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| National Lampoon | 
 enlarge | From: GIT Corp
Category: Software
List Price: $44.99
Buy New: $24.99
You Save: $20.00 (44%)
New (21) Used (2) from $24.24
Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 507
Format: Dvd-video
Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows Nt, Macintosh, Windows 2000, Windows Xp
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: 90012
Model: 90012
UPC: 791149900121
EAN: 0791149900121
ASIN: B000VPNSJY
Release Date: September 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 That's Not Sick! That's Funny!! December 14, 2007
Whatever it's flaws, this remains a fun product that is worth the price. Every issue in the entire Lampoon run. Wow! That's a lot of laughs in a format that doesn't take up tons of space or cause a fire hazard.
 Quality art and writing marred by lousy scans December 10, 2007
30 out of 30 found this review helpful
I was really excited to finally have a collection of these classic issues in their entirety.
It would have been even better if they were readable.
Some scans were cropped too tightly, and cut off text or parts of a photograph. Other scans had crummy exposure, resulting in dark photos and filled-in, unreadable reverse type. Some scans went the other direction, rendering black print as light gray. And still other scans are inexplicably blurry.
It's not just the photos and drawings that suffer, either. The scans were done at too low a resolution to capture the small type in some of the articles and ads, so you'll have a hard time reading those.
Quality control on the final scans is nonexistent. No attempt was made to correct density levels or colors on any of the scanned pages -- or even to match densities on double-page spreads. The result is an annoying mish-mash of too-light or too-dark pages with wildly varying brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color density. By what amounts to sheer luck, some of the pages look, eh, not bad.
A few of the scanned magazines had leftover bind-in ad inserts attached to them, and these inserts were inexcusably scanned as pages in and of themselves. Sheesh!
Clearly, this is a slapped-together project straight out of an automated scanning farm. It might have been better if the publisher of this compilation had outsourced the scanning of these magazines to some offshore outfit that could have hand-corrected the images as they came off the scanner. It probably would have only cost pennies per magazine to vastly improve the scan quality.
Bottom line, this collection is a great concept with a deeply flawed execution. It's a disappointment. The artwork, photography, and writing in the old National Lampoon magazines was of the highest caliber -- it's hard to find anything published today that's as sophisticated and incisive. Too bad this DVD compilation doesn't live up to that standard.
Half of a product December 7, 2007
32 out of 32 found this review helpful
National Lampoon at this point is an icon. To people of a certain age, they remember the counter-culture magazine that pushed the boundaries in every conceivable direction. For younger people, the name is associated with cheesy titillation movies. The magazine itself was usually funny, and had a bit of an underground cachet about it.
Well, they've brought it back in the form of a bunch of PDF files that take about 7 gigabytes on a DVD-ROM. It's basically every page of every issue, including (thankfully!) the ads which tended towards stereo equipment, male "protection", beer & liquor, and cigarette ads. [personally, I love the old stereo receiver ads because they had a couple that I wanted to buy, couldn't afford, and by the time I could, they didn't make them anymore!]
It works fine on a windows PC, and I'm guessing it would work fine on a Mac, provided you installed the Adobe reader.
But there are two problems. First, the scans are only fair. It looks like in some cases the magazines themselves were damaged, but even when that didn't happen, the quality is no better than you or I just scanning a magazine at home. However, what really spoils this collection is that there was no attempt to turn this into something that was searchable and indexable because each page is simply a photograph of the page with no attempt at OCR or transcription.
And while it doesn't spoil a trip down memory lane, it does make you wish they'd spent more money, asked for $10 more and given us something that would be a lot more fun.
As it is, for those who remember, it's a trip worth every penny of the $33 Amazon is asking for it. But it frustrates you because it could have been so much more.
 Very good product November 29, 2007
Very good product. Even if you are not a National Lampoon fan you will love it. PDF format makes it very easy to view.
A good way of reliving the past... November 15, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Can't add much to Kurt B.'s description of the scans - if this were fine art I'd be upset, but it's more than readable (even the Landlubber Jeans and Columbia House ads). Navigation is so-so. It's a collection of pdfs (as others have said) - no need for yet another reader program.
I've had no trouble so far accessing the scans - XP machine running some reasonably recent version of Acrobat Raeder (7x I think). I'll try it tonight on my iBook.
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