My copy of long forgotten 1981 classic Condorman arrived in the post thirteen years ago and having popped in my PlayStation 4 earlier today, I was reminded just how dreadful a transfer it is.

Excitedly expecting to see Michael Crawford hamming it up with Oliver Reed, what I got was nothing short of utter disappointment, I couldn’t see a bloody thing. It’s the world’s worst DVD transfer, and I’ve seen more than a few dreadful transfers in my time! It’s appalling and that’s coming from a man who owned the original transfers of Casino and Blade Runner.

How could something so great have been butchered so badly?

Why couldn’t they remove this huge hunk of dirt?

It’s presented in non-anamorphic 2.35:1, so that’s approximately 240 lines of vertical resolution gone straight away. Having said all that by ten minutes in you’re glad there’s so little resolution, it helps avoid seeing all the debris that was stuck to the the print they used for the transfer.

Honestly, it looks like it was found in a bucket full of soil and razor blades. I won’t even start on the 2.0 sound track (the marketeers way of saying stereo), it’s appalling.

What is it with dire transfers like this? Look at the dirt on every single frame in this scene.

How difficult can it be to get a decent anamorphic transfer, from a relatively clean print and chuck a remixed 5.1 soundtrack on it? It’s as if Disney doesn’t care about the lesser known movies it did and just wants to churn out straight to DVD dross like The Fox And The Hound 2.

That this is the best they can do with a movie that was shot on 35mm film is hard to believe, I thought Disney had money to burn on these things. Clearly not. It’s such a bloody shame as the movie is great fun.

Given that it’s not on Disney+ yet, I can only imagine it’s because there’s a backlog of enhancements being made to The Computer That Wore Tennis Shoes.