The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews? - Page 2

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

Gary, I couldn't agree with you more. This is a case of what IS being said vs. what ISN'T. The poster on the A&C board is merely reporting on what he was told by Passport, which sad to say, is untrue. My OWN annoyance is with Passport, not the poster. Likewise, I am simply reporting on what I see and hear between the 2 sets based on 31+ years of home video involvement. I have seen every possible video and audio "glitch" imaginable over the years and I realize that digital home video products are not without problems. I also agree that the extras on this set are quite nice and very worth having. I just wish that there was a bit more quality control in home video products as I have seen so much of this kind of thing over the years.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews

Thanks, Videowack. I didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea. There's no doubt that Passport dropped the ball on this one for the exact reason you mentioned - quality control. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether they did or did not speed up these two episodes on purpose. I don't believe they did that just because it makes no sense. Somehow, some way, they received two time-compressed episodes from the Costello estate.

But all that being said, they should have caught the mistake on those two episodes and been able to easily find out that there were sources to correct this problem (via Shanachie's source - Koch). So I'm not letting them off the hook with my previous post. I'm just saying that I believe Passport didn't purposely time-compress those two episodes. They just missed this problem, which goes back to poor quality control.

Gary "in spite of these slight problems, I'm looking forward to the second set next month" O.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

My question is...Didn't the Costello family supply Shanachie with the same masters as they did Passport? If so, where did Passport get these 2 sped up episodes from?

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

I too think the Speed Ups were from the Masters supplied to them. If they intentionally sped them up for space saving reasons then it makes no sense to do this on only 2 of 26 episodes. Why not all of them? Then they could save a disk and the speed up might not be quite as noticable since it would be on every episode. For this reason alone I do not believe it was intentional.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews

I just checked with Bob Furmanek to get the true story on these shows. He was the archivist for the Abbott and Costello Estates during that period.

Mr. Furmanek had located 35mm elements for ALL 52 episodes in 1984. It was a long process of tracking down materials because they were scattered in dozens of different places all around the country. At the time, Allan Enterprises was syndicating the shows, but he did not want to create new transfers of episodes which had already been mastered to video from inferior 16mm prints. He felt that what he had was good enough and they did not want to spend the extra money.

Shanachie had nothing to do with locating film elements. Their releases on video and DVD were done long after the film elements had been found. They were simply provided with video dubs by the Costello family.

The 35mm negative for JAIL was not at the Library of Congress. In fact, none of the film elements were there. It was stored at the Bekin's building in Hollywood, although it was inadvertently placed in nitrate vaults when it was a safety negative!

In the late 1980's, the distributor created a full set of time-compressed video masters, changing the running time from 26 to 22 minutes. Obviously, when Passport was given elements for their DVD mastering, somebody with the Costello family pulled the wrong tape masters.

To do this right, they should have gone back to the 35mm master fine grains for new hi-def transfers, and not simply re-used one-inch video copies made over 20 years ago.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

Damned fine piece of investigative work Jack. Thanks for the real story.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

You are correct in surmising that Passport had no control over the masters they were given by the Costello family. No 35mm film masters were made available; only the one-inch tape masters. It was an honest error on the part of the current Costello vault archivist that compressed masters for those two episodes were mistakenly included in the masters that were sent over to Passport for duplication. Apparently, the masters previously used by Shenachie are missing, and so the archivist believed those two substitute copies were identical to the missing ones. We now know they were not. At any rate, the errors on Discs One and Two have been CORRECTED and all episodes now run at the proper speed. The discs are currently being manufactured and should be in circulation shortly. One way to know if you see the initial run or the corrected version is that on the back of the original box, "The Wrestling Match" title was inadvertently left off of the list of episodes (although the episode itself was included in the set). The revised run, in addition to having corrected the projection speed on those two episodes, will also have "The Wrestling Match" listed on the back cover. And - again - the rare and lengthy bonus features should more than make up for this honest, if irksome, oversight.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

Thanks for the update! For those who have purchased the prior version, is there a procedure in place to exchange for the corrected version?

Also, are you saying that Shenachie lost original masters? Or were they lost later? It seems inconceivable that Shenachie would not ensure the safety and preservation of these one of a kind items.

Steve

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

Steve (he said to himself):

It's not that Shenachie lost the masters to those two episodes. Their masters were made 20 years ago from tapes on very large (and now woefully obsolete) cassettes that cannot be played by today's machines (or at least the equipment that Passport had access to). So all of the masters given to Passport by the Costellos were the one-inch, reel-to-reel tapes (which still had to be transferred to professional Beta format in order to be usable in a DVD format). Consequently, it was the one-inch masters to those two episodes that were no longer findable, hence the inadvertent substitution of the abnormal brain (or am I confusing my classics?).

Because the time-compression was a relatively subtle defect (compared with loss of audio or film breaks or too dark or that sort of thing), various eyes checked the DVD masters before they were duplicated, but no one noticed the subtle increase in speed on those two shows until it was too late. I believe Passport intends to make good on exchanging those two discs if the discs are sent to them in California. You might try emailing nnickson@passportentertainment.com and inquiring about the exchange.

Re: The Abbott & Costello Show: 100th Anniversary Collection Season 1 DVD Box Reviews?

Hi everyone. I too have fond memories of watching Bud and Lou late night on WPIX - 11 in New York. Here are some interesting tid bits that you ought to know. First of all. Channel 11 ran actual FILM through a film chain. they might have had them transferred to tape later on, but it was film. Second of all, they were edited episodes - cut enough for today's TV standards for more air time. And here's the kicker - they were the original prints struck from the original negs. Which means that it contained the original SOUNDTRACK of the episodes. When the TV show went back into syndication in the late 80's and WWOR - Channel 9 in NY picked them up for daytime airing, not only was the picture and sound dramatically compressed (and you can physically see that everyone was walking and talking faster), but a newer soundtrack with a new laughtrack was incorporated in some of the shows. There were various scenes in various episodes that lacked some lustre, so the syndicators decided to boost it a bit. It is these newer versions that we are being treated too. They were compressed, so that we can get to see an uncut episode. They did the same with the TV syndication package for My Favorite Martian as well which actually aired before A&C during the week. I believe that I still have a videotape of when I recorded A&C show when it aired on Channel 11. That was back in 1982 - WOW !!! The tape hasn't busted or disintegrated. It was the POLICE ROOKIE SCHOOL episode from season 1. And there are dramatic differences in the soundtracks. So let everyone know that there different versions of the TV show languishing out there. Sorry to burst the bubble. BTW, someone had posted that the season 2 opening credits are different than season 1- well, yeah, they are supposed to be. You may notice that Season two actually had a couple of different themes on some episodes. Also, the opening had to be changed because they didn't bring back Hillary Brooke, Mr. Bacciagalupe. And Mike the Cop appeared in only a handful of S2 episodes as well as Sid Fields and NO STINKY IN S2 either.
Here's a bit of trivia - What was Mike the Cop's last name ? Later people.