While a total stranger to the Black Adder corpus can appreciate it, a lot of this lovely little poison valentine's fun comes from being familiar with the setup and the characters so that one can ALMOST predict the next line or situation... and then being delighted when the writers and cast give it some twist you hadn't predicted.
I must agree with another reviewer that the return to the court of Elizabeth I really doesn't work; it does indeed seem forced as if the actors no longer inhabit the characters, but rather are pretending to be their younger selves inhabiting the characters. (Does that make sense?)
On the other hand, one of the funniest sequences in the production is in the Elizabethean time frame but without any of the series regulars save Blackadder himself, meeting up with Shakespeare, getting his autograph and then... Well, it's Very Funny. Even funnier if you thought Branagh's uncut "Hamlet" was a touch long.
The Waterloo sequence is lovely, with a neat little "Wizard of Oz" reference.
And, of course, the ending(s) -- particularly the end ending, as it were -- an absolute delight for the Black Adder fan, with, of course, an appropriate version of the theme song vocal for the end credits.
The "extras" on the disc, though a bit sparse, are appreciated, including a short "making of" documentary piece, with the writer-directors and actors all expressing themselves with wonderful clarity, and also including a couple of bits that were (mostly for the better, i think, funny as they are) edited out of the episode.
Also under the "Special Features" menu are cast biographies, recited, in character, by "Baldrick". Unfortunately (and i don't know if it's a defect in the disc, itself, or in my APEX DVD player with the hacked firmware, or a combination), after the first few bios have played, the last few syllables or words of each bio were cut off as it skipped to the next. (Upon further experimentation with other discs, it appears to be a problem with the way the APEX plays mp3 files.) |
