letstalkbeatles.com

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Welcome to Let's Talk Beatles

Author Topic: Revisiting 'The McCartney Years' DVD  (Read 1882 times)

kylenz

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 611
    • Email
Revisiting 'The McCartney Years' DVD
« on: December 24, 2015, 06:28:33 pm »

Well I've been converting all my blu-rays and dvds to high quality mp4s so they can all sit on a hard drive under my tv (connected via the USB) and thus never need to ever get a dvd out of its case ever again!

Amongst my collection is 'The McCartney Years', bought back in 2007, and I haven't really played it since that time. Well, time has brought upon it some reflection - and cynicism - the rose-tinted glasses have worn off and I now see it for what it is - a shoddy effort to chronicle Macca's solo career!

First, NONE of the clips run in a chronological order. This is so bizarre it's beyond belief that they would do it this way. Let's look at the opening tracklist on Disc 1 - Tug of War (1982), followed by Say Say Say (1983), then Silly Love Songs (1976) THEN Band on the Run (1973) and Maybe I'm Amazed (1970) - it's all over the place!!! There's no rhyme or reason behind any of this. The entire set of dvds runs in this haphazard track order.

Secondly, they did some strange things to the video clips to make them 'widescreen'. In the recent 'Beatles 1+' blu-ray set, they had the wisdom to present all the original videos in their proper aspect ratio - 4:3 - as that was the way our tvs were set up at the time. Here, they have kinda zoomed in and mangled Macca's videos and cropped the tops of them to fit the widescreen format, to the point where they're almost cutting off Macca's head! The only video to escape this massacre seems to be 'London Town' (and it looks good!) - which is presented as an 'extra'. Why is it an extra? How come it's not just one of the videos in the series along with the others?

Then you have the video for 'Goodnight Tonight', but the clip has been put through some cheap grainy video effect preset to make it look like it was filmed back in the 1920s or something - like what you would find on Windows Movie Maker - why did they do this??? I remember the original video back in 1979 was very sharp claritywise, there really was no need to destroy the clip like this. Did Paul actually give them the go-ahead to do this?

There is also a variance in quality of the video clips themselves. 'No More Lonely Nights' for example looks like it's been dubbed off an old VHS tape. Very dubious sources they have used - with zero effort gone into restoring them to a decent quality. Again, nothing like the restoration work gone into the Beatles videos on 1+.

There are videos they have left out (where's the 'Getting Closer' video for example??). They have an extra called 'The South Bank Show' but it's only a tiny excerpt from it. I remember when that South Bank Show episode screened back in 1984 and it went for an entire hour, showing Macca in the studio creating the soundtrack for 'Broad Street' - it was awesome - but we only see 9 minutes here! Why show it at all?

Same for 'Rock Show' - why show only a fragment of it? They finally did release it on blu-ray but the way they've done it here is ridiculous - they could've better spent that time and space including ALL of the South Bank Show, or the 'Back To The Egg' videos, or the 'James Paul McCartney' 1973 tv special or something cool. The whole thing really is a hotchpotch!

I think it's time for Macca to do a proper blu-ray of ALL the content out there - properly-restored AND in a chronological and logical running order. How can we pay tribute to a guy when it's all bits-and-pieces hacked -and-slashed and put together as if it's been caught in a tornado????!?

Does anyone else here have this collection? Any thoughts? Would like to hear your views.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2015, 06:43:51 pm by kylenz »
Logged

kylenz

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 611
    • Email
Re: Revisiting 'The McCartney Years' DVD
« Reply #1 on: December 24, 2015, 10:10:48 pm »

One thing about this compilation, is the way they did 5.1 remixes of the songs. Now as you know, I'm not a surround sound kinda guy, but the way the mp4s spat out some of those 5.1 remixes as normal stereo, it gave some of the songs a fresh kick by stripping out some of the familiar components - 'This One' and 'No More Lonely Nights' sound quite incisive stripped back to basic vocal drums, guitar and none of the lush backing vocal overdubs.

Almost makes me want to invest in a 5.1 system just to hear what these mixes actually sound like in their remixed form!
Logged