CARL BARKS, ANKKAMEASTRO - REVIEW

Since nobody has yet reviewed the Finnish Barks interview video, I might as well get around to it.
The video was released by Finnish comic store Good Fellows around Barks' birthday. There were two editions of it, a regular edition of sixty minutes and a deluxe edition with thirty minutes of extra material and including a signed print of a Barks self-caricature, which can be seen in the logo of the Carl Barks Studio. The deluxe edition was numbered and limited to 150 copies.
In the video Barks is interviewed in his home by Bill Grandey. As the video tries to find as wide a following as possible, unfortunately most of the questions handle very "basic" kind of things - how he came to create all the characters he did, how he understands their relationships and how certain story elements came to be. Ofcourse there are many questions concerning his life, as well.
Although mostly concentrating on subjects that are already known to many fans, here they at least are from the mouth of the man himself. And I believe that at least on the level of details there something new to be found every time these same things are gone over again.
What I found most disturbing in the video was the technical quality. It seems that the guy recording the speech wasn't awake all the time, for sound is not the best possible. Although Barks speaks clearly and slowly so that his speech can be easily understood by foreigners also, the tape makes his voice blur so that the listener has to be following real carefully (well, that's ofcourse what all _real_ fans do anyways!)
Also the shooting could have been done better. Certainly, this is an _interview_ and not a documentary, so the main focus is on the man speaking, but at least I would've enjoyed seeing more of Barks' house and studio - all the paintings seen only in the background, etc. Now the camera literally sticks in it's place. Only variety comes from few family photographs shown to the camera. In fact, in the additional part of the video this comes even more irritating. The location is switched from Barks' living room (?) to his studio. In one point he reaches out of the picture to pick some drawing which he's talking about and - all but disappears from the scene! Now, a slight turn of the camera wouldn't hurt too much, would it? Also I thought maybe a bit too great deal of the extra material was devoted to one subject, when Barks spoke quite a bit about one particular painting of his (with a Wild West theme). This was ofcourse interesting, but in a general approach like this it was going a bit too much into detail with one thing. I would've much rather had Barks showing his studio a bit more.
Also featured in the film are Barks' managers who discuss about their work in the end of the extra material, and this guy-who-was- the-first-fan-to-meet-Barks-and-who-owns-a-book-store-in-Hollywood -but-whose-name-I-can't-remember in the main part of the video.

So, in summing up, I don't want to make any comment whether or not to buy this video. I personally enjoyed the Norwegian tv- documentary more, but that's just my opinion. It has to be remembered that this is the first video made by Good Fellows and maybe if they have succes with this one they will make others, which can be of better quality.
For those who are interested, the deluxe edition has already sold out (I heard that one guy from Germany bought 26 of them... just makes me wonder whether he put them _all_ into plastic bags or did he watch one of them), but the regular edition is still available both in original English and with Finnish subtitles!