Good Morning Vietnam

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1987	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	116:04 minutes	Other Extras	None
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	2,4	Director	Barry Levinson
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Robin Williams
Case	Amaray
RRP	$34.95	Music

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Dolby Digital	4.1
16x9 Enhancement	No	Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 4.1) French (Dolby Digital 2.0 ) Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 )
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired Portuguese	Smoking	Yes

    Early on, the movie does little other than string together a number of very well crafted stand-up acts featuring Robin Williams, but about two thirds of the way through the movie, it takes a quick detour and becomes much more serious. The funny parts of this movie are very funny, and the serious parts are well done, so the overall movie experience is excellent.

    All-in-all, this is a classic movie which can be enjoyed time and time again.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was usually reasonably sharp and clear, but clearly suffered from a loss of definition compared with 16x9 enhanced transfers. Line structure was visible at times, something that simply never happens with true 16x9 enhanced transfers. Nonetheless, the transfer was surprisingly good given both the age of the movie and the lack of a 16x9 transfer. Shadow detail was reasonable, but not great. There was no low level noise.

    There was a slight skip in the video at 55:04.

    The colours were nicely saturated throughout.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of a fair amount of aliasing at times, particularly with traffic scenes, but this was surprisingly minor considering the non-16x9 enhanced nature of this transfer. Film artefacts were present more often than in contemporary transfers, but they remained at an acceptable level.

Audio

    Once again, an unusual channel configuration was present, though it is unclear as to whether the soundtrack was derived from the master stem recordings or from a professionally-decoded surround-encoded stereo soundtrack. The Region 1 version of this title comes with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, which is presumably simply a doubling up of the surround track into both the Left and Right surround channels.

    There were two slight audio skips, the second of which was at 111:37.

    The overall level of the English soundtrack was quite low, and I ended up increasing it by 5dB to make it easier to hear. This does not apply to the French and Italian surround-encoded soundtracks, which were recorded at quite a high level.

    Dialogue was usually clear and audible, though some words were a little hard to make out. This was as a result of a combination of reasons; some dialogue was hard to understand because of the strong Vietnamese accents, and other dialogue was hard to hear because of excessive background noise.

    There were no audio sync problems with this disc.

    The musical score was comprised of 60s rock 'n' roll standards, perfectly appropriate for the time period of the movie.

    The surround channel was used lightly for music, but otherwise had little to contribute, with the majority of the movie being mixed to the front soundstage.

    The .1 channel punctuated the soundtrack effectively at times, both for music and for special effects.

What's Missing / What's Extra

Menu

    The video quality is perfectly acceptable.

    The audio quality is reasonable.

    The extras are non-existent.

Video
Audio
Extras	nil
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
14th June 1999