70th 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 a greenish-yellow colored background. At the top is text that says that it's the 70th Anniversary Edition. It's a good cover, but kind of generic.
MENUS
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An emerald green pop up menu is over-layed on top of the film, with most options opening up in a larger menu when selected.
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! While the original mono is included as a bonus, it's only a lossy Dolby Digital mix.
Secondly, while the featurette says that hiss and distortion were reduced, the louder you turn up 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.
A plethora of Dolby Digital mono dubs are also available, with the Japanese dub only being accessible if you set the menus language to Japanese. While the quality varies from most sounding very dated, to some sounding like the dialogue was recorded ages after the original audio, kind of making it sound out of place. 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 the same 4K transfer as the 2005 DVD edition, it's very sharp and clear, and there are no noticeable compression artifacts. There are no major pops, splotches, or scratches, even during the sepia segments were were supposedly from a lesser generation print.
FINAL THOUGHTS
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N/A
TECH. SPECS.
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ASPECT RATIO: 1.37:1 (Original)
NUMBER OF DISCS: 1
DISC SIZE: Dual-Layer (38.2 GB [Full Disc] [19.1 GB Film Only]
REGION CODE: A
VIDEO CODEC: VC-1 (23 Mb/s)
AUDIO: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (1,308 Kb/s)
English 5.1 Dolby Digital (640 Kb/s)
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese 1.0 (192 Kb/s)
SUBTITLES: English, French, Spanish
RUN-TIME: 1 Hour 41 Minutes
