DVD Review HTF REVIEW: The Adventures of Indiana Jones (Highly Recommended) (1 Viewer)

[Patrick McCart]

After watching The Last Crusade, I spotted focus pulls which show the distortion from foreground focus to background focus... no Super-35 here.

 

[Christian Preischl]

Kurt,

And as I typed that I checked the DVD again..the subtitle does say "Wh-what's a matter with you?" but you can only hear the one "what's."

I assume you're refering to the "What's the matter with you" at approx. 1:18:33. I just checked my copy (R1) and it's cleary audible.

Chris

 

[Grant H]

Yeah, I didn't notice that line missing when I watched TOD. (Then again, I didn't notice the missing line in Witness either). Will have to check mine out.
Disappointing about the new "centeredness" of the sound especially the Raiders whip. I'll have to check out my LD when I get my iScan back.

My word for the Last Crusade's transfer is "overprocessed." Just a bit. It does look very good, but lacks the film-like look of the other two films. Kind of sad that my least favorite, TOD, looks the best. (Though I do think the water effects at the end should have been re-done. They always looked bad.)

 

[Miles Lucasso]

I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark last night, and The Last Crusade the night before. And I'm amazed how mediocre the audio track is. The center channel dialoge is just barely audible over the ambient action sounds. The surrounds got modest sound at best.
I thought it might be my system, so I watched the first Matrix
and everything sounded good.

Considering the amount of time they've had to work on this trilogy, and the fact this came from George Lucas, a guy who's made billions of dollars touting his sound expertice,
I'm surprized and dissapointed.

-miles

 

[Chris Atkins]

Miles:

I agree on the center channel, but I found the entire sound mix very engaging...especially in the surrounds.

Directionality is not up to, say, the Matrix. But I find myself completely enveloped when I watch these movies.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Re: Belloq and the fly.

Paul Freeman addressed this in the retrospective collage of interviews published in the Oct. 2003 issue of Premiere:

FREEMAN: The one question people always ask me is about that fly in my mouth. "How did you swallow the fly?" If you slow it down and look at it frame by frame, you see there are a couple of frames clipped out. Editor Mike Kahn very cunningly made it look as though I ate that fly, which I didn't do. I should have, because I could have had a career as a fly-eater.

M.

 

[Dave H]

I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark last night, and The Last Crusade the night before. And I'm amazed how mediocre the audio track is.

Are we talking about the same DVDs here? I thought the audio was excellent. You mentioned Matrix - but remember these movies are much older and are not going to sound as good as a newer action film.

 

[David Galindo]

Thats right. These DVDs sound as good as they can. I certainly didnt expect to be blown out of the water, and I was plesantly surprised by how well the mixes were.

You cant compare the Indy movie audio to, say, Terminator 3 since Indy was made 20 years ago.

 

[greg_t]

I compared the PCM track on my Raiders LD and the Dolby Digital on the Raiders DVD. Receiver is a Pioneer Elite 49TXi. PCM LD track was played via DTS-NEO 6 and the Dvd was straight Dolby digital. There was no THX processing of any kind. I compared several scenes back and forth, and found that the DD keeps right up with the PCM track. The LD PCM was a little bit more spacial sounding, but not a whole lot. In comparing the two, I find the DVD track for Raiders to be very faithful to the sound of the LD. I was very worried that the DD would sound thin and lifeless compared to the PCM LD, and it just ain't so. The Raiders DVD, in my opinion, has an excellent DD track that is faithful to the original soundtrack.

 

[BarryS]

I just bought this set tonight and watched "Temple of Doom". Excellent. It really looks amazing, especially compared to my old VHS copy. It's wonderful to finally have these films in widescreen. I don't know how I managed to watch them in pan&scan. For example, the scene in "Temple of Doom" where Willie goes to the front of the plane and discovers that the pilots are gone. I don't understand how that shot worked in pan&scan. It seems like the whole frame is filled. Does anyone have a screenshot comparison of that scene?

 

[Tim Glover]

Thanks for the ld/dvd comparo greg_t. I've been curious about that.

These are really excellent dvds!

 

[Patrick McCart]

I've only heard Raiders in full 5.1 (when I had an opportunity to view it on a full HT setup) and the other two on my laptop in 2.0 stereo...

But the amount of directionality and the richness of the sound is amazing.

 

[Angel Pagan]

After doing a quick scan of this thread, I see the only mention of ToD's rating in this post. If memory serves me correct, Doom was the 1st movie to receive the PG-13 rating yet is rated PG on DVD. Was something cut from the DVD or does the MPAA re-rate movies when they're released on video and changed their minds?

 

[Colin Jacobson]

If memory serves me correct, Doom was the 1st movie to receive the PG-13 rating yet is rated PG on DVD.

Doom was never "PG-13" - it didn't exist when Doom hit screens. However, along with Gremlins, Doom helped provoke the creation of the rating. Doom remains straight "PG", though...

 

[Neil S. Bulk]

However, if I'm not mistaken, the DVD is the first video release of ToD not to say "Some scenes may be to intense for young children" on the packaging. Was it on the 1999 VHS tapes?

Neil

 

[Angel Pagan]

Colin, you sure about that? Although you may be right, I always remembered that about Doom. I checked IMDB's trivia page and it does state that "This film inspired the PG-13 MPAA rating." I also remember reading in many newspaper articles (and movie reviews) that the heart-removing sacrifice scene is what prompted the new rating. Then again, I could've dreamt it all.

The same quote is over at theraider.net.

Others:
Rotten Tomatoes states: "After the film's release, the MPAA’s Classification & Ratings Board created a new rating--PG-13."

BBC Films states: "Indeed, so gruesome was one scene of ritual sacrifice that it necessitated the creation of a new rating - PG-13 - in the United States."

I also saw in FAQ.ORG where someone answers a posters question on the first PG-13 movie:

Red Dawn was the first motion picture released with the PG-13 rating, which had been created after difficulty rating some movies in 1984, most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) (Flamingo Kid, The (1984) was the first film to be *given* a PG-13 rating, but sat on the shelves for five months before being released).

Doesn't mean that the person is right just that others thought the same thing.

 

[Dave H]

Doom was the movie that triggered PG-13. It was and is, however, PG.

 

[Angel Pagan]

Ah, ok.

Colin, Dave thanks for the clarification. I should know better than to trust my memory.

 

[Michael Reuben]

The PG-13 issue re: Temple of Doom was also covered in the Oct. 2003 Premiere article (p. 80):

, which had the same criticism.

M.

 

[BrettB]

Spielberg talks about this in the doc.