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PLEASE NOTE: Michael D's is currently in READ ONLY MODE. Anything submitted will simply not be written to the database.
Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
Fantasia Legacy: Supplemental Features (2001)

Fantasia Legacy: Supplemental Features (2001)

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Released 21-Jul-2003

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Animation Main Menu Introduction
Menu Animation & Audio
Rating Rated G
Year Of Production 2001
Running Time ?
RSDL / Flipper Dual Layered Cast & Crew
Start Up Menu
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By James Algar
Gaëtan Brizzi
Paul Brizzi
Hendel Butoy
Studio
Distributor

Walt Disney Studios Home Ent.
Starring Leopold Stokowski
Ralph Grierson
Kathleen Battle
Steve Martin
Itzhak Perlman
Quincy Jones
Bette Midler
James Earl Jones
Penn Jillette
Teller
James Levine
Angela Lansbury
Wayne Allwine
Case Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI Box Music Armando Domínguez
Paul Dukas
Edward Elgar


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame Full Frame English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio None
16x9 Enhancement No
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles None Smoking No
Annoying Product Placement No
Action In or After Credits No

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    This is the third disc in the Fantasia Box Set, not available as a separate DVD I might add, that contains basically an absolute pile of extras. As such there is no plot synopsis and the aim of the exercise is to let all those Fantasia-philes loose on an information overload.

    In that regard, this serves the job admirably and I doubt that there is too much essential that is not included in this little collection.

Don't wish to see plot synopses in the future? Change your configuration.

Transfer Quality

Video

    All of the video material included on the disc is in a Full Frame format that is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Given that some of the material is over sixty years old, and some of that has been less than optimally stored, you can bet that what we have in the way of video is very variable. Obviously the more recent interview material is of excellent quality, showing good sharpness, excellent detail and no great problems in any real way. The older material is not so good with much of it being on the soft side, although detail is generally still more than adequate. Grain is thankfully not too bad and only really becomes an issue in some of the material hosted by Walt Disney himself. The colour is generally rather underdone (not surprisingly) and rather flat looking on occasions. There is nothing approaching oversaturation or colour bleed, but you could argue that undersaturation is rife.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There is equally nothing significant in the way of film-to-video artefacts in the transfer, although you will find modest aliasing in a few of the individual contributions in the package. The problem is that much of the older source material is rather obviously affected with film artefacts, ranging from modest dirt specks to very obvious film dirt and film damage. Of course, given the historical nature of some of this material, this is easily overlooked in the overall sense, but it is a great shame that this sort of material is not and cannot be subjected to full blown restoration: in many respects, some of this material is as important as the film itself. Surprisingly, some of the more recent Fantasia 2000 story reel stuff is very obviously blighted with film artefacts to an extent that almost equals some of the earlier Fantasia material.

    Staggeringly and very annoyingly there are no subtitles on the DVD.

Video Ratings Summary
Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is just the one soundtrack on the DVD, being an English Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. Given that this definitely has surround encoding for at least some of the segments, I am presuming that the whole soundtrack is surround encoded. The surround encoding is really only evident in some bass enhancement to the music but does seem to spread the soundscape across the front surrounds at times.

    Whilst there is certainly evidence of background hiss in some of the source material, there is nothing that much wrong with the soundtrack. In general the narration and dialogue comes up well enough and can be easily understood. There is nothing obvious in the way of audio sync issues.

Audio Ratings Summary
Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Extras

   The whole raison d'être of this disc, so thankfully we get plenty of stuff. I should point out that, at least with my equipment, there is an extremely annoying glitch with respect to the About The Music segments listed below. The instructions are that you use the left and right arrow keys to move between frames and the enter button to move back to the previous menu. On my equipment, the left and right arrow keys simply do not work and the only way to move between frames is to use the enter button. Unfortunately, the enter button when you get to the last page of the notes simply stops the DVD and only by hitting the enter key again will I be taken back to the main menu. Try doing this upwards of a dozen times and you can bet it starts to get more than just annoying...

   Unfortunately, the same glitch affects the Re-Release Schedule and the Biographies.

Menu

   After a very decent main menu introduction, the menus themselves are excellent in quality, although the main menu is a little obtuse thing that is graphic based rather than text based. The main menu has two selections - Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 - and thereafter you just keep delving into the package for hours and hours. There is an Easter Egg in the main menu - just push the up arrow on your remote and you too can indulge in the DVD Credits.

Fantasia

   The first part of the extras looks at each segment of the film along with the interstitials, in the order they appear on the disc, not in the order they appear in the film. Given the similarity of the content of each segment, an overall look at each segment is provided:

Dance Of The Hours

The Nutcracker Suite

Toccata And Fugue In D Minor

The Rite Of Spring

Ave Maria

The Sorcerers Apprentice

   The most famous segment of the film gets a little bit more than the rest of the segments.

The Pastoral Symphony

Night On Bald Mountain

The Interstitials

The second part of the extras looks on a more generic level:

The Fantasia That Never Was

   It is well known that the original concept for Fantasia was an evolving film that would either be continuously on theatrical release or on regular re-release with an ever-changing make up.

   This is discussed in the opening Introduction (3:17) which features interview material with John Canemaker and John Culhane as well as bits and pieces from some of the intended segments. Following this is a section on perhaps the best known of the pieces intended for the film: Clair De Lune (7:37). This was animated and scored but cut from the original release owing to length, and eventually resurfaced in a revised form in Make Mine Music as the Blue Bayou segment. We get to see the entire sequence as it was also intended to be seen - as a separate animated short. This is followed by Visual Development stuff running to 1 page and 8 images. We then have four other sequences considered for inclusion in the original film or for subsequent insertion:

   Finishing off this segment is a look at Other Concepts (1940), where far less developed ideas like Mosquito (2 pages, 12 images), Flight Of The Bumble Bee (2 pages, 15 images) and Baby Ballet (3 pages, 27 images) are featured.

Special Effects On Fantasia (4:17)

   Obviously the effects work was tremendously important to the film itself, but just how do you do these things? Well, this all-too-brief segment looks at some of the effects and how they were created. There is interview material from John Canemaker and another Animation Historian, Howard Lowery. The latter's claim to fame in particular was the discovery of a priceless behind-the-scenes record maintained on the job by Herman Schultheis, who worked in the Special Effects department at the studios. Not discovered until after the death of his widow in 1990, what his "scrapbooks" contained was a staggering amount of material on how the effects were created, amongst other stuff including actual frames of film from the shooting. Make this ten times as long and it would still probably not be enough to really do justice to the topic. Very interesting stuff.

Publicity

   Of which the Disney studios have always been the masters. We start with the 1940 Trailer (2:09) which it has to be said is in very rough condition indeed. Nonetheless, this is almost priceless stuff to see how the film was originally promoted. Next up is The Roadshow Programme, presented by a still shot of every page from the programme. This was originally handed out at the theatre as if the viewer was about to watch a concert, which in some ways was exactly what the viewer was about to do - so it was quite an innovative thing. Next up is the fiftieth anniversary 1990 Trailer (1:25) which highlights the differences in promotion over the fifty years since the original release. Obviously this is of much better quality. Following that is the Re-Release Schedule which attempts to set out the various incarnations of the film over the years, so it does in some brief way detail the censorship that has been inflicted upon the original film. We finish off with Posters, which is precisely that - 3 pages totalling 22 images of various promotional posters for the film over the years.

Biographies

   So we finish off the whole section on Fantasia with some bios. Those for Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski (Conductor) and Deems Taylor (Narrator) have a title page with a photo, followed by 18 pages, 3 pages and 2 pages of notes respectively. Those for Ben Sharpsteen (Production Supervisor), Joe Grant (Story Co-Director and arguably one of the most important men in the Disney history) and Dick Huemer (Story Co-Director) have just 4 pages, 8 pages and 3 pages of notes respectively.

Fantasia 2000

   The format for the "sequel" is pretty much the same as for the original film and so the first part of the extras looks at each segment of the film along with the interstitials, in the order they appear on the disc, not in the order they appear in the film. Given the similarity of the content of each segment, an overall look at each segment is provided:

Pines Of Rome

The Interstitials

Pomp And Circumstance Marches 1, 2, 3 and 4

Rhapsody In Blue

Piano Concerto #2

Symphony No.5

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

   Which is identical to that included in the Fantasia section...

Firebird Suite (1919 Version)

Carnival Of The Animals

The rest of the extras look at more general aspects of the film:

Orchestra Demonstration

   Taking a section of Symphony No.5, this demonstration allows you to hear the individual contributions of the percussion, strings, woodwind and brass to the whole piece, or any combination of those sections of the orchestra. Unfortunately, this sounds like synthesised music rather than actual orchestral music and sounds rather ordinary. Still, the concept was good.

Biographies

   Presenting biographies for Roy Edward Disney (Executive Producer, 4 pages), Donald W. Ernst (Producer, 3 pages), James Levine (Conductor, 3 pages), Don Hahn (Director, 5 pages), Hendel Butoy (Supervising Animation Director, 2 pages), Pixote Hunt (Art Director, 2 pages), Eric Goldberg (Director, 5 pages), Francis Glebas (Director, 3 pages) and Gaetan and Paul Brizzi (Director Design and Story, 2 pages). All have a single photo page to introduce their biography.

Trailers And TV Spots

   Comprising Trailer #1 (2:11), Trailer #2: The IMAX Experience (1:24), TV Spot #1 (0:31), TV Spot #2 (0:31), TV Spot #3 (0:31) and TV Spot #4 (0:31), all are pretty much variations on a theme - with the exception of Trailer #2 which pushes the technical aspects of the film rather than just the film itself.

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    Given the rather extensive nature of the collection here, I cannot swear to this being the complete truth but as far as I can ascertain this is for all intents and purposes the same package as is available in the Region 1 set. Indeed, the menu spelling of colour throughout is consistently the American "color" just to emphasise the point.

Summary

    Fantasia Legacy is one of the most extensive extras packages I have seen, and whilst not everything here is terrific the whole is certainly very comprehensive and informative.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (Biological imperfection run amok)
Friday, January 09, 2004
Review Equipment
DVDPioneer DV-515, using S-Video output
DisplaySony Trinitron Wega (80cm). Calibrated with Video Essentials. This display device is 16x9 capable.
Audio DecoderBuilt in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Video Essentials.
AmplificationYamaha RXV-795
SpeakersEnergy Speakers: centre EXLC; left and right C-2; rears EXLR; and subwoofer ES-12XL

Other Reviews NONE