So what's the verdict, does the new Peter Pan DVD have improved video? (1 Viewer)

[rob kilbride]

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse Daniel of being lazy, but I would like to politely agree that not giving a thorough comparison of the video or audio of a previous DVD edition IS a major shortcoming in a review. If someone's not interested in the bonus material of a new edition why else would he rebuy the disc? And I'm guessing at some point, most DVD owners will have never owned a Laserdisc Player, if its not true already. I never did. So to me the review was not useful. So Daniel you may want to consider this in the future if you don't want to ignore a growing majority.

 

[rob kilbride]

BTW Ken, I think it probably is a new transfer. But it would appear they used the same exact film source. I remember seeing a film artifact like a scratch or something in the new DVD so I checked and the exact same artifact was in the older DVD. But here are some differences in the two editions regarding film artifacts : Starting at 35:16 when the picture zooms closer to the skull island you see more film artifacts on the right of the screen than in the previous edition and at 47:25 you can see a large dustlike artifact on the upper left portion of the screen against the sky. I'm not an expert in transfers nor have I read any detailed writing about how to analyze artifacts but it would seem that having some artifacts the same and others different would indicate a new transfer was made from the same source and that either careless mistakes were made such as if the big piece of dust was something that could have been easily wiped away or that they were not willing to make the same digital alterations that may have been made the first time. Please tell me what you think on this matter.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

I have no first hand knowledge, so take this with a grain of salt, but they could have used the same hi-def master and applied different digital video processing tools for clean-up. The thing that looks similar to me is the color timing, so another possibility is that they did perform a new transfer and corrected it to the same reference (whatever that was) as the previous transfer.

Regards,

 

[Alan Kurland]

It looks great, it sounds ok, the kids like it, I sat through it and enjoyed the animation - what more can be said, a definite pick up if you don't have it !!

 

[Edwin-S]

Is "Peter Pan" eventually scheduled for a platinum release or is this release the best that can be expected? The cover art on this release has to be some of the worst I have seen. It looks like the kind of art they would use on a direct to video release....not a Disney classic.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

PP is not one of the ten "platinum titles", so this is what we get for the forseeable future. w.r.t. The cover art, the thing that I found strange was that there is not a single picture of Captain Hook on the packaging except for a silhouette in the distance on the front. C'mon, he's one of the great Disney villains. Of course, packaging is way at the bottom of my why-buy list, so it's not that big of a deal to me.

Regards,

 

[Colin Jacobson]

not giving a thorough comparison of the video or audio of a previous DVD edition IS a major shortcoming in a review

I agree - to a certain extent. I'd love to be able to do great comparisons for every reissue review I write, but it's simply not practical for a variety of reasons:

-Take the new Evil Dead DVD. I never saw the old one and frankly, I wouldn't have watched this one if I wasn't able to get a screener from AB. Will my ED review be worthless because I can't compare it to the older ones? I don't think so; I can still comment on how the current one looks, even though I won't be able to refer to the others. I don't think it's my responsibility as a reviewer to now shell out the bucks for old DVDs just to write this article, though;

-In regard to Peter Pan, I reviewed the original but I don't own it. I rented it just for review purposes; I already had the CAV LD, so I had no need to buy the DVD. I was able to compare my findings on the new disc with my notes on the old one, but I couldn't directly compare the two via new screenings. Again, I don't think it's my responsibility to seek out the old one just to do an A:B comparison right now. That'd be great, but it's simply not practical.

Maybe others will disagree, but I think we reviewers owe it to readers to do the best we can with each title and that's it. If I can directly compare two titles I will, but I don't feel my reviews are massively flawed when i can't do so...