Season 1 (Sony Set)
BOX-ART
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N/A
MENUS
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Static menus with no audio, it reeks of cheap and lazy on Sony's part but, it get's the job done and kind of fits the Bundy style. On a plain white background, with a render of the Bundy family on it, are options for play all and episode select. I'd like to note that the menu is obviously in a 4:3 format, yet is erroneously displayed in a stretched 16:9 aspect ratio.
On the episode select menu we have images of each episode inside of a fitting 80's looking TV. You navigate with a super stock looking image of a hand holding a remote with arrows. The background is, again, plain white with a render of Al & Peggy. Disc two features two additional menus for extras.
AUDIO
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On some TV airings, the show had text that stating, "In stereo where available," which was common back then to indicated 2.0 or 1.0. This is absent from this DVD, but after viewing the sound wave in Audacity I can confirm that the audio is indeed stereo.
VIDEO
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Being recorded almost entirely with broadcast tape, it has that obvious low-fidelity 80's look. Dot-crawling, interlacing, haloing, muted colors, tape grain, it's all here. The tape artifacts are rather subtle, but the overall image is rather soft. Compression, despite being in the three or four megabit range, is fine as there's not much action or detail to really tax the bit-rate much anyway. (Well, aside from maybe the scrolling credits.)
EXTRAS
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Some trailers are included, but the main extra is a forty two minute cast reunion on disc two.
As a side note, it's strange to me that rather than using two dual-layer discs and spit the content evenly between the two discs, Sony decided to squeeze the first nine episodes onto the first disc (which is dual-layer), and then compress everything else with slightly more compression than disc one to fit onto the second single-layer disc. What's more confusing is that they didn't even use up all the space on disc one leaving almost 2 Gb of empty space.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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The show has two releases, the original Sony ones and the Mill Creek re-releases. The Mill Creek one does not have the extras present on this set and squeeze's all the episodes onto a single disc. I'd recommend this set because of the slightly higher bit-rate and reunion special, but if you don't care about that the Mill Creeks set is perfectly fine.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 2
DISC SIZE: Dual & Single-Layer (6.76 & 4.10 Gb)
REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC
AUDIO: English 2.0 (192 KB/s)
SUBTITLES: English Caption
RUN-TIME: 5 Hour 2 Minutes
