A barebones release with so-so picture quality. Fans of Juzo Itami's "ramen Western" are better off importing the R2.

Fox Lorbor is a company not known for its high standard of quality. Their DVD releases of Ran and In the Realm of the Senses feature two of the worst transfers to be found on any DVD. In the case of Tampopo, the video presentation is far better those two awful releases, but still leaves a lot to be desired. It's pretty soft and not very detailed, looking more like a laserdisc than a DVD. I also noted one instance in which a scene goes bright for a few seconds before returning to normal, but I’m not quite sure it’s a fault of a transfer or was an intentional part of the film. The image is also very slightly window-boxed.

The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and is not anamorphically enhanced

The audio is okay. Nothing too spectacular about it, but nothing really bad about it either. It's perfectly serviceable, if unremarkable.

The DVD comes with removable (a real rarity for a Fox Lorbor DVD) English subtitles.

None. Zilch. Zippo. Goose egg. All you get is filmographies of Nobuko Miyamoto, Tsutomu Yamamoto and Juzo Itami. These filmographies look terrible and don't even include short bios of Miyamoto, Yamamoto and Itami.

To anybody who either enjoys this film but doesn't own it on DVD or wants to see this film, I recommend you skip this DVD and track down the Japanese R2, which not only has far better special features and picture quality but is English subtitled as well.