Though great stuff continues to come out on DVD, you can't always believe that what you think you're buying is what you're actually getting.
Some companies you can trust, like Warner Home Video, which today releases its second Errol Flynn box set. All the featured movies are hugely entertaining, particularly the boxing biopic Gentleman Jim, but more importantly, Warners presents them is pristine prints, remastered but not altered.
Sometimes, though, you enter a gray area. Sony Pictures, which has not been as careful with its library materials, today releases the first volume of Norman Lear's classic seventies soap opera riff Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Since this program ran five days a week, the set only contains the first five weeks of shows, twenty-five episodes. Sony has not seen fit to include any sort of supplementary materials that would put this show in context, that would explain how it briefly flourished and quickly faded, or even explain its unusual tone (jokey but despairing) to newcomers.
Sloppy, perhaps, but forgiveable. What's utterly inexcusable is that, according to some online reviewers, Sony has chosen to release the substantially altered versions of the shows prepared for cable syndication. These episodes were trimmed to allow for more commercial time, and some of those trims completely eliminate major plot points! This may not be part of a nefarious scheme; most likely, the people in charge of this project simply didn't do any research, and threw the thing together with materials they had on hand.
On the other hand, sometimes things are deliberately changed, and I wish more people would object. At the end of last year, MGM began its rollout of "upgraded" masters of all the James Bond pictures. Initial reviews were ecstatic--these movies, some of them over forty years old, look like they were made yesterday!--but then a second wave of opinion, better informed than the first, made it clear something suspicious was going on.
I've not seen these new Bond issues, so I'm only going by what I've read, but online critics like Glenn Erickson are extremely reputable--knowledgeable about the films themselves and tech matters, too. Apparently, in a push to "improve" the visuals of these films, digital tools substantially changed them. For instance, On Her Majesty's Secret Service famously opens with a moodily-lit fight scene, on a beach at sunset. Only now it doesn't--the actors have been digitally lightened, so they now no longer appear in shadows, and the sky has been brightened. Cosmetic changes, but they would totally alter the mood of the scene--and more importantly, this isn't what the filmmakers shot!
Sales for the "new" Bond pictures have been good but not spectacular. Presumably the people buying them are simply believing the hype (or more accurately, lies) that these movies now look better than ever, and maybe they just don't know any better. Real fans, I suspect, will avoid these, but if sails flatline, will the distribution companies realize people are avoiding them because they don't want shoddy producrt, or will they simply decide to no longer make vintage titles available, and doom us to a world of Rob Schneider vehicles?
