If anything, these were movies that were loved too much, copied so frequently that the original negatives for many of the early shorts were worn out and either lost or junked. Most important, these are new transfers, scanned from restored copies of the original release versions - no small thing for these films, which were so often sliced, diced, rescored and retitled over the years, as they were reissued by various companies for various markets. (For example, “Politiquerías,” the Spanish version of the 1931 “Chickens Come Home,” contains a complete performance by the Egyptian vaudeville star Hadji Ali, whose specialty - swallowing water, gasoline and small objects and regurgitating them in spectacular fashion - has sadly gone out of style.) (There were a few German versions as well, though none are included here.) The alternate versions often include different gags and interpolated variety numbers to bring them up to feature length for foreign release. The set also contains several foreign-language versions of the shorts, which were made in the days before dubbing was perfected and feature Stan and Ollie speaking phonetic Spanish and French. This superbly assembled collection contains over 32 hours of material, including all of the sound shorts - 40, made between 19, as well as the feature-length “Pardon Us” (1931), “Pack Up Your Troubles” (1932), “Sons of the Desert” (1933), “The Bohemian Girl” (1936), “Our Relations” (1936), “Way Out West” (1937), “Swiss Miss” (1938), “Block-Heads” (1938), “A Chump at Oxford” (1940) and “Saps at Sea” (1940).īut wait, there’s more. It’s been a long wait, but now the Roach films have returned in high style, as a 10-disc box set, “Laurel and Hardy: The Essential Collection,” produced by RHI Entertainment, the company that currently owns the Roach library, and distributed by Vivendi. The films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, or at least that central group of sound shorts and several features that remained under the copyright control of the Hal Roach studios, largely dropped out of circulation, except for questionable bootleg videos that would surface here and there, or arrive as expensive European imports.
The two-reel shorts, with their 20-minute running times, fit nicely into half-hour slots, with time left over for introductions by the local kiddie host and plenty of commercials for toys and candy.īut television changed, and that exposure seemed to dwindle in the ’70s and ’80s, and fade out almost entirely in the ’90s. For my generation, that meant the extensive exposure their short films and features received on television in the ’50s and ’60s, when they were a staple of Saturday-morning and after-school programming. MOST of us who love Laurel and Hardy, I’ve found, came across them first as children.