Product: The Great Queen Seondeok Vol. 1 (2009)
Rating: 1.0
A Different World
I began watching this by accident on a local foreign language TV station and became hooked. This costume drama series has it all. Full of action, drama, struggle, star crossed lovers, villians, plucky comic relief characters, and a little bad acting. The struggle between the two strong central women characters; One young and one old, one royal and one not, one idealistic and the other pragmatic and powerful, drive the series. Even after the older one dies her actions continue to echo through the story line through the actions of the surviving characters.I'm totally unfamiliar with Korean TV, so I don't know if this production is typical or not. It is a really interesting story once you get all the characters straight. There are a lot of characters and the social and familial relationships are very intertwined. There are many plot twists. Some of them look improbable and created to just to fix story lines that got out of control. And you pick up a little bit about Korean culture of this "medieval" era and it's relationship to the rest of the world at that time.Occasionally, there are some wordy and philosphical parts I feel must have some tie in to current issues in Korea and Asia that are passing by me. But that is ok. Also, some of the drama is slow paced and drawn out in comparison to most stories I am used to for TV. But you get hooked on seeing the characters develop and change over time. Both the heroes and villians have many dimensions.It's very, very different from American TV. The episodes are a full hour long each and and the series itself is very long, three volumes. The most interesting character doesn't even show up until the second volume! I bought the DVDs because there was just no other way for me to get through it all.This addictive series is really an escape into a completely different world.ADD ON WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Change from 5 to 1 star. Very dissapointed in volune 1 disks.I still rate the series highly, but the product I have from MBC America is labled region 1,4 with release date September 2009 English subtitles. It appears to be genuine product. Also, the runing time is 1400 minutes, so I think there is an error in the product listing details on Amazon for that.The DVD's are locking up, skipping, defective and impossible to watch with enjoyment. Extremely poor quality control by MBC America. These are systemic and repeatable errors, indicating they prepared data wrongly for writing to the disks or used a corrupted file. MBC America apparently has no quality assurance department to check master file before manufacturing disks. Supposedly this was a huge hit series in Korea and I guess they wanted to get the DVDs out fast. But it is inexcusable for for the MBC to ever ship item of such poor quality for export. What a bunch of amateurs!!! If their defective sets were recalled, they missed the one I got. So buying something labled MBC America product is no guarantee of functionality.I bought volume 1 from another vendor locally, so I am out of luck as far as replacement. If you can get a guaranteed functional set, go for it, as the series is very enjoyable.I am not sure what region 1 set is ok, as mine looks identical to this listing. The only difference I can see is there are no Spanish subtitles as listed in the amazon product details on the volume 1 set I have purchased.