The Doors-30th Anniversary Collection

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Main Menu Introduction Main Menu Audio Music Video-Break On Through (Isle of Wight Track) Music Video-The Ghost Song Booklet
Rating
Year Of Production	?
Running Time	175:00 (Case: 185)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Ray Manzarek
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Jim Morrison John Densmore Ray Manzarek Robby Krieger
Case	?
RPI	$36.95	Music	The Doors

    The Doors with Jim Morrison only produced music for a few years between 1967 and 1971. In this short time they created some of the most memorable songs of their generation. In fact, there are very few people even now who don't know the tune to at least one Doors song. This DVD spans these few years before Morrison's premature death in Paris. I just wonder how much more material we would have seen from the Doors over the years if this terrible tragedy had not occurred.

    This DVD combines three different features to present the 30th Anniversary Collection. The first feature on the disc is The Doors - Live at the Hollywood Bowl. This concert was recorded during the summer of 1968 at the peak of the Doors musical career. The second feature, entitled Dance on Fire, was released in 1985 and, as far as I can tell, is a montage of video clips of the Doors most memorable songs. The songs are separated with Morrison's poems and writings, some of which are quite unusual. Finally, we are presented with The Soft Parade that was released in 1987, another montage of songs.

    Dance on Fire was by far the most enjoyable feature on this DVD with a selection of great songs. The songs found on The Soft Parade were mostly unknown to me, but as I am not a great fan this is not surprising. The live concert was intriguing, providing a great glimpse of what the live concert scene was like in the late sixties.

    Due to some overlap of songs I will annotate the track listing with the feature the song came from:

• 1 - Live at the Hollywood Bowl
• 2 - Dance on Fire
• 3 - The Soft Parade

Video

    The transfer is presented in the Full Frame aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Sharpness varies dramatically throughout the transfer. The concert performance is terribly soft with almost no shadow detail. Numerous video clips display very good sharpness and shadow detail indicating that any video problems are the fault of the source material and not the authoring process

    Colour is generally fairly poor throughout the transfer. There are a few exceptions to the rule but there is simply no getting past the quality of the source material.

    There are no MPEG artefacts throughout the transfer that I noticed. Film artefacts are constant. At some stages there are vertical lines running through the film source. You have to take the good with the bad in this instance.

    Only one feature has subtitles, The Soft Parade, but these aren't for the lyrics - just the talking between songs.

    This disc is a Dual Layer with the layer change placed somewhere between the features as I could not find it.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    In general the audio quality on this DVD is very good considering the age of some of the recordings. I give credit to the engineers who remastered this collection, who did an impressive job.

    This DVD has two audio tracks - a Linear PCM at 1536kbps and a DD 2.0 track at 192kbps. I found the PCM track to be superior to the DD track mainly in clarity and bass definition.

    Dialogue is mainly clear throughout. Some of the live performances have quite distorted recordings and are difficult to understand. Morrison's musings are always clear and easily understood.

    A few of the music video style songs have some lip synch problems, but this is to be expected with dubbed singing. The live performance has no lip sync problems.

    There is no surround activity in this transfer as it is not surround encoded. The subwoofer gets a bit of redirected action but is not overly emphatic.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Break On Through (Isle of Wight Track)

    Another music video style reproduction of this classic hit. Video and audio quality are similar to the main feature.

The Ghost Song

    This song was performed in 1995 with the original Doors musicians. The music accompanies a poem recited by Morrison, presumably many years ago. Due to the relative youth of this recording, the audio and video quality is superior to the main features.

• Commentary by Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger
• "L.A Woman" Directors Cut Video
• New print of "Unknown Soldier"
• Ray Manzarek's student movies "Evergreen" and "Induction"
• Excerpts from John Densmore's one-man play
• Robby Krieger performing a new version of "The End"
• Outtakes from the Doors' archives
• The Doors collectibles and artifacts

• "Break On Through" (Isle of Wight Track)
• "The Ghost Song"

    The video quality is as good as the source material allows.

    The audio quality is as good as the source material allows.

    The extras are very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall