(Note: This review is of both the 25th & 35th Anniversary Blu-Ray sets.)
BOX-ART
-_-_-_-_-
Within a slip cover, is a digipack case that unfolds showing all the discs. The front & back of the box are identical to what's on the slip. The cover has renders of Doc & Marty at the top, with the title in the center. The DeLorean is at the bottom with a flame trail behind it. The back has additional renders, from the second film. With a description of the set at the top, and various extras & technical aspects listed underneath, to the side, and at the bottom. More info. about the extras is listed on one of the inner panels after unfolding. Each disc within the box has a Blu-Ray, with the digital disc underneath. A paper with information about the digital copies is loosely tucked inside the box too.
The remastered version is set up like a book that you flip through, with each section holding a disc within that slides out from the side. I'm not super into this set-up, since It could be easy to damage the discs. The set is less bulky though, which I do like. It comes with a slip box that holds the book, with the back having a list of extras & such. Each section within the book has artwork & renders from the specific movie it's housing, with a small run-down of extras the disc has. The very back of the book, is where the digital code slip is loosely stored.
MENUS
-_-_-
With this being a universal set, the menus are the usual background videos playing behind that generic gray overlay system. Each disc has a background that uses clips of that particular film, with little animations of the DeLorean in the past, present, or future playing underneath.
The remastered version has a more DVD-like menu system, where you enter sub menus & select option there. A single static render is used, based on the artwork of whichever film is on the disc. Soundtracks from each respective film plays too.
AUDIO
-_-_-
The main track here is a 24 Bit DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. There are also two additional 24 bit 5.1 lossy DTS dubs. The end credits mention the films being mixed in Dolby Stereo, so I'm assuming the 5.1 mix was made as a discrete version of the original audio when the DVD came out. The remastered set reuses the audio from this set.
VIDEO
-_-_-
The films look good, with decent colors & contrast. Grain structure looks fine for the most part, but parts II & III have some issues with looking quite DNR'd at times. Clarity & compression are fine, but the image is over sharpened on parts I & II. This leaves it looking slightly over processed with haloing and such. The final film looks slightly better than the second, without the over sharpening, but still has some waxy looking scenes.
The remastered set is using the same master made for the UHD Blu-Ray so, understandably, it looks quite a bit better. This version has no sharpening or heavy DNR applied! Grain structure is nice and colors have a bit more pop. The compression on the first film is a bit more aggressive though, with the bit-rate being about four megabits or so lower than the older set. This isn't a massive deal, but if you look super close, or blow the image up a lot you can see tell-tale compression artifacts in busy scenes. I'm not really sure why they did this, especially since parts two & three have the same bit-rates as before. No new extras were added onto the discs, so why did the film need to be compressed more? Part of me thinks this a tactic on Universals part to make UHD seem more desirable, with better compression & more space to store data on the discs.
I'd like to note that the end credits of the first film are distorted. They seem to be anamorphicly squashed. I think someone just messed up and forgot to unsquash them for the transfer! This is corrected in the remastered set.
EXTRAS:
-_-_-_-
The bulk of the extras is various behind-the-scenes featurettes and such. There's also music videos with each film, deleted scenes, etc. There's also some audio commentaries. Some are Dolby Surround encoded, while others are simply stereo; all are 192 Kb/s. (All of these extras are on the remastered set too, some of them even use the same old VC-1 encodes!)
The digital discs are basically unusable now, with the DRM no longer connecting. One you redeem the code though, you get digital copies via iTunes anyways. The part that sucks though, is that they are standard definition only. I'm not sure why, I mean, they're giving you a free digital copy...why not in full HD? The interesting thing about the digital copies is that they now use the re-mastered version; albeit still in SD.
The bonus disc on the remastered set is mostly just more of the same: documentary type featurettes.
FINAL THOUGHTS
-_-_-_-_-_-_-
I love these films, so naturally, I wanted to get them in HD. I never had the films on VHS or DVD, I simply watched them on TV from time to time. It's also interesting that I didn't know so many edits were made for TV broadcasting until I had the Blu-Ray.
I'd like to note that the final five images in the gallery are of the remastered set, but there is also some comparisons in the menu download for the 35th Anniversary Ed. Also, while most of technical aspects below are identical between the two sets, there are a few differences. Like the remastered set being AVC rather than VC-1, with similar bitrates, and the digital copies are completely digital.
TECH. SPECS.
-_-_-_-_-_-
ASPECT RATIO: 1.85:1 (Original Widescreen)
VIDEO CODEC: VC-1 (Film 1 & 2) / AVC (Film 3) (26.9 Film I | 28.5 Films II & II MB/s)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 3 (+Digital Copy Discs)
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
SUBTITLES: English SDH, French, Spanish
AUDIO: 24 Bit English 5.1 DTS-HD MA (5.7 MB/s)
French & Spanish 24 Bit 5.1 DTS (768 KB/s)
RUN-TIME: 5 Hour 43 Minutes
