On DVD from Warner Archives 4/1/11 - plus updates

Warner Archives has released Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd on DVD for April Fool's Day (along with another long-MIA A&C title, Rio Rita). $19.99 direct from WBshop.com; both films will likely not show up elsewhere for a few more months, and will normally be more expensive at other outlets.

As I said on another thread, the print of this film that TCM has been running is missing about 30 seconds of footage in the early scene of the drunken street brawl on Tortuga (prior to the barrell with Lou in it being thrown against a wall). I hope the Archive print is complete, but I fear the worst. You can tell by the shots of Bud and the girl: every time he hugs her another man (Joe Kirk, Lou's real life brother-in-law) leans in from behind and kisses her, unbeknownst to Bud. If the print is complete you see them do this bit twice. In the cut version, they're seen only once.

Yes, I am a stickler for completeness! I'll post a note about this crucial issue when I eventually get the disc.

Now...where is Jack and the Beanstalk???

6/15/11: As promised, some updated information on the DVD....

I recently got this DVD and was agreeably surprised by its quality. Some points:

The film is complete and uncut. The problem I mentioned above about the missing portion in the print shown on TCM isn't here: the DVD is intact -- nothing cut, edited or changed in any way.

Sound and picture quality are very good. In every print of this film I've ever seen, there are a lot of scratches and other marks marring the picture, especially at the beginning, but also at the end and at points where there were reel changes. But this remastered print is actually very good, with virtually every scratch gone, making it the cleanest print of this movie I've ever seen. Sound quality is also pretty good.

The color looks a bit subdued, but then the color in this film was never very vivid. Both of A&C's color films were shot in Super Cinecolor, a supposed improvement on Cinecolor. Cinecolor was a very cheap process devised in 1939 as a way to add color to low-budget movies, mainly westerns but other types of B-films as well, including a few early sci-fi movies such as Unknown Island and Flight to Mars. It involved coating a strip of film with a red-orange emulsion on one side and a blue-green emulsion on the other, to give the illusion of true color. Cinecolor always reminded me of the old two-color Technicolor used in some films of the 20s and early 30s. When in 1953 Technicolor, Inc., lost the exclusive rights to the three-color process they had pioneered, a flood of new three-color processes quickly came on the market, lowering the cost of color and dooming a cheap process like Cinecolor. Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd and Jack and the Beanstalk were among the last movies ever shot in Cinecolor.

Anyway, for fans of Bud and Lou, I can highly recommend this DVD. Not great A&C by any means, but fun enough, and worth seeing both for Charles Laughton having a ball doing low comedy, and as one of the only two times Abbott and Costello can be seen in color.