For those who have been hesitating like I have for the Laurel & Hardy 21-set at Amazon.co.uk, it is now cheaper!!!
For those in the US, without the VAT, it came to: £26.24 with the $3.00 extra shipping, total came to $41. That's great because before, it was $56 or so. Get it now though, it may go up again!
Laurel & Hardy shorts
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Rollo Treadway
- Posts: 899
- Joined: Mon Oct 11, 2010 6:32 pm
- Location: Norway
There was a Dutch DVD series a few years back, even more complete than the UK DVD set (which for some reason lacks Babes in Toyland, Bonnie Scotland, Fra Diavolo and Flying Deuces), split up into a silent shorts series, a talkie shorts series and a talkie feature series, all chronologically arranged.
Originally featuring early pre-team bonus shorts and informative booklets, the sets were later reissued in just bare-boned fashion, with the following content:
http://www.blotto.nl/index.php/weblog/d ... horSerieNL
As far as my googling abilities can take me, these discs seem to have been discontinued. They used to be advertised on the home page of Basta, which mostly specializes in nostalgic music, including the Beau Hunks orchestra. Allow me to give a plug for this organization’s wonderful 2-disc set of Laurel & Hardy music:
http://www.basta.nl/productDetails.aspx ... au%20Hunks
... also available from amazon and other retailers.
The UK L&H DVD set is a prized possession of mine. Together with the TCM 2-disc set featuring Fra Diavolo and Bonnie Scotland, plus single editions of Toyland and Deuces, my L&H needs are pretty much filled.
I’m fine with the ”theme-based” organization of the UK discs, and at least some of them make good sense, such as combining Sons of the Desert with the short that inspired a large chunk of it, We Faw Down. My main gripe is with all the space wasted on including the awful colorized versions of all the talkie material. Sad to say, though, this may well have been a ”sound” decision from a marketing point of view - but if it weren’t for this, all the relevant material would take up no more than 15 discs or so.
Picture quality is mostly excellent, though there are a few problems. Way Out West has a very distracting cut right in the middle in one of the boys’ most celebrated moments, their rendition of ”The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Especially annoying since the whole number is intact in the accompanying colorized version! And a few of the silents are taken from washed-out dupes, including the masterpiece Wrong Again. Somewhere, hopefully, there exists a more pristine version of that film, one of the boys' crowning achievements.
Originally featuring early pre-team bonus shorts and informative booklets, the sets were later reissued in just bare-boned fashion, with the following content:
http://www.blotto.nl/index.php/weblog/d ... horSerieNL
As far as my googling abilities can take me, these discs seem to have been discontinued. They used to be advertised on the home page of Basta, which mostly specializes in nostalgic music, including the Beau Hunks orchestra. Allow me to give a plug for this organization’s wonderful 2-disc set of Laurel & Hardy music:
http://www.basta.nl/productDetails.aspx ... au%20Hunks
... also available from amazon and other retailers.
The UK L&H DVD set is a prized possession of mine. Together with the TCM 2-disc set featuring Fra Diavolo and Bonnie Scotland, plus single editions of Toyland and Deuces, my L&H needs are pretty much filled.
I’m fine with the ”theme-based” organization of the UK discs, and at least some of them make good sense, such as combining Sons of the Desert with the short that inspired a large chunk of it, We Faw Down. My main gripe is with all the space wasted on including the awful colorized versions of all the talkie material. Sad to say, though, this may well have been a ”sound” decision from a marketing point of view - but if it weren’t for this, all the relevant material would take up no more than 15 discs or so.
Picture quality is mostly excellent, though there are a few problems. Way Out West has a very distracting cut right in the middle in one of the boys’ most celebrated moments, their rendition of ”The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Especially annoying since the whole number is intact in the accompanying colorized version! And a few of the silents are taken from washed-out dupes, including the masterpiece Wrong Again. Somewhere, hopefully, there exists a more pristine version of that film, one of the boys' crowning achievements.
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fgirtan
I ran the film department at a local station in Upstate New York for many years and the entire industry transitioned from film to tape in the early to mid 1980s.Ian Elliot wrote: I believe that Canadian broadcasters, including the networks, used 16mm (and tape) exclusively until sometime in the 80's.
Not sure about Canada, but in the United States most local stations showed 16mm, but the networks and some of the larger independent stations, like WPIX in NYC used 35mm.