Post
by moviepas » Thu Oct 28, 2010 2:31 am
RKO titles were overpriced & not too good VHS in Australia originally at $30 but later were $5 or less(bit like the legal USA Turner Laserdiscs which went to $5 each but I had to pay an average $30 for those discs from a local importer who landed in court for selling laserdiscs & later his store was burnt which I never heard any reason of who or why but he was not a nice man. There seems to be no one with street rights to the material in Australia but our local government TV network(ABC) has run & run & run these titles & RANK material.
Not sure of the deal but in the UK it is Universal who handle the stuff, initially, & they often released titles the same time as WB in USA like Citizen Kane & King King but in Kong's case they made it a box set with other films like Son of & the colorized Kong that had been on Laserdisc(mine was buckled when I got it along with a few others & never did get them replaced or refunded. kept the covers, though, when I had to return the discs for what never happened.
In the past month or so another UK firm has started releasing these RKO titles like The Fallen Sparrow, The Boy With Green Hair & the elusive UK-made RKO release, The Suicide Squadron aka Dangerous Moonlight with the famed Richard Addinsell Warsaw Concerto(written for the film) & starring Anton Walbrook who was also in the original(UK-made) Gaslight(Murder in Thornton Square). This I have in a reasonable transfer but I had never been able to find until this release. The firm is Odeon Entertainment who along with Renown Pictures(an old name in films who released the 1951 Scrooge & the UK release of Australia's The Rats of Tobruk(1941)) have issued of lot of hard to find British films & some once 'lost' titles. Some of these are shorter c60mins screen fillers & have been given two a disc treatment in those cases. The BFI is releasing a lot of other somewhat obscure British films in Blu Ray & DVD duo sets at a good price for Britian. There are Criterion style booklets with the BFI releases & often a thick catalogue.
I had heard that WB had been thinking about, or at least told someone who phoned them, releasing some here but nothing happened. In the UK some titles have appeared in normal replicated editions.
Amazon have recently had a few titles & the Ripley's Believe It or Not set at good prices but their earlier entry of a couple of titles priced the discs around $30 & DD had the best price but some titles are just not gettng there like the Ripley's & no end of e-mails gets any answers. MoviesUnlimited are much higher & buying thru TCM which goes to MU is the cheapest way to use them & they recently lowered their delivery rates for oversea as had Amazon. MU also have the exclusives TCM titles & box sets, usually Universal/Paramount pre-1948. I am having my own fight with DD over their e-mails cancelling orders or, in some cases, pre-orders/out of stocks because their so-called authorization center has rejected the credit card as has happened at least twice now. Trouble is that they calculate their postage on groups like $50.01-$100; 100.01-$150 etc & charge upfront the calculation on the first invoice of that order. No refund & the demand that you have to reorder again at a recharge for the postage & when this is a box set then that extra on export could be over $13 on top of what was already. Degrades their claim of the cheapest overall on the net & the current benefit of a better dollar at my end. Unlike Amazon there is no way to change manually the card for any order part shipped or not. Amazon will contact you & ask for a new number if there is a problem. There was never a problem with my card & they had used it the day before OK this week. The titles involved(for the record) Twilight Zone Blu Ray S1 & Chaplin at Keystone. Amazon's answer would have been swift & not two days or more like DD & easy to get a correction. Amazon was more expensive at the time of order for those titles.
