The Adventures Of Elmo In Grouchland

Every childs favorite character on Sesame Street of late is undoubtedly Elmo. So it is no surprise that the Childrens Television Workshop made an adventure movie with their most lovable character.

Introducing us to the movie are Bert and Ernie. They appear throughout the movie to help guide children in understanding what is going on as some scenes might be a little difficult for some tikes to comprehend. Elmo wakes up one morning and shows us, the audience, his favorite blanket. He takes it outside for a walk and after a little misadventure in the streets, the blanket ends up inside Oscars trashcan.

Elmo can't wait for Oscar to get back with the blanket so he ventures inside to fetch his friend. In doing so, he stumbles upon a portal to another location, Grouchland, ruled by the evil Huxley (Mandy Patinkin) who takes anything he likes as his own. His next posession is Elmos blanket.

It's now up to Elmo and his new Grouchland friends to get back his favorite blanket and defeat Huxley.

There's one thing you can rely on when watching Sesame Street - you're guaranteed of having brightly colored puppets. There's one thing you can count on when watching a dvd - the bright colors will be rendered perfectly. Having trust in Columbia Tristars dvd product, I wasn't disappointed with the transfer at all and was rewarded with a very, very colorful transfer. There are some nice colors in the scene where Elmo is travelling through the worm hole to grouchland.

Detail is exceptional with nary a hair on a puppet indistinguishable and sharpness is pretty much perfect. Too bad kids aren't going to appreciate these finer details of dvd when VHS is enough for them.

In other aspects, the transfer is pretty clean with only a hint of grain seen in some of the blue screen shots. Black level is great and shadow detail is just there as it should be.

Surprisingly, for a bunch of puppets, we are treated to a clever soundtrack. From the outset as Bert and Ernie enter the screen and get the audience involved you get the impression that some effort went into making this soundtrack entertaining. The kids in the audience join in on the fun and only make their presence felt in the rears which is a nice addition.

Apart from Elmos voice and accent, dialogue was consistently clear and understandable. Touting a 5.1 soundtrack, the .1 was used in certain occasions but not too much as I assume the sound engineers thought it may scare the kids in the cinemas.

The musical score is typical Sesame Street with some nice vocal songs provided by Vanessa Williams. Overall, the soundtrack was thoroughly entertaining.

Funnily enough, this disc features just that little bit more than the other standard editions Columbia puts out.

• Dual Ratio Presentation - First up we have both the pan and scan and anamorphic widescreen versions on one side that are selectable via a menu ala A Bug's Life.
• Feature Introduction - This is a very short introduction from Elmo and Bug for the movie. It is added as an extra and would have been better suited to play right before the movie itself.
• Making of Featurette - Your typical promotional pack with interviews of the key cast who treat the audience like kids. I don't recall any kids I know flicking through the extras on a dvd. :)
• Animated Menus - These menus have animated transitions that should keep the kids happy while you fiddle around to get the movie started.
• Theatrical Trailer & Previews of upcoming dvds - We are presented with the original theatrical trailer for Elmos adventures and we are also presented with 5 more trailers for other movies including Matilda, Madeline, Fly Away Home, Muppets from Space and Stuart Little. These are touted as coming to dvd so can we expect to see Muppets and Stuart this year? The Muppets trailer is presented in 5.1 and was a nice surprise.

A fine collection of extras for a childrens movie. I particularly like the heap of trailers included and would like to see more trailers on other discs too.

Reviewing such a movie as an adult is pretty hard, we're not expected to like it, but when you've got family and friends with kids themselves you know what they like and this is a fine example of what kids will enjoy seeing over and over again, especially with the cast talking to the audience and getting their involvement.