(just be thankful this isn’t the movie where the stooges met the princess)
At the end of the introductory post, I mentioned my first DVD was a box set that my mother gave me. Originally intended as a birthday present, but the course of history was changed because I had a bad day at school and she felt horrible for me. So here’s the one that started it all:
Released by Goodtimes (not the TV show), the DVD set is actually not much more than a 5-VHS release from a year or so before. About the only thing missing is the cartoons, which can be easily found in the public domain, or right here.
There are four discs in total, with five different programs headlining the fray.
Discs one and two, entitled “Kings of Laughter” and “Lost Comedy Treasures” respectively, summarize rare Stooge footage that wasn’t widely available up until that point. Long before YouTube, there were only tape traders and bootleggers to find the mischievous antics of the Stooges, whether it was a rare TV appearance or the home movie.
Disc three is “Simply Hilarious”, or what I like to call, “The Same Four Shorts EVERYONE Sees and NOTHING ELSE.” I think we all know the shorts, and I’m not cheating by looking at the box. They’re “Disorder in the Court”, “Sing a Song of Six Pants”, “Brideless Groom”, and “Malice in the Palace”. Although Curly was the most popular Stooge, Shemp is the third stooge in three of the shorts. ‘Disorder’ is a high quality effort, right down to the swing bit. The other three aren’t too far behind, but quite frankly, its shows Shemp’s slight shortcomings as a physical comic that his younger brother Jerome embraced so well.
Disc four are two features that were rarely seen up until this point too. One was “Swing Parade of 1946”, which features the Stooges in a bit role as dishwashers. Sure they’re themselves, but not the stars up and center in the feature. As a matter of fact, it’s not called a “Swing Parade” for nothing, as the Louis Jordan and Will Osborne orchestras really turn up the heat! Accompanying this is a TV pilot called “Jerks of All Trades”. Filmed in kinescope, and in front of a live audience, the bumbling disaster of a show was shot all in one take, and was declared such a disaster that the original footage wasn’t revealed to the world until the 1990s!
I would also like to point your attention to one more slight detail: the DVD’s, although low-quality discs from early in the 2000’s, actually have inserts to identify the chapters!
All right, now that the PD portion is over, let’s get to the good stuff!
Sony/Columbia listened to the fans back in 2007, and thus began a series of painstaking restoration projects on all 190 shorts starting from 1934 and ending 1959.
The first seven volumes would hold two discs apiece, while the last volume (which was all the Joe ones) had three. All shorts were restored, remastered in high definition, and look about as crystal clear as one can be.
Right now, as of this writing, I only have the first four volumes. Like the two up above, and volumes 3 & 4.
All four of these volumes were amongst the last DVD’s I purchased back in my old hometown back in 2009. With Amazon coupons, they were little more than $11 apiece. Better yet, since it was from Amazon, I ordered them one morning and arrived the next morning! It was a ‘Prime’ perk to be sure.
The layout of the volumes are simple. There is a sturdy cardboard outside to hold the slimpack cases inside.
All of the sets, even the last one with the worst Joe efforts imaginable, are well worth the coin. It shows the remarkable job by the restorations crews, and unless they’re given the okay to Blu-ray, there’s nothing going to top them any time soon. You can purchase those discs right here.
If the Stooges started it all for me, then another movie started it all for another company.
That would be the unparalleled effort of Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.
Surprisingly, the original DVD release of ‘Dwarfs’ was the second DVD I had ever owned. Reading about the restoration and special features, my 12-year-old self mustered all the allowance/Christmas money I had, and purchased that bad boy.
The DVD is so “aged” that the booklet literally flaps open to about four different sub-pages.
Look at that. And now look at the booklet given in the Blu-ray from two years ago:
That’s definitely not the only difference you’ll see. In the original picture, the 2001 Platinum DVD was a thick case while the 2009 BD/DVD case was a regulation-sized DVD fixture (that this blogger prefers). Now let’s open up:
As you can see, the first disc is on one “page” while the second disc is on “page” two. Both discs are held in so tight with the hubs that the first time I attempted to get them out, I needed help because I thought I was going to break them! Seriously, only one DVD has worse hubs than these, and it’s the “Boyhood Dream” Shawn Michaels WWE DVD released back in 2004. Seriously, they’re that non-user-friendly.
Now let’s see 2009’s Diamond interpretation:
It’s quite a warped concept, and I’ll tell you why.
The receipt aside (which says I bought that disc for a shade under $11 with tax), the booklets are all sized to be fit inside a Blu-ray case, and thus are half the size of a traditional DVD booklet. For someone who was used for DVD-sized info packets, this was quite the shock. Still readable, but very much an adjustment over the status quo. From the discs, there is a flap which has the DVD, and then the first Blu-ray disc. The second BD is on its own side, with a much easier hub to get out of.
Also I will note both releases had slip covers. The original 2001 slipcover was lost long ago, while 2009 is still there and fits like a glove.
When it comes to picture, it makes perfect sense that the 2009 release is a better-looking and sounding version than the 2001, which was great in its own time, and an improvement over the 1994 restoration.
CONFUSED YET?
I’m not joking that they restored the film 3 different times in that short of a span. With new technologies at the helm using different “crap” removal, I have a feeling they’ll be a new release in 2014 with Snow White looking as white as white can be.
Special features are in great quantity/quality too, as both used revolutionary animation-based menus. The 2001 DVD was great in the fact that if you left the room to do something, the mirror on the wall would get VERY MAD at you. I wonder if this influenced “Weird Al” to do the same thing in UHF the year later, a DVD I will cover very soon.
To wrap up this first “recollection”, if you will, it really brought the olden times back. Lots of good ol’ fashioned fun, violence, mayhem, and Angela Lansbury. Looking at the DVD’s reviewed here, it’s quite a shock how far the technology has come, where restorations make 70 year old products feel brand new, and even better than stuff coming out now. As a first blast, I hope you all enjoyed it and come back for round two!
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