Review of Thomas & Friends Bumper Collection: Seasonal Scrapes

Introduction

The Thomas stories written by the Rev. W. Awdry all those years ago have pleased children of many generations, and not a few adults too.

The stories were given a major boost in the 1980`s when they were made into a childrens television series narrated by Ringo Starr.

The action was reproduced by using models and they captured the slightly surreal world of the island of Sodor perfectly.

The seasonal release is a collection of stories that have been previously released on both VHS and DVD and have been collated here for their relevance to the festive season. This means that most have snow in them!

The Thomas success story is still going strong to this day, with new stories being written and a feature film narrated by Alec Baldwin a recent release.

Video

The video is framed at 1.33:1 full screen and is extremely good.

The colours are bright and sharp, which was a surprise, as normally TV stock does not transfer over to DVD too well straight out of the box.

Of course, the video quality is helped by the fact that all the action takes place in model form so the lighting engineer has every opportunity to get the feel exactly right.

There is no trace of any kind of imperfection in the image, it is just extremely clean and sharp with bright well defined colours.

Audio

The audio is a mono Dolby Digital track that is okay, but nothing exceptional. Maybe the thought was that a child wouldn`t be bothered if a full 5.1 track was missing, but what about us adults?

Saying that, the audio is good and the dialogue if nicely fixed to the screen, it`s just that there was room for so much more.

Features

Scene active and menus are the only extras here. A shame as I for one would have loved to have seen a making of documentary or similar, but maybe that is being saved for a release of new material.

Conclusion

Your either a Ringo Starr, Michael Angelis or George Carlin person when it comes to the narration, and for me it`s got to be Ringo, the original and best.

I wasn`t worried by the fact that these episodes had been previously released as I don`t have any other Thomas discs, but I was concerned by the fact that the warning of this was quite small. This is a source of disappointment for a young viewer who may feel cheated, let alone the parent who has bought the same thing twice.

An excellent disc that was slightly let down by the audio track, but lifted by the video. Just a shame it`s a repeat.