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Dom Robinson reviews
Here come the Teletubbies
& Dance with the TeletubbiesDistributed by
- Cert:
- Cat.no: BBCDVD 1021
- Running time: 115 minutes
- Year: 2000
- Pressing: 2000
- Region(s): 2, 4 (UK PAL)
- Chapters: 35 plus extras
- Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
- Languages: 5 languages available
- Subtitles: None
- Fullscreen: 4:3
- 16:9-enhanced: No
- Macrovision: No
- Disc Format: DVD 9
- Price: £16.99
- Extras: None
Teletubbies– it’s the choice of the children, the students and the eternal students.It does for the last few years of kids TV what Rainbow did in the1980s and most of the 90s.
The four characters here are purple Tinky Winky, green Dipsy,yellow La La and red Po and to attempt a degree of politicalcorrectness, Dipsy is meant to be black, although it’s not something thatgrabs you instantly.
The main thing the ‘tubbies do is run about, laugh a lot, eat Tubby Toast andTubby Custard and then let Noo Noo the vacuum cleaner do all the cleaning up.
Both programmes includes stories that begin with one of the characters’antennae twingling before some video footage appears on his stomach.Here Comes the Teletubbies contains more of their general messingabout and having accidents with the food, while Dance with the Teletubbiesfeatures the Round & Round dance, the Splashing Dance and the Follow My LeaderDance.
Of course, they’ve not gone without some form of controversy. The originalactor who played Tinky Winky was fired because he couldn’t quite act thepart, so they drafted in someone else to do exactly the same movements.
Points of View were questioned was one of the Teletubbies was wronglyaccused of kicking a rabbit’s head in and a couple of sad parents called theirchild “La La” after it developed jaundice (!)
Unlike the Tweenies, all the episodes of the Teletubbies filmed to datehave been in standard 4:3 fullscreen. The picture quality is just ascolourful and perfectly does the job.I was unable to determine the average bitrate, the reason for which isexplained later on.
The sound is well-used throughout as the foursome make a lot of noise andthe music goes in sync.
Extras :There are no extras on the disc, nor subtitles, which is a surprise,but at least the menus are animated, contain sound and come in fivelanguages: English, French, Norwegian, Polish and Portuguese.
The menus are difficult to negotiate because they’ve been programmed sobadly. It should be quite simple, but the options haven’t been implementedproperly. Someone’s been too busy trying to be clever and divided the entiredisc into 58 separate titles to accommodate the multi-lingual subtitles,the longest ones being the last two where themain programmes are actually stored on the disc, which gave the result ofcrashing my PC when I tried to run the bitrate program.
As for the content, it’s a must buy for any age, but perhaps that’s just me:)
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
0OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.