BOX-ART
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The cover of this edition, uses a slight alteration of the original theatrical poster. Featured are renditions of the family, including Maria, on the hillside above Saltsburg. Most films rarely get their original theatrical artwork on the home video version, so this is very nice! The top has a blue banner that says Blu-Ray + Digital. The back also has images of the cast, albeit actual renders rather than painted artwork, atop the hillside. Another blue banner on the center lists some specs. & extras. A black banner underneath has info. a bout the digital copy, with the rest of the technical aspects below.
MENUS
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An overlay menu plays on top of a video of clips from the film a rectangular type collage. Songs from the film play along with these clips. Each option is alliable one at time, so you must scroll through them. This is rather annoying, as it would be much nicer to be able to see all options at once. (Such as chapters, audio tracks, etc.) The second disc has the same menu, but chapters are simply listed with text, rather than having images accompanying them.
AUDIO
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While the film was originally presented with either a six or four track surround mix, the main track here is a lossless 7.1 mix. A lossy version of the original 4.0 track is present as well. Various dubs are also available. All surround sound Dolby Digital tracks are 448 Kb/s, with the French DTS being 24 Bit 768 Kb/s. The vocals are fully localized on the Spanish & French dubs, but the Portuguese cuts back to the original English. The French dub sound more dated than the Spanish for some reason. I thought maybe it was from an older source, but the music and sound effects sound fine, only the voices sound dated. The audio commentaries are 2.0 at 224 Kb/s. Interestingly, one of the commentaries doubles as a partially isolated score, as the only voices are the commentator!
VIDEO
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The video looks great. Contrast & colors are fine, with no compression issues. Since the film is almost three hours long, it takes up most of the space on the disc. A nice fine grain stricture is present so there's, luckily, no noise reduction. Intermission is present a little over half-way through the film, only appearing for a few seconds before the entr'acte. I'm not sure if older versions of the film retain this, or if its cut out like on TV, so it's nice to have the original theatrical experience. (Of course you will have to pause during the intermission screen if you want to actually go to the bathroom, or get a snack, or whatever.)
EXTRAS
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Disc two has a new, roughly, hour long documentary made for the 50th anniversary. Unfortunately, all the extras from the previous edition have been replaced by this! The second disc of the 45th anniversary ed. had hours of behind-the-scenes featurettes and trailers and such, but was swapped out for this new disc that only has the one new documentary. It's kind of disappointing honestly to have so much less bonus content here. On the bright side, if you redeem the digital code some market places, like iTunes for instance, have all the extras digitally. It just sucks none of them are on the new disc!
The extras that are present on disc one are: The ability to play just the songs, play the film with sing-along subtitles, and the two audio commentaries.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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I, personally, would rather have the 45th anniversary ed. It has all those extras on disc two, and even comes with a DVD copy. (If you still care about those.) I guess if your a super fan, and want the new documentary you could get both versions. I believe they're both rather cheap to find used online.
As for the movie itself, I love it, it's a classic. It's the Wizard of Oz of the era, and it definitely one of the best musicals of all time. I remember seeing this a lot on TV as a kid, but I never actually owned it until I saw on Black Friday sale at Walmart. This was right around the Disney acquisition too, so I had my doubt about how they'd handle Fox's library. I think they have slightly repackaged this version, but there's no 4K disc or anything yet.
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 2.20:1 (Original Widescreen)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 2
DISC SIZE: Dual & Single-Layer (Disc 2 is around 13 Gb)
REGION CODE: A
VIDEO CODEC: AVC (22.9 Mb/s)
AUDIO: English DTS-HD MA 7.1 (5.9 Mb/s)
English 4.0, Spanish & Portuguese 5.1 Dolby Digital (448 Kb/s)
French DTS 5.1 (768 Kb/s)
SUBTITLES: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
RUN-TIME: 2 Hours 55 Minutes
