The Rebuild of Evangelion film series was dubbed by Funimation, only including three voice actors from the ADV dub for Asuka, Shinji and Misato - while retaining Jon Swasey as Gendo from the Director's Cuts, and changing the rest of the cast. A positive was that ADV had since acquired a larger talent pool, so it allowed some of the poorer performances to be polished. Unfortunately not all the cast from before were available, so some changes were made to the cast (Gendō's original voice actor, Tristan MacAvery, had moved from Texas to New York in the interim) though most of the voice cast was left intact. With the remastered release of the 'Renewal of Evangelion' DVD sets in Japan, and the Director's Cut of Episodes 21-24, this required ADV to go back and do vocal additions/remastering to their dub. Nonetheless, Evangelion became one of ADV's most popular titles, and one of their higher regarded dubs. Tristan MacAvery even claims the dub was transcribed from fan translations. Commentary for the English dub will often make reference to it being made on a tight budget, involved renting out space to do recordings with substandard equipment, and a good portion of the cast was played by members of the production team. The series was first dubbed by ADV Films using their Houston-based recording talent, and released straight to VHS from 1996 to 1998.