Beyond the Mind's Eye (1992) [72333-80018-6]

The next installment in the Mind's Eye series is trippier than the last. Using entirely of pre-Toy Story CGI clips made in the 80's and early 90's, it's amazing how photorealistic some of them look today. Since it's newer, it's a technological leap forward from the last one. This one actually has clips from The Lawnmower Man. That's kind of... neat. The music by Jan Hammer is better, but not for too long. The "Seeds of Life" segment was turned into a music video with vocals. I can't find the actual video, but here's the song with vocals. Fortunately, Beyond has the segment without vocals.

Somehow, this is not as exciting as the first one. There is one creepy segment that heads into uncanny valley, "Nothing But Love." It's trying to do another "Love Found", but it fails miserably. There's also some dialog in this segment and the one after and the latter has unintelligible dialog.

There is an alternate version of Beyond the Mind's Eye, that was sold to Radio Shack and was shown on their TVs'. It has different animations.

8/10

VIDEO

This disc was pressed by DADC Japan. It's not as notorious as their USA counterpart, but this disc has minimal laser rot. It's in CLV instead of CAV and stores the entire program on one side, while the other side is dead. There is some video noise and crosstalk, and once again the sources vary. Otherwise, a pretty adequate transfer.

8/10

AUDIO

Beyond the Mind's Eye offers a Plain Jane stereo soundtrack on both the PCM and FM tracks. Of course, I've listened to it in PCM. The music by Jan Hammer is better engineered and mixed and sounds more natural than the tinny Reynolds score on the last episode. Despite that, it still has some odd digitized orchestration. The dialog is minimal, and like I said, 1/3 of it is unintelligible. But for a program like this, it's only a minor complaint. Not demo worthy, but acceptable.

8/10