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List Price: $69.99 | | Label: KOCH INTERNATIONAL DVD
Salesrank: 59015
Released: November 11, 2008 |
| Our Price: $53.99 |
| Used Price: $56.44 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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| Features:
Best of Box set Color DVD NTSC Widescreen | |
Editorial Review:
This is the definitive review of the music of Pink Floyd album by album. These eight DVDs feature extensive archive interviews with Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and David Gilmour alongside rare footage of Floyd in performance. Drawing upon the words of the band and a host of Floyd insiders including, each album is reviewed, contrasting the views of the band and its critics with rare surviving performances. The candid views of a team of leading critics, experts and film academics complete this eminent work. Also included is a 196 page book Pink Floyd And The Critics , a study of the evolution of Pink Floyd in the words of the band against the contemporary critical reaction to the albums on release.
Great Gig in the Sky: Album by Album Guide Reviews:
Christmas Gift 
2009-12-17 - This is a Christmas gift so I am not sure how to rate it since it hasn't been opened yet. The delivery of this product was good.
A seriously flawed but still interesting set
2009-01-21 - There are many major problems with this 8-DVD documentary box about Pink Floyd's albums, but as a big fan of the group, I found enough to enjoy it myself. Still, I hesitate to recommend it, even to other Floyd fans. The bottom line is that there's a wealth of material presented here between the DVDs and the very thorough book included in the set. There are many interview excerpts, live performance snippets, background material, and critical commentary. So I encountered enough to maintain my interest throughout.
HOWEVER... The presentation itself leaves a lot to be desired. Start with the poor editing, which includes occasional songs from different eras of the band's history, out of place chronologically. Then the individual album sections aren't put together cleanly. For ex., the Dark Side of the Moon documentary bleeds over into the Wish You Were Here segment. At first I thought it was on purpose, as sort of a transition, but the first 14 minutes of the 55 minute W.Y.W.H. documentary only talks about Dark Side, and makes no real attempt to link it to the next album.
The video quality is often only fair to poor, with the principal narrator of several of the pieces appearing in a dimly lit room sitting on a sofa. They often use a framing device where large chunks of the screen are taken up with a graphic, such as an album cover, that partly obscures the interview footage, concert footage, or whatever. Very distracting! They also felt it necessary to give the credits of the original source material - in big letters right across the screen! And it does not go away!
Finally, you have the typically fawning tone of the critics, describing every recorded work by the Floyd as if it were an eternal classic of the greatest genius. I do consider some Pink Floyd albums worthy of the highest accolades, but even I found some of this a bit too much.
And there are more problems that those. But compared to some other relatively trashy collections that I've read about, such as the universally panned 3-DVD "Landmark Albums" set, this "Great Gig" set at least has some merit.
