New to Blu: November 23-29

Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom is a ‘toon to swoon over on Blu-ray.

“It is clearly a reference picture, and contains the depth of colour and lighting associated with Toy Story 3 or How to Train Your Dragon, putting it above its illustrious forbearer.”

AVForums ranked the video 10/10, the audio, 9/10, and the comprehensive extras, which include both audio and picture-in-picture commentaries, 8/10.

Bad Teacher earned higher marks for its HD specs than its content.

“The palette displays lots of vibrant, richly-saturated primaries while secondary hues are equally bold and full of life, adding a great deal of warmth to the comedy.”

“Bad Teacher features a fairly standard comedy mix, but the outlying channels do engage occasionally for mild sound effect placement.

“Bad Teacher is almost always on talky side, but the ambience in the sound design helps create fairly natural sounding sonic environments.”

The week’s other big releases are documentaries: George Harrison: Living in the Material World and Human Planet.

Prime broadcast Human Planet in SD so this is your first chance to see it in HD.

“You know what to expect from the picture quality of these shows. I could talk all day about how you can make out freckles and individual bird feathers, or each grain of sand in a dune, but I’d just be stringing together a bunch of adjectives to state something that’s already a given.”

George Harrison is one of four music/concert releases: the others are Ozzy Osbourne: God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, Slash: Made in Stoke 24/07/11 and Aphrodite Les Folies: Live in London.

The week’s also notable for The Guns of Navarone’s release in HD, along with three box set collections from Universal Pictures — Ultimate Gangster, Hannibal Lector, Coen Brothers – and the Hellraiser movies.

Of less interest are The Puppet Masters and Air Buddies while leading the direct-to-disc slate are Cane Toads: The Conquest (3D), The Eagle, Soul Surfer, Country Strong and Sinatra Club.