Review of Madonna: The Ultimate Collection Box Set

Introduction

In singles terms, Madonna is the third most popular artist of all time behind Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley, she’s had more weeks in the top twenty than the Beatles and Michael Jackson, has had more top ten hits in the 90s than any other artist and hold the record for number of consecutive top ten hits. You could say that she is quite successful!

Madonna: The Ultimate Collection takes two currently available DVDs – “Madonna: The Immaculate Collection” and “Madonna: The Video Collection 93:99” and puts a cardboard sleeve around them. Together, they retail for £5 less than the individual cost.

Between the two DVDs, this package contains 26 videos along with the performance of Vogue at the 1990 MTV Awards Show and spans her career from Lucky Star to Beautiful Stranger. As she is still keeping up a relentless release schedule, expect to see another DVD in a few years time!

Video

I’ll treat each DVD separately here – “Madonna: The Immaculate Collection” has been available on video cassette for a number of years and this DVD release is the same except for the addition of the MTV awards version of Vogue that has been tagged on at the end. Remembering that the first material is now 16 years old, the picture quality is not too bad, although there is some noticeable grain on the earlier videos.

There is an obvious improvement in quality on “Madonna: The Video Collection 93:99” – which is only to be expected as the source material is newer – and also that it was prepared with DVD in mind.

All videos on the earlier DVD are 4:3 fullframe, as are all but four of the videos on the 93:99 DVD (Bad Girl, Take a Bow, The Power of Goodbye and Beautiful Stranger) which come in 16:9 non-anamorphic widescreen.

The videos themselves are an interesting look at both the style of music videos has changed over the last 16 years, but also how Madonna’s image has changed. From the 80’s kid in the first couple of songs, leading to a image change for Material Girl as her career went into the stratosphere, through to today’s look – were arguably she now looks better than she did at the start of her career.

Audio

Sound comes in linear PCM stereo on both DVDs which is a little disappointing as a 5.1 mix would have been nice. However, the sound quality is actually very good – even the first track “Lucky Star” sounds great, and as the material gets newer, the sound gets better.

The early DVD has subtitles/lyrics available but the second one does not, which is abit annoying if you want to sing along, and of course a serious hinderance if you are hearing impaired.

Features

None!

Surely, something like the VH1 “Behind the music” documentary could have been included, but extras on music discs are rarer than R2 DTS releases, so it’s videos only I’m afraid.

Conclusion

The total running time between the two DVDs is about 127 minutes, which makes me wonder why they couldn’t have been combined onto one disc and released slightly cheaper.

Having said that, the image and sound quality is good, and the music is top notch. As usual for music DVDs there is a lack of extra features.

Despite the relatively high cost, you’ll not be disappointed.