Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations [Blu-ray] [2020] [NTSC]

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Love ‘Em and Weep,” in which double (and triple) take maestro James Finlayson stars as a pillar of the community visited by a gold-digging old flame, was remade as “Chickens Come Home” with Hardy, who portrayed a butler in the original, and Finlayson swapping roles.

While their madcap antics are steeped in the traditions of vaudeville, they established a comic rhythm that takes full advantage of the elasticity of cinematic time.

Six years later, the two, each with their own careers, would be cast together in a series of shorts that marked the beginning of a beautiful partnership comprising 106 short subjects and feature films. Zavvi presents the classic comedy duo of Laurel and Hardy, bringing you all the best content from an expansive assortment of iconic moments in the pair’s long and successful history. All of these are, I am sure, quite valid, but all you need to know is that every single entry in this set is better than any version you have seen before: Miles better. All of the films (including The Tree in a Test Tube and That’s That) have optional commentaries (accessed through the ‘set-up’ menus, by Randy Skretvedt, though Richard W.

If much of this seems to be less about the specifics of this set itself versus the virtues of the title performers, well you’re right. When I first heard that most of the missing parts of The Battle of the Century had been found, I couldn’t wait to see it. I thought this was odd, as do many people now hearing those tracks, but it was not my choice to make. The accompanying booklet credits Blackhawk Films, archives around the world, “dozens of collectors,” and a group of “Laurel and Hardy specialists,” including Randy Skretvedt, author of Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, for compiling the materials, discovering long-lost treasures and meticulous restorations. Score: Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, Mae Busch, Dorothy Christy, Lucien Littlefield, Rosina Lawrence, James Finlayson, May Wallace Director: James W.I became convinced that, as I slept, they’d creep an inch or two closer to my bed each time I woke up in the night (hey, I was a dumb kid and I guarantee you that your dumb kids are thinking something equally dumb right now – I know mine is). Among the shorts are the Oscar-winning “The Music Box” (1932), in which the lads deliver a player piano up an impossibly long flight of stairs; “County Hospital” (1932), where Ollie is convalescing from a broken leg – until Stanley, bearing a bag of hard-boiled eggs and walnuts, visits, and “That’s That” (1937), a gag reel that longtime producer Hal Roach compiled for Stan’s birthday in 1938.

Battle of the Century – the only silent short on the set and one that most thought they’d never get to see. Label description: Very few original negatives of the silent films of Laurel and Hardy survive, and the available elements scattered throughout the world are always mediocre or unwatchable. What this four-disc Blu-ray set may lack in diversity of extras, it more than makes up with the inclusion of commentary tracks for every last film, even That’s That, a clip reel created primarily as a gift to Stan Laurel.Any drop-off with the first half, which is in sepia tone, is hardly noticeable, and a still-missing sequence at the end of the first reel is compensated for with stills and title cards. The first half, which was sourced from a 35 mm preprint, has Stanley going toe-to-toe with a big bruiser (look closely and you’ll see 21-year-old Lou Costello among the 125 extras), but the second half, an “apocalyptic” pie fight to end all pie fights, Bann says, had only surfaced in a three-minute except that was included in Robert Youngson’s 1957 compilation “The Golden Age of Comedy. Keen-eyed “ Friends” viewers can’t have missed the Laurel and Hardy poster that graced the wall in Joey and Chandler’s apartment.