Teletubbies-Oooh! (1997)

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General		Extras
Category	Childrens	Menu Animation & Audio Game-Jigsaw, Tinky Winky's Bag Of Fun Bonus Episode-Lion Dance Web Links
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	54:04 (Case: 72)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Paul Gawith
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Pui Fan Lee Simon Shelton John Simmit Nikky Smedley
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$24.95	Music	Andrew McCrorie-Shand

    Teletubbies is a children's program produced by the BBC that has now been in production for over six years. The series follows four lovable, colourful aliens - the purple Tinky Winky, green Dipsy, yellow Laa-laa and the red Po. Each of the characters are unique in a certain way and are defined as individuals. This makes for great familiarity with young children and is likely to encourage open-mindedness when it comes to foreign cultures and customs.

    The feature on this DVD is a compilation of ten minute episodes strung together to form an hour long program. In the short adventures on this DVD we see the Teletubbies discover bluebell flowers, make Tubby toast and blow Tubby custard bubbles. There are a number of interesting live action sequences included, as well as counting games and activities involving shapes and colours.

    Although my very small toddler found the run-time too much of an ask, the bright, bold colours and many rude noises kept her entertained for an extended period and even gained a loud chuckle now and then, so I would certainly say that the show has her utmost approval and should be similarly popular with kids of preschool age and under.

Video

    The feature is presented in an aspect of 1.33:1, full frame. This is contrary to the disc's packaging which incorrectly lists the aspect as 16x9.

    The level of sharpness is not the best I have seen from a new television series, but is adequate for a children's program. The entire program is very bright and well lit with virtually no dark scenes to speak of. There are no problems with low level noise in this video transfer.

    Colours are of the brightest and boldest variety in this series. My toddler was mesmerised by the constant variances in bold, bright colours and the action on screen. The bright palette did not lend itself to any bleeding or oversaturation of any kind.

    MPEG artefacting popped up intermittently, most often around picture fades and dissolves. These instances only resulted in some slight blocking for a few seconds and were certainly not too noticeable. Moments of aliasing were only very mild and similarly unobtrusive.

    There are English subtitles available. In fact, they were activated by default on my Pioneer player. The font is very easy to read and is paced well with the dialogue and noises on screen. There are a few sentences of Catalan dialogue in the feature and these are not translated by the subtitle stream.

    This disc is DVD5 formatted, and doesn't contain a layer transition.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There is only one audio stream on this DVD, a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix encoded at 192Kb/s.

    The voices and characterisations of the series are always easy to discern, however I did find it difficult to understand their babyish dialect at times. There are a few sentences of narration during the feature and these moments are the easiest to understand by far. There are no issues with audio sync at all.

    There are many examples of panning within the stereo field, most of all the Teletubbies' voices. There is a great example of this at 2:40 as the screen area fills with images of the characters saying Eh-oh!.

    The soundtrack score is wistful and electronic, with very little value other than background melody.

    There was certainly no surround activity or subwoofer response in this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Games

Bonus Episode - Lion Dance (10:09)

DVD-Rom Content

    The video transfer is bright and colourful, with only some minor compression issues.

    The audio transfer is encoded at a low bitrate, but is generally problem free.

    There are a couple of little extras included.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall