AMC TV - The Lucy Show

Rating:
Summary: "Sound enhanced" = no original theme music!
Review: I purchased these,not noticing the "Sound Enhanced" warning on them. The quality is OK (not the greatest but it'll do) BUT...the opening and closing theme music is replaced with an AWFUL version that sounds NOTHING like the original. The only reason I can figure for them doing this is that perhaps they were unable to obtain rights to air the theme song (for one reason or another). Aside from that, this is a collection of episodes NOT WORTH BUYING imo. AMC must now stand for Awful Movie Collection. If this were a movie, it'd be awful!

Rating:
Summary: Great show, bad presentations, AMC should be ashamed
Review: When it comes to public domain material you just have to hope for the best.

Certain episodes of The Lucy Show are avalable on several public domain labels. The quality of some are better than the others.

Since the source material for these shows are often 16mm films, you can never expect the crisp quality of say, the new "Here's Lucy" set (which was transfered from Lucy's children's 35mm prints of the shows and looks awesome). I really don't mind that though. if the print is a bit old and looks like it's been used a lot, it reminds me of the way it used to be shown on local syndication in the 1970's.

But what should be done is to at least take care to make as good a DVD transfer as possible.

What we get on these AMC discs is 7 episodes per disc. Usually, that's good news, most tv show releases put 8 shows per dual layer disc.

For the newbe, dual layer discs have 2 layers of digital storage information per side. The more space on the DVD that can be used for the video, the more movement will look natural and it will avoid "pixalation', the blocky look that digital video sometimes exhibits if the amount of memory used for the scene is too low.

Trouble is, these discs with 7 episodes are SINGLE layer discs. So, that means that they crammed 2 to 3 times as much audio/video on a single layer than most studios would ever dream of doing.

At nearly 3 hours on a single layer, you can see blocking and pixalation much of the time. The memory of the DVD cannot keep up with some of the movement in the video and that is the result.

The transfers themselves are fair (remembering what I said before about public domain transfers) but the quality is unforgivably compromised by overloading the single layer DVD

I really hope someday a more ligit season by season release of this series will be coming (transfered from 35mm) but until then, this is not a sutable substitute.

Buy, AMC used to be a quality network. There participation in the Vertigo VHS, Laserdisc and DVD releases lended that much more credibility to the quality of the product.

now, not only has thier network gone down hill, they endorse really dreadful quality DVD's