The Movie: About two years ago I met Peter Fonda at a party. He was pumping a keg of Guinness and happily obliged any cute girls who would listen with exciting stories from his past. At the time, I hadn't ever seen any of his movies, but he seemed to be a cool enough guy. Anyway, that's why I wanted to review this DVD -- because I'd met "Captain America".

Easy Rider is the story of two hippies (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) who make it rich on a huge drug score, and decide to use some of that money to buy some chopped Harleys and ride cross country from Los Angeles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras -- sort of a dream for Dennis Hopper's character. They set off looking for freedom in America, stopping off in random places and meeting random people. But instead of freedom in America, they only find intolerance and bigotry. Oh yeah, along the way they pick up Jack Nicholson and he tags along with them for a while. After a number of setbacks, they finally make it to Mardi Gras and have a pretty good time culminating in a disturbing acid trip.

The soundtrack to this movie has more songs about marijuana than a Snoop Doggy Dogg record, but they do seem to fit the motorcycle/drug/sex theme pretty well.

To be honest, I don't think I will ever be able to fully appreciate this movie -- it's before my time. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to completely understand the social circumstances under which this movie was made. So while I can definitely appreciate the beautiful photography and bad-ass motorcycles, I think I am only really able to understand the major themes of this movie on a very superficial level. But everything I've heard about this movie suggests it was revolutionary for its time.

The DVD: This is the 30th Anniversary Edition DVD, and it features an anamorphic widescreen transfer that seems to do a good job of reproducing exactly what is on the film. Unfortunately, the film is 30 years old and has a lot of grain, dirt, dust and scratches on it, and definitely more in some parts than others. I do realize that much of the New Orleans section of this movie was shot on 16mm (and thus are even grainier), even in the 35mm part of the movie there are some shots that are incredibly dirty. The image is quite sharp, however, and the color is surprisingly bold for such an old film.

The audio has been remixed into a 5.1 surround mix, but the remixing seems to apply mostly to the music and the surround channels were only noticeably used once in the airport scene near the beginning of the movie. Other than that, this movie is pretty much in mono for 95% of the time. Overall sound quality is about what you'd expect from a movie of this age.

As far as special features are concerned, you'll find an audio commentary track by Dennis Hopper (who not only starred in this movie, but directed and co-wrote it as well), a new making-of documentary, and text filmographies.

Overall, I'd say the quality of this DVD is pretty good considering that (as far as I know) this wasn't a full film restoration or anything.