How Not to Make a Music Video DVD: Arsenal of Megadeth
I love Megadeth. They are my favorite band, and I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 Megadeth CDs. (Live bootlegs, singles, official releases, official re-releases, etc...) I've seen them eight times and met them once. The one thing in their catalog that was missing was a comprehensive DVD of their music videos. The call was finally answered with the 2-Disc DVD release: "The Arsenal of Megadeth." Unfortunately, this DVD fails to deliver in the sound and video department. Somehow a DVD that had years to be prepared comes across as a rush job.The Good:
- A near comprehensive video list.
- Many rare and never seen before concert and TV clips.
- Some watchable quality videos towards the end of Disc 2.
There is no middle of the road here...
The Ugly:
In terms of content, I have basically no complaint. A couple videos are missing, but most are there. (Not counting the non-Capitol videos, that's a rights issue.) However, there are some major issues with this release:
- Video quality. This can only be described as grainy at best. I'm talking about the official music videos. I'd rate most of the first disc videos on par with an old VHS tape. The newer material looks better, but still lacks. Bootleg footage and old interviews are going to look crappy and I'm not counting those.
- Sound Quality. The sound quality may be even worse than the video quality. The proof that most of these videos were just carted over from VHS is when a sound mistake that appears on the Rusted Pieces VHS at the end of the song "Hangar 18" appears in the exact same spot of the song on the DVD. Also, there is a lot of cracking and volume varies from one track to the next.
- Censorship. Just about any word that could be slightly considered offensive is blanked out. (This also blanks out any music that may be playing too.) Words that are fairly pedestrian by today's standards, and weren't censored on their official VHS releases from 15 years ago, are removed.
- Real offensive terms like "bitch" are excluded. I was almost surprised that the word "Hell" wasn't censored from the song "Go to Hell."
- The phrase, "This about how many times I tried to kill myself, but just couldn't get the fucking job done..." is cut out from the beginning of "Skin of My Teeth." Then the live footage is intercut with footage of different ways to kill yourself. Why not censor all of it?
- Also, the song "Holy Wars" has had any of it's "controversial" war footage removed and replaced with bland nonsense. This takes a video with a visceral impact and makes it just another video.