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Storm Hawks: Tales From the Atmos
Storm Hawks is one of those half-hour animated shows that combines kid-violence with some touches of postmodern humor for the adults. It airs on the Cartoon Network. Sony Home Entertainment has released the first ten episodes of this series on two separate DVDs. Episodes one through five were contained on Storm Hawks: Hawks Rise Again which I reviewed for DVD Talk last week.
Storm Hawks: Tales from the Atmos collects episodes six through ten. The major characters of the show continue to be a diverse group of teenagers who protect the make-believe world of Atmos - with a thousand mountain-top kingdoms - from evildoers. You've got Aerrow, the hip leader of the Storm Hawks; Finn, a wise-cracking blond-haired foil for Aerrow; Junko, a talking rhino strong guy; Piper, the supersmart girl; Stork, a morose green-skinned guy; and Radarr, a weird bunny rabbit thing who doesn't speak and serves as Aerrow's comic relief co-pilot. Together, they serve as the Storm Hawks Squadron. They travel around in fast-movin' and cool-lookin' tech and sport energy weapons reminiscent of lightsabers.
The episodes in this set are . . .
Best Friends Forever: Piper befriends a girl named Lark after the young girl saves her life, but Lark isn't who she seems to be.
The Black Gorge: The Squadron crash onto the Black Gorge and must face the denizens of creatures that populate it.
Absolute Power: Aerrow and Radarr go off on a mission, leaving Finn in charge of The Squadron.
Velocity: Finn wagers on Aerrow's performance in a race very similar to the one in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Fire and Ice: The Squadron find themselves in the middle of a conflict between the Winter Games-lovin' Absolute Zeros and heat-lovin' Lizards in an artificially winterized landscape.
As with the previous Storm Hawks DVD, the computer animation looks very nice and detailed for a television series, and the humor is occasionally funny.
The menu provides two options for playing through the episodes: a Play All Episodes option obviously does what it says it does while an Episode Selections option allows the viewer to select an episode.
This show is moderately entertaining and continues to strike me as something I would have liked when I was in elementary / middle school. The show is best in small doses, though, as the action grows tiresome when viewed episode after episode straight through.
The DVD
Video:
This DVD sports an anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen presentation. The colors look very bright and details are clear. The animation - while not earth-shatteringly great - is fun to watch on this disc.
Sound: All five episodes are presented in Dolby Digital 2.0. It's a solid sound presentation, with dialogue, music, and sound effects well-mixed. This track is the only audio option. Subtitles are available in English and Spanish. Extras: The extras discussed in the next two paragraphs are identical to those of the concurrently released first volume of Storm Hawks. Surprisingly, this includes the bonus comic book; Storm Hawks fans who buy both releases will be stuck with a duplicate comic book. When the disc is played, trailers automatically begin for The Spectacular Spider-man: The Animated Series, The Prince and the Pauper, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The Final Season, Daddy Day Camp, and Roxy Hunter and the Mystery of the Moody Ghost. A Previews option in the menu system give access to those trailers and these additional ones: Are We Done Yet?, Surf's Up!, and The Last Day of Summer & Shredderman Rules!. This DVD comes packaged with a Storm Hawks: The Escape comic book written by Asaph Fipke (the creator of the series) with art by Andy Poon. At six pages, this mini-comic seems like something you'd find in the Sunday section of the comics. Usually when a DVD comes with a bonus comic book, it's placed inside the DVD case where the inside booklet would normally go. Here, however, it's glued to the back of the case and you have to carefully peel it off the case and then remove the drops of glue from the comic's back cover. The only Storm Hawks-specific special feature is The Cyclonians: a collection of scenes featuring the bad guys of the series. It runs just over a minute long and is a complete waste of time. Sony continues to disappoint with the extras on this series. This DVD is basically a collection of five Storm Hawks episodes. The fifth episode, Fire and Ice, is billed as a bonus episode, which seems a little silly, especially considering it was, indeed, the episode which followed Velocity in its original airing. I wouldn't consider it an extra. Final Thoughts: My final thoughts on this DVD are nearly identical to my thoughts on its predecessor, released on the same date. I'll paste my comments in the next paragraph from that review. People new to the series should check out Storm Hawks: Hawks Rise Again before checking out this disc. Storm Hawks is an amusing kids show seen on the Cartoon Network. It has some nice moments of humor and it's action-packed to keep one's attention. Watching all five episodes on this disc in a row, though, gets repetitive. I'll go with a Recommended on this one even though I have two major complaints. There's a lack of significant extras, for one thing. And, considering the trend to release series in season sets, why is Sony releasing this show piecemeal on separate DVD titles? ---------
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