Distributed by
Sanctuary Digital Entertainment

Cert: /

Cat.no: SDE 3003 / SDE 3004

Running time: 65 / 47 minutes

Year: 2002

Pressing: 2002

Region(s): All, PAL

Chapters: 24 /

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1

Languages: English

Subtitles: None

Widescreen: 16:9

16:9-Enhanced: Yes

Macrovision: Yes

Disc Format: DVD 5 / DVD 5

Price: £15.99 each

Extras: Interviews, Band History, Album Gallery

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Director:

Martin Baker

Producer:

Stephanie Bennett

The Black Sabbath Story must be up there as one of those long-awaited DVDs since I first received the press release and placed it online almost 17 months ago, on March 30th 2001. The original release date was May 21st last year, so as to coincide with the reunion of Sabbath's original line-up at the Ozzfest in Milton Keynes just five days later. Quite why it's taken all this time to come out hasn't been explained, but I bet Sanctuary saw how well MTV's The Osbournes has been received and saw fit to bring it out of the vaults now. I have to say I'm not a fan of Ozzy's reality TV show as I just didn't find it in the least bit interesting, despite enjoying many a docusoap on the goggle box.

Told in two parts, the first covering their early days in 1970 to Ozzy's departure in 1978; and the second taking the band up to 1992, there's a fair amount of info here mixed together with full-length Black Sabbath tracks taken from a variety of sources, all of which can be watched in chronological order as the DVD alternates between music and chat, or you can elect to check out individual soundbites or tunes from the individual chapter listings for either selection.

The Black Sabbath Story makes for a reasonably interesting experience for the casual viewer as their origins are discussed, the links with the occult and their jazz and blues influences, but while there's chat from lead guitarist Tony Iommi, bass guitarist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, Disc 2 sees input from later members Ronnie James Dio, Vinnie Appice, Ian Gillan and Cozy Powell. Across both volumes, frontman Ozzy Osbourne is conspicuous by his absence which seems a rather large omission.

I think it would've been a better bet to release both discs as part of one 2-disc boxset for around £20 than to put them out separately for near-enough that price each.

The music tracks on each DVD are as follows:

Disc One: 1. NIB 2. Paranoid 3. War Pigs 4. Children of the Grave 5. Snowblind 6. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath 7. Symptom of the Universe 8. It's Alright 9. Rock N Roll Doctor 10. Never Say Die 11. Hard Road

Disc Two: 1. Die Young 2. Neon Knights 3. Trashed 4. Zero the Hero 5. No Stranger To Love 6. The Shining 7. Headless Cross 8. Feels Good to Me

All the footage on the DVDs are presented in anamorphic 16;9 widescreen, although most, if not all, appears to actually have been made in 4:3 and then zoomed in. Obviously all the archive music footage will be treated this way, but most of the interview footage looks a little unbalanced, visually, to have been shot and composed for 16:9 widescreen. The encoding isn't all it could be in some sections, such as "Henry's Blues House" in the band history extras, where the bottom half of the screen suffers from blocking which appears to shimmer across the screen. Not nice.

The sound is just as you'd expect it, although the addition of Dolby Digital 5.1 doesn't particularly benefit discs like these since the music that you've come to listen to wasn't written with such technology in mind.

The extras on both discs are similar in structure and contain an Album Gallery, further Interviews with Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, plus a Band History section which looks at various aspects of the band's existence with chat from the likes of drummer Cozy Powell, Ian Gillan and ex-manager Jim Simpson. All of the extra features count for around an extra 30 minutes of content per disc.

There are no subtitles option for English, although the menus feature some cool animation to a background of eerie thunderclaps.

FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS
OVERALL