shwimpy said:
Just got back from Best Buy with Alice for 11 bucks... Coupon worked like a charm.
BTW - I have like 2000 Disney reward points... What is everyone saving up for? There's so much crap in there, I don't even know what's worth it.
Either go big, or load up on some of the badass, 27x40" movie posters.
Also, I wanted to say that Fantasia is fantastic on Blu-ray. While it isn't going to blow you away with its picture or sound like Beauty and Beast will, the soundtrack stuns.
While you can't really save the fact that the music was recorded in the 1940's (early 50's? Can't remember), Fantasia experienced in 5.1 enhances the experience to an almost indescribable level. Fantasia is really all about the synchronization of classical music to the animation on screen, and when you add in the discrete channels of 5.1, the effect is mind-blowing. I've told all my friends (who mostly all roll their eyes at Fantasia, or say, "What's Fantasia?") that this film would almost be the kind of things that I would imagine drugs would greatly enhance. I was really impressed, however, seeing the film for the first time since my childhood, how the animators were able to sync almost every single note with the action on screen.
It's a cartoon visualizer.
Fantasia 2000, on the other hand, while good in it's own right, really isn't anything to get too excited about. My biggest complaint against the film is that it almost, except for certain moments, completely loses the synchronization between picture and sound that the original Fantasia had. In fact, the very first video involving a pod of humpback whales has pretty much NOTHING to do with the music. Instead, it's more about, "Hey look at this CG! We created it for IMAX! Come see our show in IMAX, because the amazing QUALITY of the picture and sound is all we've got!"
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Another interesting this, is that for Sleeping Beauty, they had rediscovered the original recording tapes for the soundtrack to the movie and remastered them, where as before, they had been reworking the original 1950's master until the sound was distorted into oblivion. One of the results of this is that they discovered, maybe for the first time since then,
that during this scene, that the vocal flourish that's playing (in Maleficent's theme) is actually calling "Aurora," in order to lure her to the spindle. While it's harder to tell in the video I linked to, on Blu-ray, it's very apparent, and with higher picture quality, the effect is chilling.
When I heard it, I got goosebumps. It's so creepy.