to those who bought it and viewed a significant portion, what are your thoughts. just saw some pics of them and it looks mighty sweet...
My thoughts: As someone who never completed the Rhino set, I can honestly say it's nice to finally have the whole series in one, fairly compact box. The packaging is awesomely cool and this collection has been the one to finally trounce my Alien Quadrilogy set as coolest set I own. The menus are pretty awesome and remind me of some of the G2 "Cybernetic Space Cube" machine-transformery montage stuff a bit. Some of the special features on the discs alone are worth the hefty pricetag (IMO). The booklet is the nicest non-Internet basic listing of TF episodes I've ever seen. It's colorful, well layed out and has profiles of the mainmost (ie: popular) TFs dispersed throughout. The magnets are neat but a little disapointing. I'm not sure why they went with greyscale when both magnets could have easily been colored. This is a trivial complaint, though. They're both on my fridge now so my overall geekiness has now invaded my kitchen even more (I only had a Brak cookie jar on my counter before). The visuals on the cartoons themselves are rich and most of the audio is crisp. It's been a long time since I've seen the Rhino discs so I'm not sure where Shout! Factory's special editing comes into play in any of the episodes. I suppose that's a good thing as that means it's fairly seamless. I suspect more observant fans than I would be able to tell. There isn't much to say here regarding the meat of the set since we all know what the meat consists of. But hey....complete G1 series! It doesn't get cooler than that. The artwork for the boxes is a bit subdued compared with what I've seen of the seperate seasonal sets. This was a little disapointing since, by way of comparison, the Real Ghostbusters set literally had the same boxes and art that seperate seasonal releases would use, only put them all together into one collection with extras. I wouldn't have minded seeing this set use the same format if only to make it more visually appealing once the set is open, but again, this is trivial compared to the real content a fan should be caring about anyway. As mentioned, the special features rock! Some of the info in the interviews is repeat information if one has attended enough BotCons where the interviewees were guests. I don't want to give too much away, but some of the printable content is amazing, and the open group interview with some of the former voice actors will make anyone who attended the 2001 BotCon VA panel have a few flashbacks (in a good way). Probably the biggest issue I've got with the set would be Shout! evidently not securing rights to publish the old commercials without blurring out the kids' faces. It's not too distracting though, and the stars of the commercials were the toys anyhow. Plus anyone can pop onto youtube and see them uncensored at any time. Still, I miss the nightmare fuel of the kids' eyes glowing or their faces morphing or whatever. Overall, I think the set is absolutely worth the money and effort and is definately for the hardcore G1 fan. It's also exciting to consider when/if Shout! will go further to release a complete Beast Wars set and so on if this set does well. Hope this post helps for those still on the fence about whether to buy the series or not.
Meh, that much dough and I would expect a fancier box. They could have been really creative with the packaging, even their joe box is way superior. $140 we should of got more than a paper box, how about a tin or even a plastic molded box that looked like prime's trailer or the ark? Anyways why wasn't a blu ray edition offered? They could cut down the amount of disks drastically and still had superior video quality. If I'm going to drop some a sizable amount of cash I want the newest premium format.
