ANNIVERSARY EDITION

 

BOX-ART

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Dorothy is featured in the foreground (Oddly there's no Toto in her basket.) to the left, with the rest of the cast in the background under the title. Behind these renders is an emerald city looking background. It's good cover, but kind of generic.

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MENUS

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N/A

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AUDIO

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I, personally, was both impressed and yet also unimpressed at the same time with the default surround sound mix. It's obviously a faithfully remixed version, using the best elements they could, but still has some quirks. Firstly, according to the remastering featurette, they used orchestral angles in place of actual rear surrounds, since...well, it's all that exists. The left, right, and bass channels all sound like they've be digitally altered, from the original mono to the best of their ability, to add more direction to the mix. The center channel is literally just the original mono mix! The original mono is included as a bonus.

 

Secondly, while the featurette says that hiss and distortion were reduced the louder you turn you the volume the more hiss becomes apparent. The original optical prints were lost, and they were using magnetic audio that was backed up from the original prints in the 1960's. As such, the audio is very good for it's age, but don't expect amazing 21st century digital mastered audio.

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Unlike the the Blu-Rays, and most of the foreign region DVDs, there's only one dub available on this disc, and that is a french mono mix. This is the same Dolby Digital mix that is also on the Blu-Ray. Something that all the dubs have in common is that all the songs are the original English, none of them were localized. 

VIDEO

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The video looks very good. A healthy layer of grain is present through the film, with no signs of digital tampering. The technicolor is very bright and vibrant, contrast is spot on as well. Being mastered from a 4K transfer, it's very sharp and clear, with little compression artifacts. In fact, the bit-rate was rather high, almost super-bit high! There are no major pops, splotches, or scratches, even during the sepia segments were were supposedly from a lesser generation print.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

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N/A

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TECH. SPECS.

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                                                                  ASPECT RATIO: 1.33:1 (Cropped Full-Screen)
                                                            NUMBER OF DISCS: 1

                                                                        DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer (6.6 Gb)
                                                                   REGION CODE: 1 / NTSC

                                                                             AUDIO: English 5.1 (448 Kb/s)

                                                                                       English & French 1.0 (192 Kb/s)

                                                                        SUBTITLES: English, French, Spanish
                                                                        RUN-TIME: 1 Hour 41 Minutes