Search - Great Gig in the Sky: Album by Album Guide on DVD

A seriously flawed but still interesting set

William Merrill | San Antonio, TX United States | 01/21/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"There are many major problems with this 8-DVD documentary box about Pink Floyd's albums, but as a big fan of the group, I found enough to enjoy it myself. Still, I hesitate to recommend it, even to other Floyd fans. The bottom line is that there's a wealth of material presented here between the DVDs and the very thorough book included in the set. There are many interview excerpts, live performance snippets, background material, and critical commentary. So I encountered enough to maintain my interest throughout.

HOWEVER... The presentation itself leaves a lot to be desired. Start with the poor editing, which includes occasional songs from different eras of the band's history, out of place chronologically. Then the individual album sections aren't put together cleanly. For ex., the Dark Side of the Moon documentary bleeds over into the Wish You Were Here segment. At first I thought it was on purpose, as sort of a transition, but the first 14 minutes of the 55 minute W.Y.W.H. documentary only talks about Dark Side, and makes no real attempt to link it to the next album.

The video quality is often only fair to poor, with the principal narrator of several of the pieces appearing in a dimly lit room sitting on a sofa. They often use a framing device where large chunks of the screen are taken up with a graphic, such as an album cover, that partly obscures the interview footage, concert footage, or whatever. Very distracting! They also felt it necessary to give the credits of the original source material - in big letters right across the screen! And it does not go away!

Finally, you have the typically fawning tone of the critics, describing every recorded work by the Floyd as if it were an eternal classic of the greatest genius. I do consider some Pink Floyd albums worthy of the highest accolades, but even I found some of this a bit too much.

And there are more problems that those. But compared to some other relatively trashy collections that I've read about, such as the universally panned 3-DVD "Landmark Albums" set, this "Great Gig" set at least has some merit."