Season Fourteen
BOX-ART
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Both the slip cover and the actual case art have a render of an alien atop a black flashy background. The slip has a shiny mirror like material as the aliens eye, while the case does not, and is plain white. The back of the case simply has render of the aliens on a plain black background. The actual information is on the back of the slip cover. At the center is a render of the aliens abducting the Simpsons pets, with the episodes listed on either side. Underneath is a box with a list of extras, and a grid further below with tech. specs. At the very bottom is various texts and logos.
MENUS
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Each disc has an identical intro, of various characters entering a spooky mansion before fading to the menu. What differs between the menus, is the dinner scene on each disc. Different characters, actions, skits, and such play out between the three discs menus.
AUDIO
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Each episode is presented with a 24 Bit DTS-HD MA 5.1 track. I'm not one hundred percent sure if this is a remix or the original audio, but the credits for each episode do say they were, "Presented in Dolby Surround," so I assume they were mixed as a multi channel track, but converted to Dolby Surround for broadcasting. So basically, what you get on DVD & Blu-Ray is mostly likely the original audio, as opposed to the matrixed audio you would have heard during the original airings.
VIDEO
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There are no compression issues, as the bit-rate is very high throughout. There's also no noticeable grain of any kind, which could indicate noise reduction. The colors look very vibrant, and contrast is also nice, however there is some sharpening & smoothing issues. The episodes were produced in standard definition, and as such, no native high definition source is available. So, they've upscaled the episodes and added some haloing artifacts while trying to sharpen the image. Several episode have a slight aliasing issue that looks as if the original source had these issues and they tried their best to smooth them out.
There are two bonus episodes, from 1994 and 1995 respectively, that look noticeably worse than the main ones. These episode were old composite tape transfers that have loads of smeary line-art, and dot-crawling. They still manage to look better than any of the older episodes on DVD though.
It looks OK, some scenes look noticeably filtered up close, but otherwise it's the best these episode have, and probably will ever will look.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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N/A
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Original Full-Screen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 3
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: A
VIDEO CODEC: AVC
AUDIO: English 24 Bit DTS-HA MA 5.1
French & Spanish 5.1 (448 Kb/s)
SUBTITLES: English SDH, French, Spanish
RUN-TIME: 8 Hours 3 Minutes
The Movie
BOX-ART
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The cover is quite plain, just the title and a render of Homer eating a donut. There's a other few little things like logs and text but mostly just simple white with said renders on top. The back looks very similar to most other early Blu-Rays, with a blue background and technical aspects in a grid below. There's an image in the center of the main menu, which was usually something Warner often did with their early DVDs. A condensed list of extras is also listed beside the menu image. Various texts & logos are at the very bottom.
What I love about these early Fox Blu-Rays is that they were very detailed about the technical aspects, telling you exactly what codecs and even what bit-rates they used too! Now a days, your luckily if they if they give you any information at all about the nerdy aspects. I guess since the format was new they really wanted you to see all the benefits you were getting over DVD.
MENUS
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The menus are similar to the DVD, but with options that also can be overlaid on to of the film while playing.
AUDIO
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While they used a less efficient video codec (MPEG-2) they, luckily, used a DTS-HD MA mix instead of an LPCM one. Many early Blu-Rays wasted massive amounts of space with unencoded LPCM tracks, and they also weren't typically at 24 bit either! Fox was one of the better studios at managing space and codecs on early releases.
Also included are Canadian French and Spanish dubs. Both are 5.1 Dolby mixes at 448 Kb/s.
VIDEO
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The video looks very good, especially as an earlier Blu-Ray title. Some scenes have a very faint haloing effect, I can't really describe it. I'm not sure if it's some type of edge enhancement or just how the movie was animated. Colors, contrast, sharpness, all look great! It's also worth noting that the cinematic intro is presented in a widow-boxed 1.85:1 before the transition into full 2.35:1. Despite using MPEG-2, there never any noticeable compression either. The bit-rate is close to max, and they are using a dual-layer disc to make up for it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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It's a great Blu-Ray, especially for an early title released on the format. Many other studios would have shoved this onto a single-layer disc with lossy audio, and low bitrate MPEG-2 video, but Fox want the extra mile here! It was also the first & only time we would get The Simpson in HD, on home video, until the early 2010s.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 2.40:1 (Original Widescreen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 1
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer
REGION CODE: A
VIDEO CODEC: AVC (35.6 Mb/s)
AUDIO: English DTS-HA MA 5.1 (5.1 Mb/s)
French & Spanish 5.1 (448 Kb/s)
SUBTITLES: English, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean
RUN-TIME: 1 Hours 27 Minutes
