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230 of 252 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Brideshead DVD Box Set is Excellent..., May 31, 2002
By A Customer
Through my own connections, I was able to obtain this item a month before its street date so you all get to know what you're getting.The Brideshead DVD Box Set, while not perfect, is indeed excellent and I'll explain why. As is increasingly the case, the actual disc carriages are part of a three leaved slide-out assemblage which folds up and then is stored in a case, just like with the Godfather DVD Box Set. These case formats are an excellent way to fight piracy and look great but are not the best in in terms of long term box preservation as cardboard and photo-printed cardboard will degrade. This release of Brideshead is the 660 minute version of the mini-series and I believe this is the longest and most complete version ever released! The episode menus and scene selection are pretty, functional and fairly rudimentary, nothing exceptional here. A little booklet with some director's commentary and info on Evelyn Waugh and the episodes is included. There are no real DVD Special Edition type extras save for a brief but comprehensive written film/DVD production summary, info on Castle Howard, a cast/production team bio (Aloysius has his own entry and a hysterically funny news interview with the director about him), and some photography taken while shooting. There are regrettably no interviews with the cast or production team, no director's commentary, and no deleted/extended scenes, though since we've all been forced to endure the butchered Home Video verson this as full as full can be version is in a sense full of them. There are no theatrical trailers or television spots. Image quality is good and one thing that's mentioned in the production report is just how painstaking the video/audio restoration really was and how VERY lucky they -- and we -- were to be able to find the original film master in England and then clean it up. Once again, and this is becoming a great joke in the film community, a US company picks up the distribution/restoration rights to a foreign country's film treasures and then releases the best version ever made outside the market it originated in. We did it to the Japanese with Macross and we did it to England with Brideshead Revisited. This version of Brideshead looks better then the original did when it first came out for reasons explained on the DVD. The video and audio restoration was very good given the age and condition of the original film master. It's a little grainy here and there but that would have been tough to avoid. They should have spread this out over more discs for the most optimal compression ratios and resulting images but you'll not be disappointed with the results. If this title sells as well as it should, perhaps the American company that obtained and restored it can do a Special Edition version. For now, after all these years, Brideshead is where it belongs, on DVD and in my collection.
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