Black Adder, The: Historic First Series (1983)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Dolby Digital Trailer-City
Rating
Year Of Production	1983
Running Time	194:42 (Case: 190)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Martin Shardlow
Studio Distributor	Roadshow Home Entertainment	Starring	Rowan Atkinson Tony Robinson Brian Blessed Tim McInnerny Elspet Gray Robert East
Case	Brackley-Trans-Lipped
RPI	$34.95	Music	Howard Goodall

    All six thirty-three minute (or thereabouts) episodes of the first series are included on this DVD. This is one of the distinct advantages that the DVD version has over the VHS version - the VHS version also has all six episodes on it, and, as anyone who has seen Braveheart on videotape can tell you, a DVD of this length will easily out-perform a videotape of the same length after as few as ten viewings. Getting back to the episodes, in order, they are The Foretelling (the highly amusing episode in which King Richard III survives the Battle Of Bosworth Field, only to be killed by Edmund); Born To Be King (in which Edmund kills Scottish warlord Dougal McAngus (Alex Norton) by getting him to stick his head in a cannon and then blowing it off); The Archbishop (in which Edmund is appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by his father); The Queen Of Spain's Beard (in which Edmund struggles to escape from an arranged marriage, only to have another one arranged for him to a pre-pubescent girl from France); Witchsmeller Pursuivant (in which Edmund is accused of witchcraft); and finally, The Black Seal (in which Edmund and the rest of the royal family die in hilarious circumstances).

Video

    The series is presented in the aspect ratio of 1.33:1, or 4:3 depending on which parlance you prefer. It is not 16x9 Enhanced, although there really seems to be little point in enhancing a television programme that was shot in the days when letterboxing was a relatively new idea. Setting one's DVD player and television set to output a 16x9 picture, however, will compress the picture to the point where some artefacts disappear. Granted, there's still a heinous amount of them left, but anything to get rid of them. The colour saturation was frequently muted, but it was typically all over the place and varied from shot to shot. Film artefacts show up a great deal in the first episode, but they settle down during the rest of the series. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some aliasing in the first episode, and video dropouts and glitches during the rest of the series. MPEG artefacts were relatively subtle, although the graininess and generally bad condition of the source material must have played hell on the compression.

    The disc is in the RSDL format, but as far as I can tell the layer change occurs between episodes, and is thus completely unobtrusive. This is one advantage of putting an entire series of episodes from a television series onto a DVD, needless to say. I can imagine similar titles coming from the BBC with a similar sort of quality in the layer transition. The subtitle menu makes mention of both English and English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles, but both options point to the latter subtitle selection on the disc.

Audio

    "Do you want me to be honest, or tactful?" "Ermm... tactful." "Tell him to get stuffed!" I think that pretty much sums up the audio quality of this DVD when it comes to dialogue and clarity. It certainly isn't the prettiest sonic picture, that's for certain. Audio sync was not a problem at any point in the presentation, although Rowan Atkinson's tendency to speak without opening his mouth too much makes me wonder if some looping hadn't been used in post-production. Most of the sound on this DVD has a highly artificial and alien sound to it as a result of the limitations in the original recording process. The music score by Howard Goodall is infrequently present, but is rather funny to listen to when it rears its ugly head. The occasional chords that are shot into the action outside of the credits are somewhat grating, however.

    The surround presence was utterly non-existent. Just to alleviate the boredom this caused me, I tried to simulate some kind of surround presence by wiggling the balance knob from left to right for a few minutes.

    There is a boxed set of Black Adder DVDs available in Region 1 with all five of the serials on five discs, in a case type that I was unable to verify. The boxed set also contains extras such as a Who's Who of the Black Adder series, an interactive guide to historical figures and events, the Black Adder's Christmas Carol special, and an archival interview with Richard Curtis, an episode called The Cavalier Years, and a sing-along. Obviously, this five disc set is the version of choice for dedicated fans, although anyone who can tell me about the transfer quality is welcome to email me.

    The video quality is reasonable, but riddled with artefacts of all kinds including some severe blurriness and variations in picture quality from one frame to the next.

    The audio quality is pretty much the same as the TV broadcast (haphazardly balanced), except now it is in digital.

    The extras are non-existent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall