The Grease and Saturday Night Fever Blu-rays (released last Tuesday by Paramount) represent a definitive upgrade over the DVD editions they replace. I've never seen the color depth so rich or heard the soundtracks this clear and crisp on either movie. It's only a coincidence that John Travolta stars in both and that they feature music heavily, but it's interesting to see the consistency between the two given they were made a year apart.
The resolution and clarity are vastly improved as one would expect from Blu-ray at this point, but the real standout is color. In particular, the animated opening of Grease is impressive right off the bat, and all the disco scenes really pop in Fever, not nearly as muddy as before.
Any critic who tells people up-converted DVD is "good enough" compared to Blu-ray should be strapped down and have their eyes forced open Clockwork Orange-style in front of side-by-side monitors showing these movies next to their previous versions.
The extras on Grease and Saturday Night Fever are identical to the previous "Rockin Rydell" and "30th Anniversary" DVD editions. All of the Grease ones are upconverted SD, which I'm fine with, honestly. It would have been nice if they'd done the Theatrical Trailer in HD at least. The weird thing is, Saturday Night Fever's supplements all got the 1080 upgrade. Frankly I'd have been fine with the extras in SD to improve bitrate on the feature, but can't fathom how if at all the picture or audio suffered.
On Grease, the featurettes amount to just a hair under an hour of total material, including the retrospective The Time, The Place, The Motion: Remembering Grease [22:00], which is more concise and informative than the Feature Commentary. Structurally, it would have been nice if there were a Play All so that bits like the DVD Launch Party [15:00] and the Grease Memories from John and Olivia [3:00], The Moves Behind the Music [8:00], Thunder Roadsters [5:00], and the two "Grease Day" interviews with John & Olivia [2:00 each] didn't require fishing for the remote. There's also 11 Deleted, Alternate, & Extended Scenes [10:00] that are B&W only from the Paramount vault as well as some Photo Galleries I skipped. The Grease Sing-Along? It's called subtitles, folks.
Saturday Night Fever, in contrast, has a cohesive, all in one go feature doc, Catching the Fever [75:00]. Director John Badham's Feature Commentary is worth the listen and compliments the doc nicely. Also included are three Deleted Scenes with Optional Director Commentary and a Disco Trivia pop-up track. The former is worth the time, the latter wasn't particularly eye-opening, but it's not the bore pop-up tracks usually are.
In all, this bodes extremely well for other Paramount catalog releases from the same era to the present on Blu-ray, but I'm curious what things look like when we go further back. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (about 15 years older) is being reissued on DVD next week, but no Blu-ray...yet. I have a stack of Paramount Blus at home that are hitting the street tomorrow along with Ferris Bueller's Day Off (5/5 like the above), which I'm similarly impressed with. More on these soon.
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