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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Music Video-I'll Be There For You-The Rembrandts
Rating
Year Released	1993-1994
Running Time	175:07 minutes
RSDL/Flipper	Dual Sided	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	James Burrows
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Jennifer Aniston Courtney Cox Lisa Kudrow Matt Le Blanc Matthew Perry David Schwimmer
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$36.95	Music	Michael Skloff

    The episodes on this DVD are Episodes 9 - 16 of Series 1.

    The One Where The Underdog Gets Away (21:54). Our friends end up desperate and dateless on Thanksgiving. Joey because he features in a VD poster and no girl will go out on a date with him, Rachael because she misses her flight to go ski-ing, Chandler because he hates Thanksgiving, and Monica and Ross because their parents have gone to Puerto Rico

    The One With The Monkey (21:54). Our friends once again end up desperate and dateless on New Year's Eve, but cobble up a series of old flames and other desperate and dateless individuals and make the most of the festivities. Ross acquires a pet monkey.

    The One With Mrs Bing (21:53). Phoebe and Monica feel guilty because they distracted a male stranger and he was subsequently hit by an ambulance. He remains in a coma for some time, with both Phoebe and Monica convincing themselves that he is a dream guy. Meanwhile, Ross has a flirtation with Chandler's mother, with disastrous consequences.

    The One With The Dozen Lasagnes (21:54). Rachael's boyfriend, Paolo, makes a pass at Phoebe, much to her consternation, and everyone know the sex of Ross' baby, except for him.

    The One With The Boobies (21:54). Phoebe begins dating a psychologist who analyses all of them, much to their disgust. Chandler inadvertently sees Rachael topless, which starts an escalating spiral. Joey is dismayed to find out that his father has a mistress.

    The One With The Candy Hearts (21:51). Joey convinces Chandler to go on a double date with him, with Chandler's ex-girlfriend Janice being the unfortunate mystery date. Meanwhile, Ross takes a workmate out on a date and runs into his ex-wife and her lover.

    The One With The Stoned Guy (21:54). Monica thinks she may have gotten her big break, and painstakingly prepares a meal for her potential employer only to have him show up stoned. Chandler gets a promotion at work.

    The One With The Two Parts-Part 1 (21:53). Joey meets Phoebe's twin sister, Ursula, and starts dating her, much to the chagrin of Phoebe. Ross accompanies his ex-wife to antenatal classes where roles become difficult to define. Chandler needs to fire someone at work but instead ends up dating her.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. Four episodes are present on each side of the DVD, which is not clearly labelled in regards to which side is which.

    The transfer is quite soft and blurry, particularly Episodes 8 and 9, which appear to have been sourced from analogue videotape rather than from film. These episodes are extremely indistinct at times, lacking both in foreground and background detail. A marked contrast between the quality of the fake Jay Leno show in Episode 10 and the Friends episode itself is a pointer to the source material being at fault with the Friends series. Some shots are occasionally out of focus. Shadow detail is quite poor, particularly the first two episodes, but even the later episodes suffer from poor shadow detail. No low level noise marred the image at any stage.

    The colours were oversaturated a significant portion of the time, with skin tones in particular taking on an excessively red hue. The first two episodes exhibited a significant amount of colour bleed.

    A frequent artefact was a blue ring around objects, particularly bright red objects and black objects, which became quite objectionable after a while. This was present to a greater or lesser extent in every episode. An additional artefact which affected bright red objects was that these objects occasionally took on a striped, purple discolouration at times which was most distracting to look at.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen. Aliasing was present only when venetian blinds and long shots of the city were shown, and even then it was not overly distracting.

    Film artefacts cropped up occasionally and quite noticeably at times, as when they occurred, they were usually quite large artefacts.
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue was generally easy enough to understand, although it did tend to distort on dialogue peaks. Audio sync was satisfactory at all times. There was an audio dropout during Episode 16 at 6:08 whilst the monkey is fiddling with the TV remote control.

    The score by Michael Skloff was generally restricted to the opening theme of the series, but short snippets of music found their way into the latter episodes on this disc.

    The surround and bass channels were not used by this more-or-less monaural mix. The only stereo components of the mix were the audience laughter and the music.
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Distortion/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Music Video-I'll Be There For You-The Rembrandts

    The video is of marginal quality, hampered by significant blurriness and colour oversaturation.

    The audio quality is acceptable given the source material limitations.

    The extras are limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
11th September 2000