An Addendum

...to my review of The Phantom Of The Opera.

DO NOT BUY THIS DVD.
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Here's why:

1. The Fullscreen DVD is Pan & Scan, in a most terrible way. More on this later.


2. There are no special features. None. Not one.


3. No, really, NO SPECIAL FEATURES WHATSOEVER.

Now, maybe this has been the experience of some of you, but not mine: I've never even SEEN a DVD without a "Special Features" option on the menu. I've seen some pretty threadbare ones - "Multiple theatrical trailers!" Ooooooo. But never one that didn't even have the option.

I bought the much less popular movie House of Flying Daggers on DVD at the same time as I bought Phantom. HoFD has over an hour of documentaries on the DVD about the process of making the movie, including a 20-minute featurette on the visual effects; storyboards of the movie, production stills, bios of the cast and crew, and audio commentaries by the director and stars. HoFD cost me $2 less than Phantom did, was in anamorphic widescreen, and was vastly superior in terms of what I got for my money.

Now, a little DVD technical note: anamorphic widescreen is the best kind, because it adapts to your television's resolution, allowing it to display properly no matter how new or old your TV is. Even a standard widescreen DVD will suffer from image degradation on a newer, widescreen TV, because the image is stretched to fit the screen, first horizontally, then vertically. An anamorphic widescreen DVD is pre-stretched vertically, which means that when your TV displays the movie, there are no black lines and image degradation.

Pan & Scan, as I mentioned earlier, is related to this. See, theatrical movies are filmed in a different format than televisions: 2.35" to 1", as opposed to televisions' 4" to 3" format. In order to display a theatrical movie on a standard television, you have two options: letterboxing, or Pan & Scan. In letterboxing, the picture is smaller, because the movie is resized so that the horizontal width is the same as the television's, and then black bars are added to the top and bottom of the screen. In Pan & Scan, the DVD company simply chops off the sides of the screen, resulting in an image that fits the standard TV, and focuses only on what the studio considers the "main" action in a scene.

What this means for Phantom is that when the Phantom is onscreen, the screen centers on him - and you can't even see what's going on to the sides. In a musical, in which there are several amazingly choreographed, costumed, and set-designed song-and-dance numbers, ("Masquerade" just LEAPS to mind,) something like 60% of the scene is simply gone.

IF you simply must buy the Phantom DVD, buy the widescreen edition. That way all you have to suffer with is the total lack of special features. For myself, I'm waiting for the "Collector's Edition" or whatever, which will no doubt be along in a few months. But frankly, let me say this flat out: the fullscreen edition is the worst DVD I have ever purchased. Total waste of cash.