This sweet little film has been most grievously mistreated. Joseph Papp’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s beloved comic opera was a huge hit on Broadway, starring Kevin Klein, Linda Rondstat and Rex Smith. The film captured the fun of the show and created a fantasy world where people just naturally sing and dance.
But then (as they say at the 45 minute mark of every “Behind The Music”) tragedy struck. The studio decided to release the film to pay-per-view “Day and Date” with the theatrical release. And, as they always do, the theater chains fought back by giving the film the contractual minimum release - one week in a handful of theaters, no ads.
My wife and I managed to catch it during it’s one week run at a tiny little “crackerbox” theater that no longer exists, the Watt’s Mill in Kansas City, MO. We bought it on VHS when it came out, but the glorious 2.35:1 widescreen composition was chopped to 4:3. Shots that used the full width of the screen, like this song (originally from Ruddigore) had one or more of the actors just chopped off.
But this wrong, after 27 years, is finally being righted. Universal is releasing it on DVD! I thought they were holding it back for Frederik’s birthday (which only comes around once every 4 years) but they’ve decided to have it out for next Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Of course. I finally get round to finding and buying an OOP VHS copy several months ago, I’ve mentioned in one or two threads that I’ve been meaning to watch it when I have time, and now they release it on DVD!
Anyone else have any movies they want released on DVD? If VHS copies are hard to get, I’ll buy one. The DVD should be out a few months later.
Apparently, Amazon has another version of the Kline/Ronstadt production on DVD - and it appears to be the Broadway production - and it’s available NOW.
Well that is what it says in the IMDB. But the ads are bought by the studio. My guess is that the studio itself had low expectations for the film and that’s why it got the ‘select TV’ release day and date.
I saw that production on Broadway (though, by the time I saw it, Maureen McGovern had replaced Linda Ronstadt) and enjoyed it immensely… but the movie left me cold. All they did was film a performance of the Broadway show without the live audience.
They didn’t have to “open up” much, but they owed us something more than a PBS-style performance video.
…and the technical quality is abysmal. The DVD was made from a 3/4" preview tape with mono sound with very audible SMPTE timecode noise. This tape was apparently made from a live switch of the show and the director missed some cues.
The show was probably shot on 1" (the standard at the time) and recorded to 16 or 24 track audio. But the cheap bastards at the Broadway Archive Project didn’t bother to have the 1" tapes converted and a proper on-line session and multi-channel mix-down done. So the only record of this show is a painfully bad looking DVD.
Yes, they did. Remember the “TripleCast”? Remember Qube?
The positive? It exists and the film looks pretty good. It is in widescreen.
The negative? There are no extras. The single one is a trailer, and that is from video and is in black and white! All it is is clips from the movie, and anyone could take the sound and the movie and re-make it.
I knew this would be a “shovel it onto the disc” release, but nobody took much care. For instance, there are English subtitles, and for the most part they are quite good. But there are easily correctable errors. For instance, during “My Eyes Are Fully Open”, a song from a different operetta, the director changed a line so Ruth sings:
“But at present I’m afraid
I am as mad as any hatter
so I’ll sing this song from Ruddigore,
it really doesn’t matter”
…and the captions have “so I’ll sing this song for ruddy good”.
It might have been nice to have the captions done by someone who was aware there was an operetta called “Ruddigore”.
The film could look a lot better. The edges are over-enhanced with “sharpening”, and I suspect it is a single layer DVD.
