Why So Blu?

Cartoon Network Holiday Collection (DVD Review)

Cartoon Network has put together some Holiday focused episodes of some of their in-house produced series and put them to use on a nice DVD.  This DVD serves as a sort of sampler of sorts to their programming as well.  The shows appearing with spirited episode son the disc are the super popular Adventure Time (Gets two episodes all to itself), the strange and funny Regular Show and the fun The Amazing World Of Gumball.  Though, a closer look shows this might be more of a secretive promotional disc as you can see that they’ve also included two “Bonus Episodes” that don’t have anything to do with the holidays.  Those two episodes come from the recently started show Clarence and the currently running (in the middle of season one), Steven Universe.

Episodes 

Adventure Time: “Holly Jolly Secrets Part 1” – This season 3 episode finds Jake and Finn discovering a trunk full of VHS tapes.  It winds up that these VHS tapes once belonged to the Ice King and were a sort of personal diary of his.

Adventure Time: “Holly Jolly Secrets Part 2” – The conclusion to the previous episode, the Ice King wants to know what secret videos Jake and Finn have been watching.  He freezes their home but they make the best of the situation and he instills a group of snowmen to infiltrate and get the tapes back.

Regular Show: “The Christmas Special” – A two-part episode combined into one from the fourth season.  This features Santa Claus hiding out with the gang after being thought be left for dead by his arch nemesis elf.  The guys most go and destroy a present to save Christmas.

The Amazing World Of Gumball: “Christmas” – From the second season.  The Wattersons run over Santa Claus.  Ms Simian also owes Gumball an apology.

BONUS EPISODES

• Clarence: “Money Broom Wizard”
• Steven Universe: “Together Breakfast”

Video 

Encoding: MPEG-2

Resolution: 1080p

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1

Clarity/Detail:  Animation is usually pretty easy to get right, but this appears to just be something that got a hurried and thrown on a disc.  There is constant ghosting on every episode.  The picture quality is serviceable, but not very impressive at all if you’re looking for something to wow in quality.

Depth:  Every show is pretty flat.  Gumball looks decent though.

Black Levels:  Blacks are natural and deep.

Color Reproduction:  Colors are okay and accurately represented.  The ghosting on the disc takes away from any ability they could have to be striking.

Flesh Tones:  N/A

Noise/Artifacts:  Ghosting throughout and other normal low bitrate DVD issues

Audio 

Audio Format(s): English 2.0 Dolby Digital

Subtitles: English SDH

Dynamics:  The score and effects sound terrific in this mix.  However, the audio cannot match their audacity and loudness.  So the two are very loud and tend to drown out any dialogue going on at the same time.  Its a little problematic because if you turn it up to hear the dialogue, your ears might get blasted from a sudden sound effect or piece of music.

Low Frequency Extension: N/A

Surround Sound Presentation: N/A

Dialogue Reproduction: Dialogue is really low in the mix for every episode.  Its clean and clear, it just needs cranked up.

Extras 

I suppose we can count the 2 “Bonus Episodes” here.

Clarence – “Money Broom Wizard”

Steven Universe – “Together Breakfast”

Summary 

These are all solid shows featured on this disc.  The humor here is for all ages.  The quality of the disc is pretty substandard, even for a DVD, where animation is pretty easy to look good.  I don’t know where to recommend this aside from being something to get your kid for a road trip or something where they have a nice mixture of episodes.  Its a cheap disc, but that $10 could be put into going for a full season set of one of the programs featured here.