MovieChat Forums > Hans Christian Andersen (1953) Discussion > Missed opportunity with the Blu-ray

Missed opportunity with the Blu-ray


Kudos to Warner Bros for releasing this on Blu-ray. For all its strangely mismatched elements, it's a childhood favourite of mine, and I hope other Danny Kaye titles will follow into high-def releases.

The transfer was made from a very clean print -- at least, there is no visible damage. But the film was originally shot in Technicolor, and almost every scene in the Blu-ray version shows the slight colour fringing that results from the component colour strips no longer being in perfect registration as they shrink or warp over time. Warner Bros is recognised as having the best technology in the world for addressing this problem, so it's a real pity this film apparently wasn't considered significant enough to warrant the expense of using it. It would have made an enormous difference to the quality of the Blu-ray. As it is, it merely looks like a decent TV broadcast, rather than anything approaching what Blu-ray is capable of.

And while we're at it, there must have been a tonne of extra material WB could have chosen to include -- about Danny Kaye, or HCA himself, or WB's many cartoon versions of HCA's stories ... the disc is not a BD-50, only a BD-25, and is only a little over half-full even at the lower capacity, so there was tonnes of room for including more material without increasing manufacturing costs.

With DVD prices being driven so low, and the studios often not taking advantage of the BD format to really deliver quality material, it's no wonder Blu-ray hasn't been the real success studios were hoping for. Studios really have to make more effort than this, if they want people to see BD as worth paying for.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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