Product: The Hobbit [VHS] (1977)
Rating: 1.0
Classic movie, TERRIBLE DVD!
I grew up with this movie, and it was my gateway drug to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. It's got high quality animation for the time it was made, a very unique and creative art style, catchy songs, and serves as a good enough cliffnotes version of the story to get kids hooked. Unfortunately, this DVD, while looking better than I ever remembered and having crystal clear audio, is almsot unwatchable because most of the sound effects are either completely missing or have been sloppily replaced with public domain foley. Me and my brothers were watching this disc a while back, and the poor audio mixing was so bad we were checking for loose wires on our stereo. "Why is there a campfire sound when smog is roaring," "why isn't there any sound when the spiders die?" and "shouldn't there be a rumbling sound when those rocks fall?" were common questions throughout the viewing, and it wasn't until later that I learned that Warner Bros. was to blame for this craptastic problem. It's almost unwatchable.Save yourself some money and just download "The Hi-Fi Hobbit" for free. You get the DVD's restored video combined with the original hi-fi VHS audio track. Yeah, it won't sound as clear, but at least you'll actually HAVE sound, which is more than I can say for this half-assed excuse for a digital restoration. Even George Lucas would take a crap on this DVD. When Warner Bros. decides to pony up the money and do a proper audio restoration on a future release of this movie I will buy it, but until then I am not giving them a penny for a product that is inferior to my abused old VHS cassette.