When you upscale to a bigger TV, you notice things you didn't before. When you go to a higher quality version, you notice things you didn't before. They're both good and bad things. You be the judge on which is which.
First off, the disc itself. The actual disc. I've seen Blu-ray discs that are blue, gray and black, but never one that's orange. I can say that I have now. The Land Before Time Blu-ray is orange. Here's proof.
Yeah, unique color choice there, Universal.
The lack of extra features is disappointing. What's more disappointing however is the main menu. Nothing more than pictures that gives you a vague idea of what is what. At least the DVD version had words to help you, but here, you're lost.
Note: The following was taken with a camera phone and I have no other way to show you. Please forgive the lack of quality.
Let me help you navigate and show you dumb it is to use pictures instead of words.
The Play Button plays the movie. The Book is the Scenes Menu. The Volume Icon is the Audio Menu. The one at the bottom is the Subtitles Menu. The House at top brings you back to the beginning of the Disc itself and let's you choose a different region.
I'll say this. It's a region-free Blu-ray Disc with MANY options in audio and subtitles. From the top of my head, I saw English, Spainish, French, Danish, German and Chinese. (There were others, but that's all I can remember at the moment.)
Now, on to the movie itself.
First off, I can't tell if this is an upscale or not as I have never really experienced Upscale Blu-ray before. I seriously need experts on that. However, if my understanding of what Upscale means is correct, it might be the case in some areas and in others, it's not.
Let's go to where it's obvious. Grainy texture character models. Seriously, I noticed. The only ones improved were Littlefoot, his friends and a few others. (At least the little flyers that fought over the berry were improved.) Trust me, it was noticeable. At first, things look beautiful and it doesn't seem like an upscale, but something put effort into. Until you get to the first longnecks of the film. Their texture is grainy.
Onto things I didn't notice until now. The creature at the very start you see swimming around has spots on it. It sheds one before the first bunch of bubbles. You notice it here.
The bug that Ducky chases I can now identify as a mosquito.
The Sharptooh had an eye problem BEFORE that thorn smacked him. Here, you definitely notice his right eye is closed before he got hit by that thorn. I guess the thorn made it worse.
The tree Cera was headbutting to get food down from... had no leaves on it.
However, one thing I noticed, was how much the wound on Littlefoot's Mother moved. They did not change this graphical mistake that's been around since the beginning. On top of that, it's more noticeable now that her skin was torn off in that area, and nothing else. I can understand if it was downgraded. After all, needs to stay G-rated. Rules may have changed after more than 2 and a half decades. However, if it's been like this since the days of VHS, then it shows how much the scene was downgraded before the film's theatrical release.
Oh, and one last thing. No missing scenes added. Seriously Universal, I would expect you to get in touch with Spielberg by now on them. We have to know what happened to them. You owe it to the fans.
All in all, it shows that this was a cash-grab on a re-release. Which might explain why I got it so cheaply.
Let's hope that if they bring out the sequels on Blu-ray, they treat them with more respect. This movie series deserves better.
