Monsters and Madmen DVD

Monsters and Madmen

My appreciation of Criterion Collection home video goes back to its beginning, when Citizen Kane and King Kong were released on the old Laserdisc format. The discs included a commentary audio track, and extras such as trailers and production stills. These features are now taken for granted, but 20+ years ago they were exciting and ground-breaking.

Criterion specializes in releasing high-quality specialty videos for titles that are hard-to-find and/or haven’t been presented properly. Mike Dobbs has posted some interesting background on a new Criterion set of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies, including a couple that feature Bill Pratt, aka Boris Karloff. I’ll be looking for these cheesy classics on Netflix, but when will there be a Queen of Outer Space DVD?

Star Wars – Missing Minutes

Biggs and Luke

A long time ago, seeing bloopers and deleted scenes from movies was a rarity. But along came DVDs and it started to seem that scenes were being shot solely for the purpose of padding out supplementary material.
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This post will be nothing new to die-hard Star Wars fans, but here are a couple of scenes that didn’t make it into the release of the first movie, which is coming up fast on its 30th anniversary.
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