20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) [22/0015]

One of the classic live action Disney films, "20,000 leagues Under the Sea" (20 000 Lieues Sous les Mers) from 1954 is well-known to most people so it needs little description. The French PAL release, which is what I am discussing here was produced for laserdisc in 1997, making it one of the later releases in France. With that being said, one would have expected a rather nice transfer at this point in time....as you will see, this was not to be the case!!!

First off the film's strange extremely wide original aspect ratio inside a 4:3 frame is already a recipe for disaster, made worse by the unsharp source material used for the transfer. But hey, that could be tolerated if it were not for the extreme aliasing throughout the entire film! But hold on....there's yet another little "bijou" just around the corner! As our film opens we are treated to a beautiful red velvet theater curtain (hard to be sure in that blurry mess...it could be ratty crepe paper too). The curtain soon opens and the French overlayed titles are now prominately displayed jumping and dancing crazily around on the screen as if they had had been HEAVILY drinking, while the original film running underneath the French overlay remains completely steady!!! Yep, that icon shows clearly how I felt after trying to read those overlays. The colors are well saturated for a film of this vintage however and there is no sign of rot, although after looking at it, it's too bad there wasn't or I would have put it where it belongs...in the "poubelle" (trash)!

The only nice thing I can say about this release is what a nice job they did on the gatefold jacket and the documentary at the end of the film that is very interesting. It does not however, excuse the bad film transfer by Disney studios. What is bizzare is that I have never seen a Disney release look like this before , as most of them are top notch transfers.

This title has been awarded 2nd prize in my collection as the worst PAL laserdisc....you'll have to read my other reviews to see which one holds the dubious number one position!!!

So, to sum up my review using a simple sentence: Doggy-doodoo, be careful you don't step in it!!!

It's not just the PAL disc- I just finally got the US release and the video is surprisingly poor overall for a Disney premium release. They seemed to have not put much care into it as it's very soft and noisy. The DVD is much better but altered colors. The restoration was done years ago but never released other than an iTunes download which reveals heavy tweaking and the dreaded teal infusion.