Ben 10: The Complete Collection - DVD Review

[Michael Scott]

Ben 10: The Complete Collection



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Ahhh, what I wouldn’t give to be back in 2005 again. I had just graduated college the year before, and my new bride and I (we just celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary a few days ago) were working minimum wage jobs down here in Arizona, and what better way to spend the time with our newfound freedom post school than to watch Cartoon Network. And right about that time we were introduced to Ben 10, a WB animated show that took Cartoon Network by Storm. The early 2000s was that shaky time period for animated shows, as the golden era of the 90s was coming to a close, and Anime was the new kid on the block for the United States kids. Buuuuut, alone with Batman Beyond, Static Shock and Ben 10, we still had some good 2000’s era animated shows to enjoy.

Ben 10 was probably the most under rated (in terms of general popularity, not by the fan base) as it was an original IP that didn’t leap frog off of older comic book shows like the DC and Marvel animated shows had the privilege of experiencing. But fans soon locked onto the show and realized it was something special. Spanning from 2005 till 2014, Ben 10 featured several spin off shows, several made for TV films, a live action show, a generalized reboot, AND still is seen in video game form (in one form or another) even to this day. But here lies a problem for us home video enthusiasts. To date the releases for Ben 10 have been fractured and incomplete. The original show, Alien Force and Ultimate Alien had complete DVD series released, albeit in the old school method of having volumes released at a time instead of a single series box set. But the worst problem was that Ben 10: Omniverse was left by the wayside around 2014 when the series wrapped up. They released about half of the 80 episode series on DVD, then just stopped, with a little over 40 episodes still to go. And to this day we have never seen them on home video again. Even streaming sites have let Ben 10 and it’s variants go, so there’s not a whole lot of legal ways to watch the show. So you can bet your bottom dollar that I was INSANELY excited when I saw Warner drop the press release for the entire collection a few months ago and saw on the packaging detail that it listed ALL 80 episodes

Ben 10 focuses on young Ben Tennyson (Tara Strong) gaining access to a super powered alien bracelet that allows him to turn into ten different creatures/beings. Along with the help of his grandpa Max (Paul Eiding) and cousin Gwen (Meagan Moore), young Max embarks upon the adventure of a lifetime as he uses the bracelet (known as the Omnitrix) to become the superhero every teenage boy wants to be. Naturally problems occur and the alien forces chasing the Omnitrix decide to show up, but the original show was PERFECT back in the day. As the universe grew and expanded, so did the spin offs. As Ben himself aged, the spinoff’s aged and matured as well. Alien Force, and Ultimate Alien had him traveling way past the limits of what the original show envisioned, and Ben 10: Omniverse was probably second best to the original series. It had a much darker element to the series, and felt the most well rounded of all the secondary shows in the franchise. The two films that were made later are solid takes, but ultimately, more cash grabs than anything (in my opinion. There are some rabid fans of the movies that will definitely disagree).
As I mentioned above, getting the complete series has been a tough situation over the years. You can get the original volumes of the show and the movies, but they’re fractured and varied in pricing over the years. Right now you can get everything out there for all of $200, so with this coming in a single giant collection for $70 (ish), you can bet this was going to be a solid way to FINALLY get everything, especially the incomplete Ben 10: Omniverse, which was never finished by Warner on home video. Now, here’s the good, the bad, and the REALLY ugly for this giant set.

The Good. Well, that would be that we finally get everything all together in one place. It’s a pain in the neck trying to navigate the Ben 10 canon figuring out what sets to buy, and what volumes need to go where. Here we have everything in chronological order.

The Bad. My most minor nit pick is definitely going to be the packaging. This is not something unique to this set, but a personal pet peeve of mine going back years ago when Paramount started using this packaging for their complete series TV collections. The set comes with a slip box shell that houses TWO of the giant clam shell DVD cases that we’ve seen show up for shows like Succession or Young Sheldon over the last few years. This means all of the discs are in those over lapping hubs that included actual disc stacking on single hubs as well. It’s one of my most loathed ways of housing discs as they always find a way to slip off or get scratched. Weirdly enough, this set that Warner sent me actually didn’t have a SINGLE disc off their hubs when I got it in. A miracle in and of itself as I don’t think I have received one of these sets yet without at least 1-2 discs loose in the packaging. Next on the list is going to something that we could have guessed coming. The original series (and the first season of Alien Force) are in the original 4x3 format that the show released in back in the early 2000s, even though the show later got a digital remaster that brought all the original seasons into 16x9. BUUUUUUUUT, this set doesn’t utilize those remastered seasons as every disc in this set is simply the original release DVDs simply put in one large packaging with new disc art. There are not updates, tweaks, or alterations to the pressings from 11-15 years ago. That doesn’t surprise me, but it is a disappointment as those remastered re-runs looked great in 16x9.

Now here’s the really ugly part. This is the part that broke my heart. I didn’t actually keep track of online scuttlebutt for this release when I got the set in 3 weeks ago or so. I simply got to cracking on the set and started reliving my 20s again as I chewed through the series in order. But when I got to Ben 10: Omniverse I noticed something strange. There wasn’t that many discs left in the box set to house all 80 episodes unless Warner had REALLY crammed a lot of episodes per disc in. As I started the series I realized that these were the EXACT same discs as my old Omniverse volumes I had collected a decade ago, and then it hit me. These were ALLL the same discs, which meant that Warner had simply taken all their old stock of discs, and packaged them together like this, WITHOUT pressing any new discs to complete the 40+ episodes missing from the series that was never released. I immediately started checking the forums, reddit, and some online reviews of people who had gotten it early as well, and I noticed there was some HUUUUUUUUUUUUGE backlash over this error. And there are only two reasons for this happening too. Either whomever was in charge of producing this set at Warner accidentally forgot to oversee the production of new masters and pressings for the final 40 ish episodes, or else they simply didn’t realize and/or care that the show was incomplete and just used their already created pressings to stuff everything together. I have my own suspicion on which one those options was the correct one, but its completely unsubstantiated and driven partially by my own disappointment, so I’ll simply say “oooopsie”.

According to Warner Brothers this was in error, and that a new set with full replacements is scheduled for September, so that means we can FINALLY complete Omniverse, but that also means that at this moment I can not recommend purchasing the set due to this massive oversight. Which breaks my heart as the set is otherwise very solid with some minor/moderate concerns. I have zero problem with the original aspect ratio’d seasons being included. I have some gripes with the packaging, and I kind of got a chuckle that the Ben 10 Reboot imagery was included on the cover art of this box set, while not being in the set (not a big deal, it and the live action movies were TENTATIVELY non canon as is, so it’s understandable why those weren’t included). But the exclusion of over HALF of Omniverse while advertising that this was the first time we’d get to see it complete means that we definitely need to wait for the re-release in September.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Video wise, I already knew what I was going to be getting. The original sets were middle of the line animated releases by Warner Brothers over a decade ago. Pretty much every series in the set ranges from a 3/5 to 3.5/5, and the movies the same 3/5 (including the awful 3D animation style that the second movie got). Compression issues are consistent, but never horrible. There’s some macrblocking, banding on primary colors and dark shots, and the hand drawn animation style isn’t exactly overly revealing in the detail department. On the flip side, it looks solid. Colors are bright and warm, while the hand drawn animation of the first couple of series looks great. Good old fashioned Cartoon Network and the WB cartoons. They look organize and pleasing to the eye, but the encodes are old school “we’re making for kids, so don’t put TOOO much effort into them” releases like many budget releases were back in the 2000-2010 DVD heyday.







Audio:

The same can be said of the audio as well. The series (multiple) were done for Cartoon Network, so the 2.0 Dolby Digital track replicates the low budget nature of the animated show. It does well with clean dialog and strong channel separation, but the mix is decidely thin and squashed in terms of dynamics. Everything feels fairly level matched, with no major swings in either direction. Bass is of course nearly non existent except in my mains, and well...yeah, no surrounds either lol. But overall it’s a passable audio mix that doesn’t have a whole ton wrong with it. It just isn’t going to be massively impressive.








Extras:

• Alien Archives and more!

Final Score: ​

I’m sad to say this, but I’m going to have to recommend skipping this set FOR THE MOMENT based upon the exclusion of the complete Omniverse series. Bluntly, this release feels mildly sloppy, as all of those minor quirks I listed above snowballed into what is a long litany of “what happened here”? Is it unforgivable? Of course not. Mistakes happen, especially with series that aren’t getting a hands on remaster or something. But this set is an amazing set of series that unfortunately got botched in the hubbub of everything. Luckily for us Warner has recognized the error and in the process of rectifying it as we speak (Kudos to them, they and Paramount are usually on the ball with fixing their goofs) but it means I have to say “hold off on getting this till September”, as this is a FANTASTIC series with tons of rewatch potential, but the issues outlined above require fans to not spend their coin until we get the new set out. Extras are pretty minimal, but that was how the original volumes were as well. The alien archives and the like are all facturated and spread across the entire set, with some discs having zero, while others containing all the extras for that season. As I said, these are all reprints of the original early 2000s discs, with all the menus and extras that you remember. My rating of 3 for the show itself is only a 3 instead of a 4 or 4.5 due to the fact that we're missing 43 episodes from the final series.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Tara Strong, Paul Eiding, Meagan Moore
Created by: Joe Casey, Joe Kelly
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 MPEG2
Audio: English: Dolby Digital 2.0, French, Spanish DD 2.0
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: NR
Runtime: 4340 Minutes
DVD Release Date: May 13th, 2025

Recommendation: Great Show, Frustrating Release

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