There's good bands on the 2003 edition of the Warped Tour that made this DVD [Glassjaw, Andrew WK, Suicide Machines].

There's bad bands on the 2003 edition of the Warped Tour that made this DVD [Something Corporate, Mest, Simple Plan].

There's bands that played the 2003 edition of the Warped Tour that for whatever reason didn't make this DVD but should have [Rise Against, Brand New, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes].

And that's pretty much that. This DVD supposedly "tells the story of the 2003 Warped Tour" when in actuality it just hosts 24 performances from 24 bands. Betcha didn't see that coming. Each performance is prefaced by an interview clip or two, sometimes with the band in question, sometimes with other Warped employees. Nothing gets too in-depth with the clips, with the longest package being the one about how everyone on Warped likes to poop. Seriously.

Luckily, a number of full interviews [of which the clips were taken from] are available in the extras section. Chats with Pennywise, the Ataris, Face To Face, and more [as well as some of the athletes] are available for viewing, but the only one really worth watching is the interview with Andrew WK; it's absolutely insane and wonderful.

The performance clips are filmed better than almost every other DVD Kung Fu's put out to date, but strangely, the audio suffers on a handful of them. Tsunami Bomb and Vaux both experience bad mixing vocally, with the backup vocals almost nonexistant in the live recordings. Otherwise, both bands put on awesome performances. The majority of the DVD is filmed during the day, but the Ataris song was taken from an evening performance, so it's filmed in black and white and looks pretty awful. The band plays admirably, but it just looks like shit.

The lowlights of the DVD aren't too many, but include The Used's simply awful "performance" - I couldn't even figure out if they played a song or not, it just sounded like feedback to me. The Mad Caddies' version of "Road Rash" is completely phoned in, too; that band needs to hang it up. The coolest performance out of all the bands, though, is probably Thrice's acoustic version of "All That's Left," from when the band's drummer was injured for a few performances. It's nice to have a moment like that captured on film, and they play the song pretty well sans distortion.

So is this worth the hefty price tag it's currently being sold for? That just depends on how many of the bands you really are into. The downfall of this DVD, as with the Warped Tour itself, is that there really is something for everyone - which makes it nearly impossible to have everything for someone.

View trailer here