The Film
One World is the latest of the Disney Channel movies based on the books about a tightly knit group of aspiring singer/dancers, and starring Adrienne Bailon fresh from her risqué online photo scandal. In this third outing, the trio might finally be getting their big show business break, and so they drop everything and fly to Mumbai to appear in a Bollywood movie… maybe: How can three Cheetahs fill one role? Catfights, melodrama and abundant song-and-dance numbers ensue. The mentally disposable music all feels a little Grease 2 to me, but then I haven't been a teenage girl since the late '90s. This "Extended Music Edition" includes the additional, never-before-seen sequence, "Feels Like Love."
The Picture
The movie looks to have been shot on video, entirely on location in India. Overall the image is soft, lacking in any really detail and worse, backgrounds and other portions of the 1.78:1 frame are noticeably noisy at times throughout. Surprisingly considering the choice of imagery here, colors are unspectacular, while blacks are often flat and lifeless. It beats watching the movie on DVD or standard-definition cable, but this is certainly no demo disc.
In a remarkable dose of overkill, the audio is served up in Uncompressed Linear PCM 5.1. From the first moments, the improvement over the accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 track is significant, delivering a bigger, fuller, clearer soundfield, particularly the frequent musical numbers. Beyond that, it is a reasonably well-produced TV movie, with occasional discrete sound effects. Environmental sounds are lacking, and much of the dialogue appears to have been re-recorded, so I certainly can't place this among the best discs I've heard this year. Again, this is likely the highest quality presentation of this title we are likely to come across (probably ever, as we have to wonder who will remember The Cheetah Girls ten years from now when we're onto the next format.)
The Extras
The two-and-a-half minutes of Bloopers are what we'd expect, the girls messing up their lines, in high-def. "Backstage Disney: Cheetah Spots" proffers the movie again, this time with onscreen trivia influenced by more than 50 million online fan votes. We're also given Music Videos for three of the songs: "One World," "Cheetah Love," and "Dance Me If You Can," all in standard definition. The "Rock Along With The Movie" feature puts the lyrics on screen, either for the whole movie or we can go directly to any of the nine songs. The disc is also enabled for Disney BD-Live.
Final Thoughts
While the allure of The Cheetah Girls eludes me, Disney has a knack for crafting home video editions that gives their fanbase what it wants. Kudos to The House of Mouse for doing it (mostly) in high-def, too.
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