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PLEASE NOTE: Michael D's is currently in READ ONLY MODE. Anything submitted will simply not be written to the database.
Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer-Season 2 Box Set Part 1 (1997)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer-Season 2 Box Set Part 1 (1997)

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Released 2-May-2001

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Horror Main Menu Introduction
Menu Audio
Script-3 episodes
Audio Commentary-Reptile Boy - David Greenwalt (Director)
Audio Commentary-What's My Line Parts 1 & 2 - Marti Noxon (Writer)
Rating Rated M
Year Of Production 1997
Running Time 509:54 (Case: 540)
RSDL / Flipper Dual Layered
Multi Disc Set (3)
Cast & Crew
Start Up Menu
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By Joss Whedon
Bruce Seth Green
David Greenwalt
John Kretchmeyer
Studio
Distributor

Twentieth Century Fox
Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar
David Boreanaz
Nichola Brendon
Alyson Hannigan
Charisma Carpenter
Anthony Stewart Head
Case Slip Case
RPI $79.95 Music Sean Murray
Shawn K Clement
Christophe Beck


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame Full Frame English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio None
16x9 Enhancement No
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles Dutch
English for the Hearing Impaired
French
French Audio Commentary
Smoking Yes
Annoying Product Placement No
Action In or After Credits No

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    Buffy the Vampire Slayer is probably my favourite show on TV at the moment, which means that I will be fairly enthusiastic in this review - you have been warned. I assume that you've seen a fair bit of Buffy; if not, there may be a spoiler or two ahead.

    This box set contains the first half of Season Two. The first season was a short one (12 episodes), so it fitted neatly onto three DVDs. The second and subsequent seasons are 22 episodes. This box set contains episodes 1 to 12 of the second season. There is another box set (which we'll get to shortly) containing the remaining episodes of Season Two, and providing we all rush out and buy these box sets, I am confident that there will be further releases for Seasons Three, Four, Five, and so forth. Hopeless addicts have been able to get Buffy on VHS for quite some time; in fact, the first half of season five on VHS has recently been released in the UK. Why the big gap between DVD and VHS? Mostly, I suspect, because the DVD releases have only just started - they have to get through the earlier seasons first. Note that the gap between the release of Season One and Season Two on DVD was rather less than a year; with a little luck we could see Season Three before the end of the year (Buffy for Christmas!), which will be rather amusing in a way - you may not know (or care), but Buffy Season One is not available on DVD in the US yet. Apparently there are some problems to do with licensing or syndication in Region 1 due to the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is made by Fox (and distributed on Fox DVD), but screened by Warners (on WBTV) - WBTV want their re-runs unimpeded by DVDs, or something like that. Nett result is that we have Buffy, and they don't - yay for us!

    Regular watchers of the show keep track of each season by its major theme - the first season was The Master, the second is Spike and Drusilla, the third is the Mayor, the fourth is The Initiative, and the fifth looks like being Dawn.

    Season Two was a good season - we had been introduced to the main characters (even Jenny Calendar, the techno-pagan computer teacher), so we could start off with a rush:

  1. When She Was Bad - the attempt to revive The Master (slain at the end of Season 1)
  2. Some Assembly Required - build your own perfect woman
  3. School Hard - the arrival of Spike and Drusilla, coinciding with parent-teacher night
  4. Inca Mummy Girl - Xander's next bad choice in dates, Oz's first sight of Willow
  5. Reptile Boy - one drink and they're feeding you to a giant snake
  6. Halloween - first encounter with Ethan Rayne, hints of Giles' past, Oz's second sight of Willow
  7. Lie To Me - the vampire wannabes
  8. The Dark Age - Ethan Rayne and Giles' past catching up with him
  9. What's My Line Part 1 - Kendra, the Order of Taraka, Xander and Cordelia, and careers week
  10. What's My Line Part 2 - two Slayers, no waiting
  11. Ted - Buffy's mother's boyfriend
  12. Bad Eggs - a tribute to Alien?
    It's an impressive list - there are no "filler" episodes here. OK, Some Assembly Required and Ted don't advance the main plot line of the season, but they are good solid episodes, and Ted is quite horrifying. I'd have to nominate the double episode What's My Line as my favourite - Kendra is cool, and the confrontation between Kendra and Buffy is quite something. It was amusing to hear in the commentary that the US audience couldn't identify Kendra's accent, despite their use of a dialogue coach to get it spot-on - apparently it is a perfect reproduction of the accent from a specific town in Jamaica (OK, I only located it as Jamaican, but the US audience couldn't tell). The Dark Age lets us in on some of Giles' past - something that has a strong influence on later episodes. Several relationships build during these episodes: Buffy and Angel, Giles and Jenny Calendar, Xander and Cordelia, the start of Willow and Oz.

    We get special features for Reptile Boy, and for both parts of What's My Line. For all three episodes we get the script and a commentary.

Don't wish to see plot synopses in the future? Change your configuration.

Transfer Quality

Video

    Bad news first - lots of this show is shot at night (surprise!) and I'm not talking about "blue filter to make it look like night", I'm talking about night-time, low light conditions, hard to see. The result is a picture with lots of undistinguished black, and some graininess. This is a feature of the show, though, and I'm not sure I'd like it if they changed it - it looks a lot more real to me than the blue filter technique.

    Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a TV series, made in the US. That means that it is shot in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and consequently is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Daytime shots are crisp and clear, with excellent sharpness, shadow detail, and no low level noise, in general. A couple of the stock shots (like the establishing shot of the entrance to Sunnydale High) are starting to show a little low level noise, but they're only brief. Night shots outside, on the other hand, are dark and dim, with no shadow detail at all, harsh lighting on occasions, and traces of low level noise. Even so, what you can see during night shots is generally quite sharp. Fortunately, there seems to be no artificial edge enhancement. There's a little softness in parts of The Dark Age, but it is not objectionable.

    Colour is vivid without being oversaturated during daytime shots, and during night shots in well-lit venues (such as the ice-skating rink). Night exterior shots might as well be in black-and-white - don't look for strongly saturated colours at night.

    One of the problems of shooting at night is film grain - they do work hard at controlling the graininess, but there are moments when it gets away from them. Perhaps the worst example is at 18:52 in the first episode, where there's heavy grain for a moment. In fact, the entire start of the first episode (before the credits) shows serious grain, but it clears up for most of the rest of the episode. There's more grain at 17:30 and 28:06 in the second episode, but the rest of the episodes are reasonably clear.

    There are few film-to-video artefacts to be seen, although we do see some faint aliasing. There are a couple of momentary film artefacts, but they are small, few, and far between - not distracting. There are no MPEG artefacts (I guess plain black compresses well).

    There are three subtitle languages to choose from: English, French and Dutch. On episodes with a commentary track, the same commentary is provided as subtitles in French, but not in Dutch. Interesting choices.

    The discs are Dual Layered, and not RSDL-formatted, which makes sense: rather than have a layer change disrupting an episode, they simply place two episodes on one layer, and two on the other layer.

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

Audio

    There are two or three audio tracks presented for every episode; English and French Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtracks for all of the episodes, and an additional English Audio Commentary track for three of the episodes. If you understand French, you can enjoy Buffy in French. I stuck with English, which is the default.

    Dialogue is uniformly clear and readily understood. Even Kendra's accent is readily understood, despite the clipped words. Heck, I even understood the Gorch brothers, with their strong Texan drawl.

    Audio sync was perfect.

    The background music in Buffy is ideal at providing the desired atmosphere, although I feel they did go over-the-top during the scenes where Xander and Cordelia kissed for the first time. Generally the music does not draw attention to itself, which tells me that it is doing the job intended.

    The audio is Dolby Digital 2.0, and it seems not to be surround encoded (although the surround coding flag was present). As such, the surrounds and subwoofer were unused. Shame, really - they could do some interesting things with the subwoofer, and the surrounds could make things even spookier - maybe later seasons will be surround encoded.

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

Extras

    There aren't a lot of extras, but they are good. I am absolutely delighted to report that the Special Features box on the back of each cover includes only extras - they have not listed menus, scene access, alternate languages, or anything like that as special features - I really hope to see Fox continue this, and other distributors follow.

Menu

    The menus are rather well done. Each disc starts with a CGI-rendered zoom into a graveyard, into a mausoleum, past a statue, and up to a wall, on which the main menu appears. This menu offers the choice of episode. Selecting an episode triggers another animation, taking us off to a different part of the graveyard, where the menu for that episode is presented. Any special features for a disc are presented in the menu for the episode to which they apply. The episode menus are arranged in a circle, which is pretty.

    The menus themselves are static, with background sound. They are easy to navigate.

    One small odd thing: the menus appear to be 16x9 enhanced - the circles are circular in 16x9, but ovals in 4x3- an odd choice for a disc full of 1.33:1 (4:3) material. Maybe we can look forward to future episodes in widescreen?

Scripts (3 episodes)

    The scripts are presented in a typewriter font, with not too much text on a page - easy to read. You can move forwards and backwards using the chapter skip buttons. Forwards is easy, but backwards is a little more awkward - you have to press the back button twice, most times, to move back one page. I didn't walk through every page, but there look like being an awful lot of pages to a script - for rabid fanatics, only, I suspect. I did notice, though, the occasional difference between the script and the episode - the director makes changes during shooting. I'm sure that someone is, right now, going through the script and noting down every difference between the script and the episode - there'll be a web site up soon!

Commentary - Reptile Boy

    This commentary is courtesy of David Greenwalt (director of this episode), and it is not very good, because he spends too much time plugging Angel (the spin-off series he works on now), telling the story that we're watching, and going "gee, isn't this actor great?" - I picked up some interesting facts, but I wouldn't be in a hurry to listen to another commentary by him.

Commentary - What's My Line Parts 1 and 2

    The commentary for both episodes of What's My Line is from Marti Noxon (writer) - this is much better. She talks about themes, such as the introduction of Kendra to show what Buffy might have been like without family and friends, just as Faith is introduced later to show Buffy's dark side. She talks about the problems of working with extras and locations, about the use of firearms (or lack thereof) on Buffy, about the balance of humour and drama. Her commentary is interesting and insightful - I hope she does more.

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on:     The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on:     As I mentioned earlier, there are apparently legal issues holding up the release of the R1 version. Fortunately, these issues haven't impeded the release here. In fact, we get the first release in the world of Buffy Season 2 on DVD, just we did for Season 1. Region 2 did get fancier packaging for Season 1 - their season 1 package unfolded into a crucifix shape, while we got three standard cases in a cardboard sleeve. I suspect that our packaging may last longer.

Summary

    It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD. I'm happy.

    The video quality is good for daytime scenes, and fair for night-time scenes. That's how Buffy always looks - can't blame the DVD for rendering the source material faithfully.

    The audio quality is good, for a stereo track.

    The extras are a pleasant bonus.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Tony Rogers (bio-degrading: making a fool of oneself in a bio...)
Saturday, May 05, 2001
Review Equipment
DVDPioneer DV-737, using Component output
DisplaySony VPL-VW10HT LCD Projector, ScreenTechnics matte white screen with a gain of 1.0 (280cm). Calibrated with Video Essentials. This display device is 16x9 capable.
Audio DecoderBuilt in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Video Essentials.
AmplificationDenon AVC-A1SE
SpeakersFront Left and Right: Krix Euphonix, Centre: Krix KDX-C Rears: Krix KDX-M, Subwoofer: Krix Seismix 5

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