George Clinton-Parliament Funkadelic: Mothership Connection (1976) (NTSC)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1976
Running Time	81:32 (Case: 83)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	None Given
Studio Distributor	Umbrella Entertainment	Starring	George Clinton Bootsy Collins Maceo Parker Fred Wesley Kidd Funkadelic
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	?	Music	None Given

    "The uncut funk. The bomb!"

    In 2006, I reviewed a DVD release by the greatest of all the funk bands, Parliament/Funkadelic which was a 2004 show at Montreux. In that review, I lamented the fact that many of the great band members had since moved on from what was a stunningly good band at their height in the mid-1970s. On balance, though I recommended that disc on the basis that very little was available from that classic period. Now we have this release featuring a show by Parliament/Funkadelic from their P-Funk Earth tour in 1976. The show was recorded in Houston and the bill also included Sly & the Family Stone and Bootsy's Rubber Band (both of whom come on stage to join P-Funk towards the end of the show). The band here includes most of the big names from the group including Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Ray Davis and "Fuzzy" Haskins, Bernie Worrell, Eddie Hazel, Mike "Kidd Funkadelic" Hampton,  Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, Richard "Kush" Griffith and Rick Gardner, Glenn Goins, Gary Shider, Cordell "Boogie" Mosson, Jerome "Bigfoot" Brailey and singers Debbie Wright and Jeanette Washington. Of course, George Clinton is there leading the charge to the mothership.

    The show is a complete funk freak out featuring weird costumes, bizarre lyrics, girls with furry tails and dummies dangling between their legs, incredible musicianship and a huge mothership that gets lowered to the stage (A wonderful Spinal Tap moment). The stage is completely full with musicians, singers and dancers and no two songs in a row seem to be sung by the same person. The band's big hits (to that point in time) are included in the show and many versions are excellent including Cosmic Slop (featuring great guitar), Standing on the Verge of Getting it on, Mothership Connection, P.Funk & Tear the Roof Off the Sucker. Maceo Parker stands out among the musicians along with Glenn Goins and Kidd Funkadelic, however, this is truly an incredible ensemble show.

    If you are a fan of this band, you NEED to see this show especially if you were born too late to actually see them live, like me.

Video

    The video quality is poor, however, considering the time and place it was recorded you could probably not expect much better. A 1976 show by this band would have seen most of the band and audience off their heads on something so it is not too much of a stretch to expect the crew to have been as well.

    The feature is presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, non-16x9 enhanced, which I presume to be the original aspect ratio. The colour format is NTSC so please ensure your setup can handle NTSC before purchasing.

    The picture was quite soft, badly affected by colour bleeding. There was also low level noise and some graininess. The shadow detail was virtually non-existent but this was driven by the stage lighting combined with what was probably a video source.

    The colour was full of chroma noise and the aforementioned bleeding. Additionally, there were significant comet trails and flaring from movement.

    Besides what I have already mentioned other artefacts including some minor aliasing, tape tracking problems and an omnipresent interference which looked like diagonal microphony.

    There are no subtitles.

    There is no layer change.
    

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The audio quality is better than the video but nothing too spectacular.

    This DVD contains an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack encoded at 448 Kb/s.

    The music sounds better than it would have on video and has obviously been remixed to 5.1. It is a sensible remix in that it really focuses on the front channels along with the subwoofer rather than attempting to do a full surround version. Despite this the sound is quite muddy as you would expect, however, its is certainly very listenable and considering the age of the recording comes across pretty well.

    The surround speakers were used for crowd noise mostly.

     The subwoofer adds significant bass to the bass-heavy music.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    Nope, nothing here...

Menu

    The menu design is simple but does include some music behind a still frame from the show. The only other option is track selection.

    This has been available in other regions for some years and all versions seem to be the same.

    The video quality is poor.

    The audio quality is pretty good all things considered.

    No extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall