Gaiam is a media company whose portfolio mostly included yoga, workout, and "sustainable lifestyle" content. Then, in 2012, they bought Vivendi Entertainment and they released a Blu-ray of the classic Max Fleischer Superman theatrical shorts. I bought it blind for around $30 last year, and only just tried watching it last night. Emphasis on tried.
The Max Fleischer Superman shorts are in the public domain, and have been on countless awful DVD and tape compilations for some time. In 2009, Warner Bros. put out a DVD sourced from the original master elements. That $10 to $15 DVD set handily outdoes the horrible $30 ripoff that is GAIAM's Blu-ray. All screengrab comparisons in this post are sourced from the discs in question, and represent how these look at full resolution and in motion.
Oh yeah...WB put all 17 shorts on their YouTube channel...in HD. I think this happened around the same time that GAIAM shat this disgusting excuse for a Blu-ray out the door. Good on Warner Bros., and shame on GAIAM. More further down.
GAIAM's 2012 Blu-ray. Note the watermark in the bottom right, which appears throughout every short.
Warner Bros.' 2009 DVD
The picture quality is awful, but the audio is what makes it even more unwatchable. In the first short, there are sound sync issues.
The second short, "The Mechanical Monsters", is arguably one of the most well-known Superman shorts by Fleischer. The dialogue is out of sync starting with the first lines spoken.
As things go forward, most of the time that Clark/Superman's lines are heard, it's over Lois Lane's mouth moving.
GAIAM Blu-ray
The above is a great example of the ghost lines, color dulling, and blanket blur filter that apparently constitutes a "Digital Restoration" to GAIAM. Note how the word "Technicolor" barely contains any pigment to speak of.
Warner Bros. DVD
The video transfer is abhorrent: fuzzy and more distorted than one expects even from bargain DVDs for the most part. Horizontal shadow lines appear any time text appears on-screen. Every visible line in the animation is jagged along both sides. The glorious, vibrant color I remember from third-generation VHS tapes as a kid is replaced with washed out mud.
The greatest offense? The "GAIAM" logo watermarked in the bottom right of the frame throughout every second of every single short. Is this them branding these Superman shorts as their own? Seriously, who are these clowns?
Look at how much color and fine grain detail information is completely smoothed out, blown out, and just gone in GAIAM's "Digital Restoration" as compared to the WB DVD:
GAIAM Blu-ray
I promise, the above is not a DeviantArt piece by a 10-year-old.
Warner Bros. DVD
GAIAM Blu-ray
Look at how a bunch of windows in the blue building at right just don't exist in GAIAM's version, and how as tiny as Superman is, how much more like a blob he appears.
Warner Bros. DVD
This "release" is an embarrassment in every possible way, including their proud proclamation of "INCLUDES COMMEMORATIVE BOOKLET" on the front. Even for public domain content, touting "DIGITALLY RESTORED CLASSICS" on the front is false advertising. I hoped that the shoddy cover wouldn't reflect the content on the inside, but I should have .
Below is a further series of comparisons to Warner Bros.' 2009 2-DVD set, which looks radically better at 480p than GAIAM's 1080p Blu-rays do, in every single way. All screengrabs in this post come direct from the digital source, and are reduced to at most 800 pixels wide each, with JPG compression.
GAIAM Blu-ray
There's an enormous loss in detail here. Just look at the ground, which looks like it got the ugly side of a Photoshop blur filter.
Warner Bros. DVD
GAIAM Blu-ray
See those gross ghost lines? They're even more prominent on a TV.
Warner Bros. DVD
I don't know why I bothered denoting which were the GAIAM grabs, since they watermarked them all for me. Great news, Gaiam's first quarter revenue is up almost 20%! That means they can refund my purchase price for this. $30 is $30, and I'll update on how it goes.
Here's the HD version of this short from WB's YouTube channel: