Laurel & Hardy: The Essential New Collection

I purchased this set because it contained the short "The Live Ghost". I have not seen this since I was growing up in the 1950's and found it to be just as funny as I remembered it. There have been many erudite commentaries about this set and the history of Hal Roach and various releases of the boys films. I don't really care about these factoids, only that films I grew up loving are finally available to own. One person wanted the set to contain colorized versions and was knocking the set for this reason. Really ? The originals were shot in B&W so why review or purchase a set that's not put out in the format you want ? The packaging sucks. Obviously designed by some nurse-a-nickel pencil-neck dumb Kopf. I have plenty of CD Jewel cases I use for my video and audio productions so each disk will be getting a new home as it is removed from the Kludgey packaging. While some have pointed out that not all the boy's films are represented here, I feel the set is a marvelous compendium of the majority of the boys films I remember watching years ago. Bo Hunks - The boys join the foreign legion so Hardy can forget Geenie Weenie. After they get to their post, they tell the commandant they forgot what they came to forget and want to go home. Hilarious ! The Live Ghost - The boys get a Buck for each sailor they shanghai but the end up getting shanghaied on the same ship they shanghaied the sailors for. Then the fun begins. I bought this set just for this short. Busy Bodies - Laurel and Hardy working as "Millwrights " . Sight gags and just flat out funny situations make this a comedy classic. I have liked Laurel and Hardy since the first time I saw them in the early 1950's on our local kids program "The Marshall J Show". The Marshall introduced us to Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges and myriad Warner Brothers cartoons. Bugs, Daffy Elmer and Tweety. Owning this set is a real trip down memory lane and a reminder of how fortunate I was to grow up right after the end of WW II. It was a period of unprecedented prosperity and a wonderful time to be a kid. It is easy to see how comics like Tim Conway and Dick Van Dyke learned their craft from watching the boys do their thing. I haven't made a dent in viewing all the content but what I have seen so far is definitely good quality and very watchable. I will enjoy this set for a long time.

The previous Laurel & Hardy gold standard was the Blackhawk Films collection, which offered this same group of sound titles as well as the majority of extant silent titles--on film. There have sporadic attempts to offer the films on video tape and disc formats. The "Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy" is currently the definitive compilation of the silent shorts (with a few early sound subjects thrown in). "Laurel & Hardy: The Collection," released in Britain, was notable for gathering practically everything that had been in the Blackhawk library, along with some of the foreign market variants and guest appearance shorts (and the original release print of "Brats"). Unfortunately, the British release had to make do with much of the older source material, including Film Classics reissue prints and badly deteriorated prints for the silents. The "Essential Collection" represents a major improvement in the presentation of the bulk of the Laurel & Hardy canon. It's a shame the silents couldn't be presented here, but the "Lost Films" dvds are still fairly easy to locate, and are the best way of studying and enjoying the team's formative years. The two items in the British package that will be missed most will be the original release of "Brats" and excerpts from the German variant of "Pardon Us." The treatment of "Brats" is possibly the only sore point in the "Essential Collection," which uses the reissue print and provides an either/or soundtrack option. If this sort of economy was necessary, I wish they had layered the dual soundtracks on the original release, which has the original gag titles and seems, to me, to have superior pictorial quality. Otherwise, this new collection beats all previous anthologies hands down. All the original Hal Roach Studios title cards are back in place, and the visual element has been collected and restored from superior quality prints. The "bleached" aspect of certain titles like "Sons of the Desert" and "Them Thar Hills" has been replaced by robust black and white tones that make watching these classics a new experience. The once lost track to "Unaccustomed as We Are" has been re-recorded for improved audibility. If you haven't seen any of the foreign release variants, start with the Spanish version of "Below Zero": "Tiembla Y Titubea," and see how a comedy with somber undertones is almost transformed into a work of Expressionism in the extended cafe scene. Another revelation is the "streamliner" (42 min.) version of "Chump at Oxford," previously available only on film from Blackhawk. The shorter version is composed of different shots and takes, and is actually better proportioned than the longer version, where the "Lord Paddington" sequence almost comes across as an extended gag rather than a turning point in the plot. There are some wonderful bonus vocal tracks on a handful of the films providing insights from Rich Correll, Randy Skretvedt, and Hal Roach authority Richard W. Bann, as well as an easy-going bantering session between Tim Conway and Chuck McCann during "Sons of the Desert." The supplemental material on Disc 10 includes a retrospective of filming locations with an interactive map, and a documentary tribute featuring Dick Van Dyke, Penn & Teller, and Jerry Lewis, among others. The recollections from Van Dyke and Lewis are particularly poignant, since both men knew Stan Laurel in his later years, but greater editorial care might have been used in portions of the Lewis interview; his "recounting" of Laurel meeting Hardy is bizarre fiction, particularly in light of the fact that Laurel had met Hardy years earlier when both appeared in the silent comedy "Lucky Dog." This set includes none of the colorizations that cluttered the British set. This is a blessing since those "enhanced versions" were not only freakishly bad (recalling the colorized versions released by Cabin Fever in the '90s), but also had trims and fade-outs for tv commercials. If you must see Laurel & Hardy in color, check out Legend's colorized March of the Wooden Soldiers (Colorized / Black & White) , which like all the Legend colorizations I've seen, has been done with the sensibilities of costume/set/and pictorial composition. Or, just watch the short Kodachrome film "Tree in a Test Tube" on disc 10. This is the Laurel & Hardy sound film set we've been waiting for. And it was worth the wait.

Attenzione! Il prodotto non è idoneo al mercato europeo ma solo a quello americano. Infatti quando inserisco i dischi nel mio lettore dvd / bluray non vengono letti ed un messaggio del lettore avverte che hanno un codice “regionale” errato. La cosa incredibile però è che amazon non avvisa di questo nella pagina del prodotto!

really funny great service .

Great insight into top comedians of the silent era and between the two world wars,there is lot more to explore with more digital remastering needed essential viewing

excelente colección de sus películas

You get 10 discs in this set - the sound shorts and feature from the Hal Roach Library. There is a lot to enjoy and some nice extras - there are some commentary tracks on several films that, for me as a more casual fan of Laurel & Hardy, were very informative. I would recommend this if you have even the slightest interest in classic comedy. There's a reason these two have retained an avid following - they were, quite possibly, the greatest comedy team in cinematic history.