The Rocky Anthology (DVD, 2006, 5-Disc Set)

While these days it is pretty easy to associate Sylvester Stallone with meathead action roles thanks to the ridiculous turns the Rambo films made in the eighties and some of his subsequent meathead action movie roles that followed in their success, the glory of Rocky can never be tarnished. The first film in the series took home three Academy Awards in 1977, and Stallone himself was nominated for the Best Actor and Best Screenplay awards. What started out as a fairly low budget story about the little boxer who could turned into a pop culture icon, and Stallone is the man who deserves most of the credit for that. Rocky is his character, he's played the man in all five films to date, he wrote all five of the films, and he is associated with the character even more often than he is with John Rambo or, God forbid, Judge Dredd.

All five films are given new, high definition anamorphic widescreen transfers in their original aspect ratios of 1.85.1. Rocky III, Rocky IV and Rocky V also have alternate fullframe versions available on their respective discs as well. The colors look very nice, there's not much in the way of print damage to complain about on any of the films and aside from a very natural looking coat of grain present on the five films, the image on each disc is quite clean looking with a nice, high level of detail present from start to finish. Seeing as the previous edition of the first film was rather gritty looking, there is a noticeable improvement here for that film in particular, at least in regards to the overall quality of the image. This doesn't come without a price though, as for some reason there is some slight picture information missing on the top and bottom of the screen. While this only occurs in the first movie as far as I could tell, the fact that it happens at all is rather unusual. It's minor cropping, but it is there.

That issue aside, the first film looks a lot better here than it has on previous editions and the sequels look pretty solid as well. There is some mild edge enhancement (most noticeable on the fourth film for some odd reason), but there aren't any problems with compression artifacts at all on any of the movies. Skin tones look dead on, and the colors are nicely defined, never bleeding into each other and always looking very distinct.

Why fullframe versions are included for the later three films and not for the first two is a good question, but I wouldn't bother watching these widescreen films in fullframe versions anyway so I could quite honestly care less about that – though I know there are people who do still prefer fullframe. For those people, the three discs that do provide fullframe options do so on the other side of the DVD, and image quality on those versions is just as good as it is on the widescreen versions.

Each film comes with its respective theatrical trailer. None of the other supplements from previous releases have been carried over from previous releases (though to the best of my knowledge, the sequels have never been released with anything on the discs as far as supplements go except for trailers anyway).

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