Ranma 1/2 Outta Control is a DVD box set of the fourth season of Ranma 1/2. This set contains a total of twenty-four episodes. The first four discs contain five episodes, while the fifth disc contains four episodes and the special features.
The menus for the first four discs let you play the episodes, setup your language and subtitle preferences, or select where you want to begin watching an episode. The menu on the fifth disc contains these features, as well as an option to view the special features. In the setup menu, you can choose to watch the episodes with either the Japanese language track or the English language track, and you can also choose whether to have the subtitles on or off.
The special features menu contains five options: “Line Art Gallery,” “Textless Opening,” “Textless Ending,” “Cast List,” and “Actor Profiles.” As you would expect, the textless opening and ending are just the opening and ending credits without the text. However, it should be noted that for the textless opening, it is a textless version of the original Japanese opening (the English graphic for the title that covers the Japanese graphic is absent from this version of the opening). The line art gallery has twenty-eight pages of model sketches of the characters that appear on this DVD box set. The cast list is a list of the English and Japanese voice actors for each character. The actor profiles are selected filmographies for the English voice actors.
Ranma 1/2 Outta Control is a rather “low frills” DVD set, and the extras are similar to what can be found on Ranma 1/2 Anything-Goes Martial Arts and Ranma 1/2 Hard Battle. While these features are better than what appeared on the first Ranma 1/2 DVD box set, I wish an effort had been made to track down some of the English voice actors and include interviews with them as extras on the DVD box sets.
This season of Ranma 1/2 introduces the principal for Furinkan High School, a new disciple for the Tendo Dojo (who only appears in one episode), and a character that appeared in the second season of Ranma 1/2 makes a return appearance. This season also saw a couple of stories that ran for more than one episode (these kind of story arcs were all but gone during the third season of Ranma 1/2).
Ranma 1/2 Outta Control tends to run between $40 and $50 at retail. While this could be considered a little high-priced for what you get, the episodes are still worth the cost. The series is very enjoyable for an older audience (16 and up), and really should be in an anime fan’s DVD collection.
I wrote this review after watching a copy of this DVD box set that my husband and I purchased.
