The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		0.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.5

The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie Review

Rhino has been on something of a tear lately with some really interesting audio Blu-ray releases (a tear which commendably looks to be continuing into the foreseeable future, at least), but this particular release may be something of an outlier in that Rhino has already released another audio Blu-ray featuring The Doors, namely The Doors: The Singles, which I reviewed way back in 2017. That said, there may be a bit of confusion since the 2017 release purported to recreate The Best of the Doors LP on its audio Blu-ray disc, and it's probably pretty obvious that this release bears the very name of The Best of the Doors, but features a completely different (and lengthier) track list. That turns out to be because there were several releases bearing the name The Best of the Doors, including in addition to the 1973 album the 2017 audio Blu-ray offered, a 1985 two CD offering that is what this audio Blu-ray offers. (Kind of hilariously, there's a third release from 2000 with the same title.)

The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The video content of this disc is simply a static menu (as seen in the screenshots). Unfortunately, this is another disc Rhino has authored the same way they did their recent Joni Mitchell: The Asylum Albums, i.e., the audio codecs cannot be toggled, meaning you have to navigate down through the tracklist to change it/them, and even more annoyingly, the album starts over once a new choice is made. I personally much prefer the authoring Rhino offers on releases of theirs like the also recent Alanis Morissette: Jagged Little Pill, which offers the choice to toggle between audio codecs via the colored buttons on your remote (toggling which does not start the album over). It's perhaps salient to note that, unlike that earlier release where I had to parse some "fine print" to see his involvement, this release proudly trumpet original engineer Bruce Botnick's involvement in these remixes.

The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Best of the Doors features Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options. This is another fantastic sounding release, though it admittedly is really not that much different from the quadraphonic versions on that "other" Best of the Doors Blu-ray release linked to above. There's still fantastic separation in both of the surround mixes, with little things like the opening rim shots in "Break on Through (to the Other Side)" clearly emanating from the front left channel, or some kind of funny "oom pah pah" ping ponging from left to right as instruments enter on the Kurt Weill cover "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)", but this is another release where to my ears there simply wasn't a huge difference between the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track and the Dolby Atmos track. Jim tends to anchored front and center throughout, with Ray Manzarek's keys often filling the front and side channels. The rear channels occasionally spring to life with instrumentation ("Hello, I Love You" is a great example), but they and the Atmos speakers may not offer so-called "24/7" 100% activity. Fidelity is excellent throughout.

The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no on disc supplements. The insert booklet contains an interesting essay (speaking of fine print, the font is tiny) by Danny Sugerman. The keepcase insert features an inner print of The Doors' logo repeated against a red background.

The Best of The Doors Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Fans of The Doors should enjoy this release even they picked up the other Best of the Doors version offered on The Singles release from years ago, not necessarily because the mixes sound that different, but because there are tunes here not included on the older release (and, frankly, vice versa). The surround mixes are excellent, even if there isn't a whale of a lot of difference between the Atmos and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks. Recommended.