Black Lagoon Complete TV Series   Starring (voice): Daisuke Namikawa, Megumi Toyoguchi, Hiroaki Hirata, Mami Koyama and Tsutomu Isobe Manga Entertainment RRP: £39.99 KDVD2580 Certificate: 18 Available 09 July 2012

The seas of Southeast Asia can be a perilous place, especially with the likes of the mercenary PT boat The Black Lagoon - with its crew of Dutch, Revy and Benny - roaming the high seas. The Lagoon Company are not the sort of people that you would want to mess with and certainly not the sort of people that meek and mild company man Rokuro Okajima thought he would end up joining...

Black Lagoon (2006) is an action adventure anime, directed by Sunao Katabuchi from the Madhouse studio (Trigan, Perfect Blue, Tenjo Tenge amongst many others), from an original manga by Rei Hiroe. The setting initially appears similar to Cowboy Bebop in its premise. The first season ran in Japan between April and June 2006 for twelve episodes. A second, twelve episode, season followed in October 2006. This release of the box sex contains all the episodes from the two seasons.

This had already been released originally as Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3, where you can pick up thumbnail synopses of the individual episodes. So, if you missed this excellent show when it first surfaced now is the time to get the whole lot at a reasonable price. Spread across six discs, with four episodes per disc.

The show has been re-encoded; you couldn’t actually say it’s been restored as there is little to complain about the show's high quality of animation. The set has audio options for English, French Italian and Spanish languages as well as the original Japanese, all with subtitles in the same languages. Audio is 2.0 Stereo, which does a good job of being both clean and clear. As the discs are being released by a different company, the extras that existed on the original release are missing here, the disc contain no extras at all.

The real quality of the show comes from its well-rounded and believable characters and a cracking good script. Of, course the real advantage of the set is the inclusion of the show's second season which continued the tradition of great stories, strongly animated.

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Charles Packer