Bear in the Big Blue House
is a programme for children that teaches children the general things in life
while appearing colourful and throwing in songs and dialogue between characters
that wouldn't necessarily get together in real life.
The theme for this DVD is "Happy and Healthy" and contains three episodes
from the series: "Picture of Health", "That Healing Feeling" and
"The Big Blue House Call", in which Doc Hog comes round to give the
bear and his friends a check-up. I can't remember the last time a real doctor
made housecalls for such things...
But I digress. Children will no doubt enjoy this DVD, but with just three
episodes, scant extras and a £19.99 price tag, it's not the greatest
value package around.
Doc Hog (centre) pays a visit to check everyone out.
The picture is of reasonable quality, having though been an obvious conversion
from NTSC to PAL. Shot in 4:3 fullscreen, the print is free of artifacts, but
then so it should be as it's a very recent programme.
As for the sound, it's plain Dolby Surround and is fine with the songs taking
centre stage most of the time. But then you didn't expect a DD5.1 remix for
a kids DVD.
The plain extras are 2 Sing-a-long songs, both with words on the bottom
of the screen to follow allong and Trailers for The Hoobs, Elmo in
Grouchland and
Stuart Little.
There are no chapters as such, or rather effectively one per episode.
Subtitles are noticeable by their absence and the menus are static and silent
with animated and scored parts between them.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
