Blu-ray Movie Reviews

In this collection, "South Park" follows the new President-elect from his acceptance speech to his first official day of duty as Commander in Chief. The boys keep busy helping a pop-princess who's down on her luck, negotiating a truce for striking Canadians, and preventing giant rodents from destroying the world. For them, it's all part of growing up in "South Park".

This is up there as one of my favorite seasons of South Park. I rarely have the opportunity to watch the shows as they air but I try my best to catch them once they’re on DVD. It was great to see the boys make it to Blu-ray. This season puts Obama, Britney and even Spielberg and Lucas in the crosshairs and no one is safe. I especially loved the homage to Heavy Metal in the episode “Major Boobage”. This is just a series that doesn’t seem to get old!

I was wondering how well this show would translate to Blu-ray and Paramount have done a great job. This series is encoded as 1080i though, so the overall quality will have a lot to do with how well your player or display will handle the video processing as most displays will display the signal as 720p or 1080p requiring HD de-interlacing. This has always been a simple show in terms of animation but the bold colors are striking here and the utter lack of compression noise gives the animation a sharper look than I’m used to from TV or DVD. I did see some very mild banding from time to time but it was barely worth mentioning. This is by far the best I’ve seen the show look to date!

The show is presented in Dolby TrueHD and the sound design is a lot of fun. While I wouldn’t call this an overly dynamic mix, it gets the job done. The soundstage is a bit front heavy but that doesn’t keep the mains from providing a nice open soundstage with great imaging across the screen. There is no strain at all in the voice work and the sound effects are just as cheesy as before.

Extras include some limited audio commentaries by creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone along with a look at making the show and the animation. You also get a look at the creation of the “Major Boobage” episode, which is quite funny. Surprisingly Paramount has also included a digital copy of the entire season for your portable device! A very nice touch.

It is great to see South Park finally makes it way to Blu-ray. Hopefully Paramount will deliver the feature film soon! I was skeptical as to how much benefit HD would have for this series but the proof is here, South Park has never looked this good!