(And, if you don't already have the UK set, I can't imagine anyone not wanting The Essential Collection.) However, because so many Laurel & Hardy fans already have the UK set, the essential question about The Essential Collection is: Is it worth the cost of a double-dip? Let me say that again: If you skipped the PAL format release you'll definitely want to get this.
If you skipped the PAL format release you'll definitely want to get this. The Essential Collection has material not included in the UK set and vice versa, and the transfers and other details differ. A 10-disc set about as thick as two standard DVD cases glued together, it's about one-tenth the size of the bulky and awkwardly packaged UK boxed set, and a good five pounds lighter.
Nevertheless, this 21-disc set included almost everything else.* (Missing, for some reason, from both sets is the Roach-produced Pick a Star, in which they make an extended guest appearance.) The boxed set was also extraordinarily cheap, usually hovering around $50, which meant even factoring in the cost of buying a region-free DVD player on which to watch them, this set was just about the DVD bargain of the decade.Īnd now, finally, comes Laurel & Hardy - The Essential Collection.
LAUREL AND HARDY COLLECTORS EDITION DVD REVIEW PLUS
The set includes pretty much the same silent films as those long out-of-print Image DVDs, plus all of Laurel & Hardy's talkie short subjects and features through 1940, excepting only a handful of titles ( The Devil's Brother, Babes in Toyland, Bonnie Scotland, The Flying Deuces) whose rights reside elsewhere. Even more ironically, four of the six films turned out to be far better than their uniformly negative reputations suggested, and their true worth was rightly reappraised.īut the team's best movies, during their years with producer Hal Roach, remained stubbornly MIA, and eventually a great many fans took the extreme step of ordering PAL format DVD boxed sets released in Europe, especially Laurel & Hardy - The Collection, a May 2004 shoebox from Universal's British subsidiary. Ironically, the movies widely regarded as Laurel & Hardy's worst, the half-dozen they made for 20th Century-Fox in the forties, were issued in luxuriously appointed boxed sets, featuring excellent audio commentaries and other supplements.
There were two half-hearted releases, one in 2003 that included their feature Sons of the Desert (1933) plus four classic shorts, and another in 2005 containing Way Out West (1937), Block-Heads (1938) and another two-reeler, but both sets utilized extremely mediocre transfers and were obviously slapped together with little enthusiasm. The original film elements were in poor shape, and the company, now called Hallmark Entertainment, had little interest in releasing them to DVD. Meanwhile, rights to the Roach library passed to Hallmark, the greeting card company, and Laurel & Hardy's Roach titles pretty much languished there, unloved, year after year. But those very quickly went out-of-print and even now several volumes command premium collector's prices. Featuring the team's silent films, they were among the very first DVD releases of any kind, with Volume One released in December 1998. The DVD era had started off well, with Image's The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy series. The beloved comedy team's best films, those made for producer Hal Roach from the mid-1920s through 1940, were maddeningly stuck in a kind of apathetic corporate limbo. The last dozen or so years have been mighty rough on Laurel & Hardy fans.
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