sounds faithful to the source and without any inconsistencies.

The audio can be accompanied by, removable, English subtitles.

For all purposes, this disc has no extras. It has two trailers that play automatically when the disc is inserted, but they are so out of genre that I doubt anyone watching the DVD will have a parallel interest.

Bottom line, this DVD is pretty lacking but at least can be purchased for bargain bin prices to offset the short comings. This release is currently the only way to get the last two episodes of this trilogy on region 1 DVD, so bad quality or not there are still probably a number of fans who will seek this disc out.