Customer Reviews

2004 World Series - Boston Red Sox vs. St. Louis Cardinals

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having attended the premiere in Boston last night, I can attest that this is not merely a World Series production. The Sox are covered from spring training through the season, then into the Anaheim Series. A fair amount of time is spent on the ALCS as well. More time is spent on the World Series because of MLB's focus, unlike the NFL as someone else mentioned.

The film starts with a recap of that curse thing and refers to it a couple more times before the end, but guess what? It doesn't bother me any more. During the season highlights, there is a brief segment on the Nomar trade. There is also a brief look-back at the two previous Red Sox-Cardinals World Series. Narration is by Massachusetts native Denis Leary, who does a fine job.

The clips are fun to watch, and the interviews make them even more exciting. Unfortunately, I only heard about half of what was said because of the frequent and enthusiastic applause of the audience, myself included. Can't wait to watch it in the quiet of my living room. From what I did hear, many of the interviews were done during the playoffs, so for example you see Johnny Damon talking about having to go into St. Louis and try to win 2 games on their home field. It's a peek into what the players (and Tito and Theo and Larry and JWH and the fans and...) were thinking as the story was unfolding, before we all knew the ending.

The production quality is excellent. The studio interviews were done against a black background, so there is nothing to distract the viewer from the interviewee.

While we saw only the main movie, the MLB Productions representative who introduced it said that the many extras on the DVD are "must see."

The story of 2004 was the Red Sox finally becoming World Champions ending the so called curse of the Bambino. This was a four game sweep and the Red Sox rode high with no let down after another amazing ALCS against the Yankees. Down three games to none and feeling like they were about to be swept away the Red Sox behind the clutch hitting of David Ortiz amazingly won the next four games to be the first team in any playoff series to come back from being down three games to none. For a Yankee fan like me this was extremely hard to stomach especially the bloody sock heroics of Curt Schilling.

The tape is rescued because of the coverage of the Yankee - Red Sox rivalry and the highlights of unbelievable ALCS. Members of the Red Sox Nation will love it. I am disappointed because the Yankees let a sure win slip away. Also it is kind of boring to watch the Red Sox steamroll the Cardinals and their star first baseman Albert Pujois. It was disappointing to see a good team like the Cardinals unravelled by the Red Sox.

This info came from MLB.com, which is marketing the DVD. Apparently it covers a lot more than highlights of the four WS games:

"We didn't want to show a highlight reel of the postseason." said Gavant. "We wanted to show a film, a movie, and I hope we delivered in terms of a great story arc that we followed. We wanted to differentiate this production by really making it a documentary that could have been a theatrical release, more so than a highlight video.

"We could have even gone longer on this program," said Gavant. "It's 90 minutes long with an additional 20 minutes of bonus footage. There were really so many more stories to do. What we aimed to do is give fans an inside look at what was going on behind the scenes while they were watching the World Series."

Some of the DVD highlights include:

A look at the Red Sox Nation: A breakdown of the Red Sox season and highlights from their Division Series championship over the Angels.
An in-depth look at the history of the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry and highlights of the Red Sox's miraculous ALCS with New York.
In-depth highlights and behind-the-scenes footage from all four games with the Cardinals.
Highlights from Boston's championship parade following the series.
Interviews with most of the Series' stars, including Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe and manager Terry Francona.
Bonus footage includes: Ortiz's walk-off ALCS home runs, the ALCS celebration, postseason pregame radio and TV commentary and a section called "The Storytellers," containing historical interviews with Smokey Joe Wood, Joe Garagiola, Tim McCarver, Fred Lynn, Carlton Fisk and Dwight Evans.

As a Red Sox fan, I really don't want a play by play of the whole season and the playoffs when remembering this year. I want an overview of what happened plus showing all the "chill scenes" (credit goes to The Sportsguy for this term). In otherwords, the high and low points of the season, as well as the things that bring me goosebumps everytime I think about them. And this DVD has them all. From scenes of the hope of Spring Training, to the June Swoon, the trading of Nomar, and the fight between Varitek and A-Rod that turned the season around for the Sox, the regular season is covered in adequate fashion. The playoffs are covered in remarkable fashion, with the high and low points of each game covered, along with interviews of Red Sox players and management. A nice touch is with shots of game winning hits and outs, there are a variety of calls, from Fox's Broadcast to Boston Radio and TV broadcasts as well. Finally, we end with the Curse of the Bambino, the actual World Series, and the post game celebrations and fan celebrations in Boston, culminating with the Parade. There are many touching moments where Red Sox fans are quoted how they thought they would never see a World Series victory in their lifetimes, and how they were glad to share it with their family and friends. The DVD is wonderfully narrated by Dennis Leary, and really brings together the whole season, playoffs, and World Series nicely in around 90 minutes. Like my title says, a must own for Sox fans who want to remember this special season over and over again.

I'm another fan who attended the premier. I was with my family and can only say the DVD is a must-have for Xmas. Though the focus was more towards the ALCS and World Series, there was some decent background material leading up to the playoffs. And if this wasn't enough, there is a locally produced DVD coming out within the next 2 weeks. I'll include the link so you can pre-order. The word around here is that there is much more regular season footage than what was included in the MLB video. Here's wishing all of Red Sox Nation a Merry Xmas.

Let's go Red Sox.

http://www.tenmayflower.com/index.cfm?page=redsox

As a Red Sox fan, I ate up just about every recapping of the season that was available, and saved this DVD as a special Christmas treat. I've seen virtually all of the "Official" Major League Baseball Productions (tm) videos since the production was taken over by organized baseball, and most of the pre-historical documentaries about the World Series of years past that have been repackaged in VHS and DVD as being the 'official' histories, and I will say that there's been a steady improvement in the production values and storytelling.

However, within the limits of the storyline that a rather mundane four-game sweep can provide -- and I say this as an ardent Red Sox line -- there was a weirdly parallel-universe feel to how the story was retold in this video. While this was an entertaining and well put-together video, it seemed to be lacking a certain attention to the story line, not even to say selectively editing the history to the point where I had to go back to my scorecards to verify that they had indeed left out many important moments.

In the past, the official World Series videos have usually focussed on a parallel structure, showing how each World Series participant reached the big dance through the playoffs. This year, not that Cardinals fans are going to want to be remembering this series much, they just jettisoned much of what went on in the NL to focus almost exclusively on the journey of the winners. There's an obvious commercial reason for this: the Red Sox fans, desperate for their championship, like I, will eat this up, and that's the primary market for the DVD. Yet that also hurts the story line: the Cardinals were the best team in baseball and overcame the Astros in an incredible NLCS, and perhaps it would have made more of the inherent drama of being a Red Sox fan and knowing, just knowing, your team was going to find a way to choke to emphasize the Cardinals' extreme talents. There are many minor details along these lines -- such as, as one reviewer has noted, the failure to even show the controversial A-Rod interference call or the important role that reversed calls made in the LCS, or the injuries to the Cardinals which hurt them so badly in the World Series, or even the emotional role played by Ellis Burks, who wasn't even on the post-season roster yet was the personification for many fans of the perseverant old-school Red Sox. I don't want to be overly extreme, but there's a faintly Stalinist air to the 'Official History' when it skips so many interesting details.

I am not a Dennis Leary fan, but honestly the Leary narration didn't bother me much. The '2004 World Series' shares a lot of footage with the NESN-produced DVD 'Faith Rewarded' (which also has its strengths and flaws), and overall the narrative script of this DVD, while focussing much on the less than dramatic World Series, was of much higher quality than the NESN video.

Oddly, this DVD ends with the inferior version of 'Tessie' by the Dropkick Murphys, in the "play it too loud too long" school of overhyped stadium music blaring, while the NESN video eschews the local boys for ending with the Standells' "Dirty Water". I'll wait for the perfect video of the 2004 Red Sox triumph to come out, because it's not either one of these two films -- maybe they'll use 'Sweet Caroline' to end that as yet unproduced documentary.

The extras on this DVD focus on highlights of the games and formal interviews; the extras on the NESN 'Faith Rewarded' video focus a bit more on things Red Sox fans will probably find more delightful, such as a montage (without narration) of the victory parade-rolling rally and an odd segment of David Ortiz cooking that seems to have been left out of some local TV show. That, in essence, is the way the two videos stand in contrast: this video focusses more on the MLB Property, the World Series, and is a selective history of that series using the season as a minor prologue, while the NESN video is a somewhat more poorly-produced yet down-homey review of the entire season that Red Sox fans may find more to their taste. As odd as it is to say this, both are essential purchases for the Red Sox fan and perhaps take it or leave it for those outside the nation due to their inherent flaws.

I've watched this DVD and the NESN DVD several times now. For a die hard Red Sox fan you need both. But if you are only buying one this DVD edges the NESN one out.

The clincher is Denis Leary as the voice over. He does the long suffering Red Sox fan well without being maudlin. The music is good too. Short snippets of a few games during the season then a good recap of the Angels and New York playoffs. Minor irritation is they only spend about two seconds on the ARod swatting of Arroyo with his purse. This is an MLB production and they don't spend enough time on the Yankees Grand Choke.

But they build everything up and even the sweep of the Cardinals is pumped up and when Foulke throws to first for the out on Renteria I am still mesmerized on the 5th playing of the DVD.

The NESN DVD has much more play by play during the season and although the face wash of ARod is in both DVD'd the NESN shows more of those crucial Yankees series. The voice over and music get a bit better at the end but why didn't they have McDonough and Remy doing the voice over? (They do have some bits of them sprinkled through.)

Though MLB is not known for their film production like the NFL is, this DVD was done well. A little to much "curse" talk, but a great reveiw of a long waited for season.

Every Red Sox fan must have this along with Faith Rewarded.

I enjoyed this DVD a lot, even though the narration by Denis Leary left a little to be desired. I felt like it recapped the feeling of the regular season well, and in a concise fashion, and it dealt with the first two rounds of the playoffs well (with one exception that I'll get to in a moment...). Even though the ALCS takes up a smaller portion of the movie, it IS supposed to be about the World Series, so...

The coverage of the World Series itself is good, covering the most memorable parts well. My favorite part (for sheer entertainment value) is Jeff Suppan's base running debacle in game three. Watch the third base coach, he looks utterly disgusted. And of course, the whold thing has a happy ending (for once) so that's just great.

The extras are good too, the most memorable being interviews with older Sox plays from past World Series, and footage of the Sox on field prior to games in the ALCS. It's amazing seeing how upbeat and enthusiastic guys like Kevin Millar were prior to game four, probably a big part of why they were able to win.

Now, for my one real complaint. It really, REALLY bothered me how they completely glossed over A-Fraud's bush-league play running to first in game six. I mean, come on, that was a huge deal for most, if not all, Sox fans. Leave it to the official MLB DVD to not make anyone look bad, no matter how much they deserve it.

Still, even with that one omission the DVD is very good, and well worth buying. I've watched it 5 or 6 times since I first got it, and am thinking about sitting down and watching it again soon. It's a great way to re-live the greatest Red Sox season in history.

Go Sox 2005!

That's all? 80 little minutes to cover the most momentous occasion in Red Sox history? How about three or four hours? How about a DVD covering highlights of the ENTIRE 2004 season? I'm not saying that they should put every minute of every game on DVD, but maybe we could cover the entire postseason at least. Highlights of the Angels vs. Sox. Cards vs. Dodgers. Sox vs. Yankees. Cards vs. Astros. How about including those wonderfully produced openings from Fox, including the "Ignorance is Bliss" skits with Millar and Damon. Hopefully, MLB will come out with a comprehensive DVD covering this great postseason, because to tell you the truth, the series was boring compared to the ALCS and NLCS matchups.