Despicable, despicable, DE-SPI-CA-BLE! Ahhh, feeling a lot better already... (c:

Well, after all the excitement I felt since hearing that Karel Zeman films were finally to get the long overdue domestic DVD releases from newly restored masters (I might have misunderstood that last bit though), actually seeing the first of the DVDs was rather a bitter-sweet experience; it is based on a new master / new scan from "original film elements" (whatever that means - OCN?), but apparently no restoration took place at this point (a fact confirmed by a UPP employee frequenting the Zóna discussion board), so there's still quite a lot of dirt, scratches, and even missing frames on display here. (Also, during the "dino fight" sequence, the colour changes rapidly a couple of times - I'm mentioning this specifically because the only work done on the master was supposedly colour correction.)

Restoration (or lack thereof - it does cost a lot, you know) aside, there's one more problem - a st... silly one that could have been easily avoided at no extra cost - the 4:3 image is actually encoded in a 16:9 frame, i.e. there are black bars on the left & right of the image encoded as a part of the video stream; consequently, while a stand-​ard 4:3 PAL frame would use 402,786 pixels to represent the image (maintaining the 1.37:1 AR), only 320,256 pixels are in use here = a loss of 20 % of the already limited SD resolution. And of course, anybody watching this on a 4:3 TV will get to know windowboxing real good...

Still, problems or not, this is currently the best version of "Journey to Prehistory" / "Journey to the Beginning of Time" available, and - a major selling point for all Karel Zeman fans abroad - the only one subtitled in English, including the comparative wealth of extras!!

Okay, I'm back! ;-) But no worries - I'll try to make it brief:

So, how does the first ever Karel Zeman Blu-ray fare? The short answer is: It could have been better. A slightly longer one would be: What we've got here is - unexpectedly - not simply the Museum DVD only in higher resolution; the Blu, while still unrestored, shows more picture at the top and the bottom of the frame, and it's been either contrast-boosted or - a more probable scenario, IMO - something went wrong during the mastering of the now dull looking DVD (colour space conversion?). Well, more picture, better dynamic range and - despite KZM's questionable decision to squeeze the three films onto a single disc - reasonably good encode (the fact that it's 1080i is a different matter)... It could have been better, true, but - by George! - it could have been so much worse (the 16:9 enhanced DVD encodes of these Academy ratio films were already a sure sign that KZM don't really know what they're doing).

By the way, the DVD's got yet another flaw (corrected on the Blu), which I previously didn't notice - 2 seconds of footage are repeated twice @ 1h 3m 53s, and 2 seconds are then cut @ 1h 4m 32s:

Similarly to "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen," Track Media's DVD's got better contrast, and shows more picture on all sides. The colours are darker, making the Japanese release look faded, and sort of hazy in comparison (see e.g. frame 55133). On the other hand, the transfer "made in Spain" seems to be grainier (see e.g. frame 75374), but I don't mind - I like grainy! ;-)