Cheap Queen - Greatest Video Hits 2 (DVD) Price

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Customer Reviews of Queen - Greatest Video Hits 2

Disc 1
1. A Kind of Magic
2. I Want It All
3. Radio Ga Ga
4. I Want To Break Free
5. Breakthru
6. Under Pressure
7. Scandal
8. Who Wants To Live Forever
9. The Miracle
10. It's A Hard Life
11. The Invisible Man
12. Las Palabras De Amor
13. Friends Will Be Friends
14. Body Language
15. Hammer To Fall
16. Princes Of The Universe
17. One Vision

All in DTS 5.1 Surround Sound & PCM Stereo Mixes and in widescreen.
Audio Commentary by the band

Disk 2
Hot Space Section
Bonus Videos :
"Back Chat"
"Calling All Girls"
"Staying Power" Live from Milton Keynes '82

The Works Section
Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival
The Works Interviews
Freddie Mercury Interview

A Kind Of Magic Section
Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival
The Magic Interviews
One Vision Documentary
"Extended Vision" video

The Miracle Section
The Miracle Interviews
Making the Miracle Videos Documentary
Making The Miracle Album Cover
Bonus Video : "Who Wants To Live Forever" - for the Bone Marrow Donor Appeal

The videos off the "Innuendo" album (and beyond) will be on "Greatest Video Hits 3" DVD, due sometime late 2004.

Greatest Video Compilation Ever
What can I say? Queen's latest installment of The DVD Collection - Greatest Video Hits 2 - is spectacular. Not only does feature hits but it features misses as well. Many of the videos presented here were previously available on Greatest Flix II and some were never available in the US, particularly It's A Hard Life, Friends Will Be Friends, Breakthru, The Invisible Man, and Scandal. Also, the bonus videos on disc 2 were never released in any format whatsoever. This is truely a real treat for Queen fans everywhere. Everything about this release is just right. You can't expect anything better than this. Although, there is one big disappointment. Queen's Montreux Golden Pop Festivals of 1984 and 1986 could have been much better if they were not lip-synched by the band. It's so relevant that Freddie is seen lip-synching his own music considering he was one of the greatest showmen in pop history. Overall, this is one DVD worth buying. It's absolutely great and I can't wait for Video Hits 3 to be released. I'm sure it will be even greater than the previous two.

Parts excellent; song selection cynical; extras flakey
Most people will have seen and loved much of what's on it: Queen's video output through the 1980s was of course hilarious (though some cuts - such as Invisible Man and especially the Hot Space material - have dated horribly). With the exception of anything from the Innuendo material, pretty much everything Queen released on video in the period is here. Since you'll mostly know what you're getting I have focussed on some more questionable aspects of the package:

EMI, bless them, seem to have divided Queen's oeuvre up into three periods: the seventies, the eighties and the nineties (in Queen's case, all one year of it!).

Actually there are really only two periods: The "early" era (1972's "Queen I" to 1980's "Hot Space") and "late" era (1984's "The Works" through to 1991's swansong "Innuendo"). Between the simply awful Hot Space and the far superior The Works, the band, which had fallen apart during the making of Hot Space (check out the fun they were having together in "Las Palabras De Amor" if you don't believe me), thought very hard about splitting and, I think, returned only upon the realisation that solo careers weren't going to reap the creative or financial rewards that toughing it together out might. This turned out to be a very good call.

Also, Roger Taylor's drums sounded a million times better in the early era than in the late era, but perhaps that's just me.

So this collection ought to cover the "late" era entirely, rather like the Greatest Hits 2 Compact Disc does. It doesn't. It includes three videos from the Hot Space album, (especially curious given how execrably bad two of them are, and the fact that the other (Under Pressure) isn't a Queen video at all, but some file footage of buildings exploding and cars crashing hastily tacked together with extracts from FW Murnau's 1922 vampire movie Nosferatu. Yes, quite ... go figure!

Nor is there any material from Innuendo. But, hey, look at it from EMI's perspective: Something watchable has to go in the Greatest Video Hits 3 package, after all - they won't shift too many units if the best it has to offer is material from the post-mortem stinker "Made In Heaven", will they? There shouldn't even be a Greatest Video Hits 3, of course, just like there shouldn't have been a Greatest Hits 3. That's not how The Man sees it, though.

The last odd thing is that the "extras" DVD is pretty much full of rubbish. Uninteresting interviews and footage of Queen's several "performances" at the Montreux Pop Festival during the 1980s, which were actually (and painfully obviously) mimed to a backing track. Totally inessential viewing. It's not like there isn't great live footage from the period, unavailable elsewhere, which could have been included (the Live Aid set leaps to mind - perhaps EMI wasn't interested in a slice of its profits going to charity?). And I've seen plenty of better interviews than the ones included on the disc. Fundamentally, the second disc exists only to inflate the price of the package.

So the upshot is, the good is very good, but the package suffers a lot from decisions made from a purely commercial perspective. Bad, BAD EMI!

Olly Buxton