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The events themselves were often inspiring, but this high-def release doesn't quite do them justice....
Vivendi / 250 Minutes / 2012 / Unrated / Street Date: September 18, 2012
As a reminder of these latest Olympic games, this new Blu-ray Disc totally serves its purpose: over the course of a couple hours, we hit hints and recaps of all the events and participants we loved this past summer. Passing by in head-spinning rapidity, this Games of the XXX Olympiad disc basically strives to showcase the whole shebang in four hours, taking away the copious advertising and nail-biting cliff-hangers that kept viewers around the world glued to the tube for a couple weeks.
But this puts Games of the XXX Olympiad is a strange and often unfulfilling conundrum. It's by no means in-depth enough to offer comprehensive investigation of the myriad of match-ups these games hosted, and even as a cursory best-of compilation, it feels rushed and skin-deep. Where our personal DVRs filled up this summer with the programming we were most excited for - "More swimming!", said this writer - this celebratory high-def release never feels all that user-friendly. It's got many of the goods, of course, but it doesn't feel like mandatory entertainment.
Alas, as was the case in Olympics past, occasional news-time bulletpoint refreshers and halcyon memories of evocative television-watching will prove to be more valuable than this Games of the XXX Olympiad Blu-ray. It's wonderful to see these athletes really give it their all here, but the programming here neither thinks big nor small enough to truly legitimize its presence. And that stupid NBC logo appears everywhere (more on that later...).