League Of Their Own, A - Collector's Edition

When the second world war came around, alot of the major league baseball players went off to fight and left nothing behind that would even be considered a skeleton league at that. An idea by a confectionary tycoon was to promote a female baseball league in place of the male league to at least keep the turnstyles rotating and the cash flowing.

It is with this true story that a League of Their Own is based upon. Sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty) have been scouted by talent scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz). But it is only Dottie that he is after as Kit seems to believe that she will never move out of her older, taller, more beautiful and talented sisters shadow. As fate would have it, both are invited to try out for the league and we soon meet the rest of this ensemble cast featuring Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell and Tom Hanks.

Only a handful of teams are formed and they are in need of a manager with Jimmy Dugan (Hanks) looking after our team of stars. Being the drunk that he is, there isn't a game that he isn't pass out at which almost relegates his role to something even less of a supporting one.

Even though we follow these women through to the world series finals, it's the sub-plots (or main plots even) that really bring the emotion to this film with Kit forever battling to prove herself against her sister and the woman coming to terms with their husbands at war to the commercialisation of the sport, even as far back as 1943.

The presentation on this disc is pretty damn good. While not of reference standard, this effort does prove that movies made in the early 90's can provide and do deserve a very decent transfer.

The 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer is rendered sharply providing an abundance of detail in both foreground and background. At times, the increased sharpness bleeds over into aliasing problems where some stadium seating exhibits the usual shimmering.

Colors are rendered beautifully but there seems to be an inconsistency in the saturation at times. When the girls first step out onto the stadium where the try outs are being held, the grass looks vibrantly green but the very next scene, an alternate angle, the green becomes darker and dull.

The other problem with the transfer is the ordinary black levels that almost seem to be a dark greyish-blue. A bit of research reveals that this is due to a positive film print being used in the telecine process which does provide brilliant whites but not that great blacks.

This is another quad surround presentation from columbia. Basically, it's a 4.0 channel soundtrack that contains left, center, right and mono surrounds encoded into the bitstream. All that is missing from a possible 5.1 soundtrack is the split surrounds and the addition of the LFE channel.

Despite the discrete soundtrack, the feel of the audio is closer to a mono soundtrack than anything else. There is no real channel separation across the front hemisphere other than when the musical score comes to the fore and this is when the surrounds become active too.

In many crowd scenes, there is a decent amount of rear (mono) activity which is considerably more active than what could have been provided via a 2 channel pro-logic matrix encoding.

There are a fair few extras included on this Collector's Edition that should keep fans of the movie happy.

• Featurette - This is your usual behind the scenes feature the studio uses to promote the movie. I'm starting to wonder if these are thrown in because nothing else can be found.
• Music Video - This Used To Be My Playground by Madonna. A full frame video clip of decent quality.
• Documentary - A League Of Their Own - This 27 minute documentary is a look at the real stars of the movie, those girls who played in that short-lived Female Baseball League. The movie was inspired by this doco and it's nice to see how true the movie was, although it altered many of the names of those involved for whatever reasons, most likely commercial.
• Theatrical Trailers - Another whole swag of trailers on this dvd that include A League Of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle and Stuart Little. Don't fret, I don't think Columbia are going toward the rental style of placing these collection of trailers before the main feature.
• Cast & Crew Biographies - standard look at the main folk involved with the movie.

Having not sat through this movie all the way through before, I was dreading that previous reasons of why would arise and halt me from sitting through it again. Alas, there was no real reason and I thoroughly enjoyed this tale which provides some great highs and lows and is at times a moving story.

It's not for everyone but it does deserve a rental at least.