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58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Half of a product, December 7, 2007
National Lampoon at this point is an icon. To people of a certain age, they remember the counter-culture magazine that pushed the boundaries in every conceivable direction. For younger people, the name is associated with cheesy titillation movies. The magazine itself was usually funny, and had a bit of an underground cachet about it.
Well, they've brought it back in the form of a bunch of PDF files that take about 7 gigabytes on a DVD-ROM. It's basically every page of every issue, including (thankfully!) the ads which tended towards stereo equipment, male "protection", beer & liquor, and cigarette ads. [personally, I love the old stereo receiver ads because they had a couple that I wanted to buy, couldn't afford, and by the time I could, they didn't make them anymore!]
It works fine on a windows PC, and I'm guessing it would work fine on a Mac, provided you installed the Adobe reader.
But there are two problems. First, the scans are only fair. It looks like in some cases the magazines themselves were damaged, but even when that didn't happen, the quality is no better than you or I just scanning a magazine at home. However, what really spoils this collection is that there was no attempt to turn this into something that was searchable and indexable because each page is simply a photograph of the page with no attempt at OCR or transcription.
And while it doesn't spoil a trip down memory lane, it does make you wish they'd spent more money, asked for $10 more and given us something that would be a lot more fun.
As it is, for those who remember, it's a trip worth every penny of the $33 Amazon is asking for it. But it frustrates you because it could have been so much more.
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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Quality art and writing marred by lousy scans, December 10, 2007
I was really excited to finally have a collection of these classic issues in their entirety.
It would have been even better if they were readable.
Some scans were cropped too tightly, and cut off text or parts of a photograph. Other scans had crummy exposure, resulting in dark photos and filled-in, unreadable reverse type. Some scans went the other direction, rendering black print as light gray. And still other scans are inexplicably blurry.
It's not just the photos and drawings that suffer, either. The scans were done at too low a resolution to capture the small type in some of the articles and ads, so you'll have a hard time reading those.
Quality control on the final scans is nonexistent. No attempt was made to correct density levels or colors on any of the scanned pages -- or even to match densities on double-page spreads. The result is an annoying mish-mash of too-light or too-dark pages with wildly varying brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color density. By what amounts to sheer luck, some of the pages look, eh, not bad.
A few of the scanned magazines had leftover bind-in ad inserts attached to them, and these inserts were inexcusably scanned as pages in and of themselves. Sheesh!
Clearly, this is a slapped-together project straight out of an automated scanning farm. It might have been better if the publisher of this compilation had outsourced the scanning of these magazines to some offshore outfit that could have hand-corrected the images as they came off the scanner. It probably would have only cost pennies per magazine to vastly improve the scan quality.
Bottom line, this collection is a great concept with a deeply flawed execution. It's a disappointment. The artwork, photography, and writing in the old National Lampoon magazines was of the highest caliber -- it's hard to find anything published today that's as sophisticated and incisive. Too bad this DVD compilation doesn't live up to that standard.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
MUCH BETTER THAN NOTHING, November 6, 2007
Having had great difficulty finding reasonably-priced original National Lampoon Magazines, I was looking forward to this product which claimed to have EVERY ISSUE scanned. The deluxe glossy packaging is better than expected, including the famous "We'll Kill This Dog" dog on the cover.
As for the DVD-ROM itself, it initially WOULD NOT stay in my disc drive (I use an Apple iMac - OS 10.4) - there was obviously something wrong with the disc...however, after several tries the DVD-ROM stayed in my computer...though the disc continues to resist staying in my drive...in other words, it dosn't seem to like Macs
It seems best to use the Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer supplied on the disc...when using Apple's PREVIEW program to view the PDFs I got ugly "National Lampoon" watermarks on all of the scans. However, when using Adobe Acrobat everything was fine and the watermarks are now gone.
As for the scans, they're decent but definitely look like they were taken from actual old magazines and not the original magazine lay-out "boards" - sometimes words are cut-off and the general coloration of the scans is brown-ish and a little dark
But ultimately the important thing is the comedy material of the magazine and that holds up very well. It's especially nice to see the many cartoons, satirical ads (and the real ads, too which are included)
Overall, it's a package worth buying and a good value.
Several other Nat Lamp projects are NOT included (High School Yearbook, Newspaper parody) - but it looks like these side projects are all being released separately in book form.
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