Romantic Greece (1994) [COLE-50001]

I first viewed this disc less than six months after returning from an Aegean cruise, in the course of which I had visited many of the places which appear in the video. With that in mind, I found the pictorials excellent. Naturally the videographers sought out the beauty spots & the best shots & angles on everything, but allowing for that, the result is quite faithful to what I saw. The aerial views are especially nice. While it has a reputation of not being visually one of the best of the Hi-Vision scenery discs, the image is mostly quite satisfactory ; there are scenes in which noise, softness, or other problems become apparent if you look for them, but none of that is obtrusive, & on the whole I would say that the picture quality is entirely comparable to the usual broadcast or cable HD. Obviously, if you went out & re-shot it with high-end modern HD cameras, with an eye to quality rather than convenience, & then released the product on Blu-Ray with a high bitrate, you could do better.

The real problem, in my mind, is the music. Each of the ten three-minute scenes (the disc is CLV, but only a hair over 30 minutes) is set to a piece by composer & musician Tassos Mavroudis. Presumably supposed to be related to Greek cultural traditions, & thus an exotic selling point for the Japanese buyer, I found it a supremely annoying mess of plinkety-plonking. Basically, anything bad that can be said about the soundtrack to The Third Man goes double or triple here. If you're anything like me, while you may start out to listen (suffer) through it once, to get the "full effect" of the program, you will rapidly find that it begins to wear on your sanity, leaving you to switch the audio over to a CD or something, or just mute it altogether. It might be an interesting experience to watch it while playing random music.

So, in summation, if you are interested in watching what is more or less a very professional set of gently-moving tourist photos of attractive places around Greece, this Hi-Vision LD is a fine choice. Be prepared to put on some alternate background music, though. As a visual background for a party, it might be just the thing.

Note : There is a second title on this disk, Girisha to Ege-kai, or in Japanese "Greece & the Aegean". I believe that Greece - Aegean Sea [POLV-1002] is the NTSC release, probably letterboxed.