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

    Set in medieval times during the reign of King Richard IV (Brian Blessed) of England, the series takes a number of dubious characters and places them in farcical situations. Rowan Atkinson is The Black Adder, the Duke of Edinburgh, a snivelling, spineless little toad of a man. The theme song from the series proffers the most apt description of this man as a "horrid little man". The Black Adder feels that he is destined to sit on the throne of England, and will do anything in his power to stop his more favoured brother Prince Harry (Robert East) from gaining the throne.

    The Black Adder is "ably" assisted by Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and Prince Percy (Tim McInnerny) in his endeavours to gain the throne.

    This series still cracks me up after all these years - if you want to see great British comedy, look no further.

    This DVD contains the entire first series of The Black Adder - all six episodes on one dual layer DVD; The Foretelling, Born To Be King, The Archbishop, The Queen Of Spain's Beard, Witchsmeller Pursuivant, and The Black Seal.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer is variably sharp, but generally is quite blurred and indistinct. Some segments are better than others, but there is a great deal of variability both between episodes and within each individual episode. Graininess is very prominent in this transfer, and could be quite distracting at times. Shadow detail is typically poor and in keeping with the source material. Low level noise is frequently present in the darker scenes, which tend to have a somewhat variable level of blackness.

    The first video episode, Born To Be King, is a particularly problematic transfer, with flaring of the camera being a frequent problem, resulting in a lot of false blue colouration within the image.

    The colours were typically muted, but they were also quite variable, and some later episodes showed some oversaturated scenes. Cross-colouration artefacts were noted at times, particularly with the chain mail on King Richard IV, where blue and red colouration would appear as he moved about, giving away the composite heritage of this transfer. Chroma noise was also a problem at times with this transfer, particularly with scenes involving a lot of blue.

    MPEG artefacts were plentiful but relatively subtle and confined to the backgrounds. The source material is frequently grainy and this has played havoc with the MPEG encoding - at a total running time of nearly 195 minutes (even more than the packaging claims), something has to give, even spread over a dual layer disc. This something is manifest in the subtle but frequent macro-blocking evident in the backgrounds of the image as the MPEG encoding struggles with the grain in the source. The data transfer rate of this DVD is set to a modest 4.5 to 6 Mbits/second, in order to accommodate this length of program on a single DVD. Fade-ins and fade-outs are also significantly affected by MPEG artefacts. Having said all of this, there are no major MPEG artefacts to detract from the image, and the image comes across as simply being quite noisy at times.

    Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some minor aliasing during the first episode, but obviously none in the video-sourced episodes. There are occasional video dropouts and glitches during the video-sourced episodes, but these artefacts are relatively minor. Film artefacts were plentiful during the first episode.

    Subtitled plot synopses are burned into the video stream at the appropriate points of the programming.

    This disc is a Dual Layered disc. I presume that the layer change is placed between episodes 3 and 4 of the series, but as they are all encoded as separate titles, the exact layer change point is impossible to pick. It is certainly not within any of the program material.

Audio

    There is only a single English Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track. The first episode appeared to be mixed in stereo, but the remainder were undistinguished mono.

    The dialogue was a little dull and hard to hear, and I found myself varying the level of the soundtrack up and down at times in order to clearly understand what was being said. There was some hiss present in the soundtrack of the first episode, but this was not a problem for subsequent episodes. The very end of Episode 5 (Witchsmeller Pursuivant) has a swearword edited out.

    There were no problems with audio sync.

    The musical score by Howard Goodall is infrequently present and unremarkable.

    There was no use of the surround channels or the subwoofer.

Menu

    The video quality is poor, but I doubt that anything could have been done to make it much better. Even splitting this series over 2 DVDs would not have improved the quality of the image all that much due to the nature of the source materials used, and personally, I prefer having all of the episodes from the one series available on the one DVD.

    The audio quality is poor, but passable.

    There are essentially no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall