Saturday Night Live-25 Years of Music (1975)

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    I enjoy Saturday Night Live, especially the earlier material, and am also a fan of music of many types, so accordingly I was keen to review this 5 disc set.

    The set contains music highlights from 25 years of Saturday Night Live interspersed with various sketches involving musical guests and musical parodies. There are also short interview segments with various cast and crew members over the years. There is lots of great stuff here (and also some duds) including some of the best comic talents to come out of the US since the show started including John Belushi, Andy Kaufman, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Billy Crystal, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and many more. Each disc is hosted by a different cast member, however it seems to me that this just doesn't work, because they are not funny. I think the discs would have been better without the hosts. The discs are roughly chronological with the older stuff on the earlier discs. To my mind, the quality declines over the years, both of the comedy and the music. The music really loses its edge towards the end. I have included a list of all the sketches and musical acts which appear below and have highlighted the stuff I enjoyed the most.

    Overall, this is an entertaining set of some great comedy and some excellent musical performances. Nothing on any of the discs was terrible but some appealed to me more than others. Obviously, your personal tastes will affect this.

Video

    The video quality is generally pretty good and improves as the material becomes newer.

    The feature is presented in a 1.29:1 aspect ratio which is the original aspect ratio.

    The picture was generally clear and sharp throughout, with no evidence of low level noise although the first disc had some fuzzy scenes, particularly the Carly Simon performance. It was transferred at a high bitrate. Shadow detail was fairly ordinary but most of the action takes place on a brightly lit sound stage, so it doesn't matter too much.

    The colour was generally pretty good although there were some issues on Disc 1 with colour bleeding and some discolouration, which was especially noticeable during Simon & Garfunkel. There was also some cross colouration, especially in the early material.

    From an artefacts perspective there were lots of minor artefacts but generally they did not effect the enjoyment of the show. Artefacts include minor aliasing, quite a few tape tracking errors, minor edge enhancement, microphony (82:58 - Disc 1) and some macro-blocking (Joe Piscopo's forehead on Disc 2).

    There are no subtitles.

    There is no layer change as all five discs are single layered.
    

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The audio quality is very good if you stick to the PCM stereo, but decidedly average on the 5.1 remix.

    This DVD contains three audio options, the default PCM 2.0 track encoded at a non-compressed 1536 Kb/s, a Dolby Digital 5.1 remix encoded at a low 224 Kb/s and a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono track encoded at 192 Kb/s. I started out listening to the 5.1 track but quickly settled on the PCM track. The 5.1 remix is pretty bad, very boomy and distorted with way too much bass. It also makes the vocals quite muffled. I tried it again a number of times and it was better for some material such as Queen. If you want a track which will be good listening for the entire set, stick to the stereo track.

    The surround speakers and subwoofer are not used except on the 5.1 track. On that track the surrounds add ambience only and the subwoofer booms way too loudly.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Someone needs to explain the term extra to the producers of this set. An extra on disc 1 is NOT something which is included in the main program on the next disc. The same applies to the extras on all discs except Disc 5. I can only assume that these discs were available separately in the US which would make these extras. These 'extras' are listed above but I will not discuss them here.

Menu

    The menu includes music and an ability to just play the music or just the comedy separately.

U2 - Elevation (4:36)

    The only real extra appears on Disc 5 and is U2 performing their song Elevation. This is the best musical track on Disc 5 by a country mile.

    This set has been released in Region 1 in exactly the same format.

    The video quality is pretty good for mostly old television footage.

    The audio quality is good if you stick to the PCM stereo track.

    The set has only one proper extra.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall