Rhino Entertainment
Kid Rhino is the children's entertainment division of Rhino Entertainment, an American record and home video label. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rhino held the North American video rights to The Transformers: The Movie and the Generation 1 cartoon, eventually releasing the first-ever DVDs of both and reissuing the former's soundtrack album on CD. Rhino likewise issued full DVD boxed-sets for Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Armada.
In 2003, Rhino remastered the Generation 1 cartoon series for release on DVD, to subsequent controversy. As the original broadcast masters (the tapes used for broadcast) had degraded to an unacceptable level of visual quality over the years, Rhino opted to use pre-broadcast masters that had far superior clarity and picture quality. Unfortunately, as these pre-broadcast tapes used unfinished animation, the episodes included on Rhino's DVDs suffered from animation errors, missing special effects and colouring mistakes that did not occur in the original 1980s broadcasts.
Additionally, Rhino contracted post-production studio Magno Sound & Video to remaster the monaural soundtrack to a 5.1 surround soundtrack worthy of a DVD release. Unfortunately, Magno's engineers added in some 30 tracks of new sound effects to this new soundtrack<sup id="cite_ref-0" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-0" title="">[1]</a></sup>, and once again Rhino's DVDs introduced new elements that were largely seen as undesirable. Rhino representatives rather disingenuously attempted to claim that these sound effects were there all along and that fans had simply been unable to hear them before, despite evidence to the contrary. <sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-1" title="">[2]</a></sup>
The new sounds include abnormally loud and glossy stock sound effects for lasers, explosions, and swooping jets layered across numerous scenes. The show's commercial bumpers were also altered, with motor, laser, and transforming sound effects added where there had originally been only music and Victor Caroli's voice.
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References
<ol class="references"><li id="cite_note-0">[#cite_ref-0" title="">↑</a> <a href="http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HNN/is_10_18/ai_110073878/pg_1 BNet article from October 2003 "'Transforming' mono cartoons into multichannel DVDs"] <li id="cite_note-1">[#cite_ref-1" title="">↑</a> <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/alt.toys.transformers/msg/a614b114805c5209 Transformer fan Zobovor explains on ATT how the new sound effects include noises that didn't exist in 1985.]</ol>
External links
- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_Entertainment" class="extiw" title="wikipedia:Rhino_Entertainment">Rhino Entertainment</a> at Wikipedia
- Official homepage
