New release of The Return Of The Pink Panther (1 Viewer)

A new widescreen release of The Return Of The Pink Panther is due on January 10th. As fans of the Pink Panther series are aware, the previous release was pretty bad as far as picture and audio quality are concerned.

Does anyone have any details on this new release? It is priced as low as $9.99 but details are not available on the sites I checked, including Best Buy, Circuit City and Amazon. Hopefully, it will be anamorphic with a remastered sound track in Dolby Digital 5.1, as the previously released MGM box set of the other Pink Panther movies was.

After an additional search, it appears that this new Universal release is anamorphic wide screen with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound. It has to be a vast improvement over the previous release. And at $9.99 how can one go wrong?

Full details and box art at DVD Times here

I will have to pick up a copy to replace the original DVD that I have. I had no idea that this was coming out. Thanks for the heads up!

I have it in hand. It is indeed 16:9 now. The only audio track listed is English 2.0.

I just previewed a bit on my PC at work, and it looks decent. I don't think the same amount of work went into this as MGM's remasters of the rest of the series, but to me anything is a welcome improvement over the hideous Artisan release. The former release wasn't even centered properly in a 4:3 frame. I could do a screenshot or two, but I know many people feel screenshots over the web are pretty much useless in determining quality.

Do it! All the cool kids are!

i'll pick one up to replace the crappy artisan version.

wonder if any reviews of the new box set will show up soon.

Quick question, as I'm confused, as usual.

There is listed for release on 1/31 a new PINK PANTHER disc, with new packaging (black background, three images on front, instead of the bluish background image of Sellers on the disc I own now). Is this a NEW PRINT of the film? Anamorphic? Or merely a repackage job?

Any info? Thanks in advance!

MC

I believe the releases set for 1/31 are simply single-disc packaging of the discs found in the Pink Panther collection released in 2004, which had all new anamorphic prints.

Whelp, in that case... I'm buying.

Thanks, Andrew!

MC

Any reviews anywhere on this disc?

Sorry to confuse the issue here, but weren't there some much-talked about framing problems in the 2004 box set? I thought the 1/31 was going to be a new set with new extras.

At any rate, I did get the new Return disc, and it's definitely worth $10.

I don't recall any (mis-)framing issues on the Pink Panther set. There are more extras on another region's set, I remember...

Curse Of (the Ted Wass one) and Son Of (the Benigni one) are coming out, I know, and I don't think they've been on dvd before. The re-packagings of the others... same content on all, I think.

I'm looking forward to the collection of the animated shorts, due on 1/31...

There were not framing issues, but MGM did go overboard with digital tampering.

The Pink Panther, Revenge, and Trail look nearly flawless. Especially the first film since it was shot in 8 perf Technirama.

However, A Shot in the Dark and Strikes Back are heavily filtered. The latter has some edge enhancement.

And I don't like how all of the films except "Trail" had logo replacements. I wish the original United Artists logos were kept.

Still can't find any reviews on this disc?
Can Andrew Bunk or anyone else confirm what it looks like on a TV?
Also is the trailer included or not?

No trailer, just the movie.

I'm still waiting for my disc to arrive here in Germany, but I've still got the horrible old Artisan release and I'm going to do a graphical comparison as soon as the new disc gets here. I think the differences will show up even on low-resolution captures...

As for the MGM boxset, the R2 version (which is surely using the same masters as the later released R1 set) looks very, very fine. I don't recall any over-filtering on "Shot" and "Strikes again", but they always looked a bit softer than the other movies. There are actually some framing differences to the old discs - the new transfers are sometimes framed a little bit tighter, but I think it's nothing to be worried about.

I haven't viewed it on my 57" yet, but on my LCD monitor, it didn't look quite as good as the MGM transfers.

I will try and pop it in for a minute this weekend and check some scenes.

Either way, it is most definitely an improvement over the last R1 release.

Didn't the old Artisan disc have the trailer?
And was it really made up mostly of out-takes?

The Trailer is on the Artisan disc, but it doesn't look like they used outtakes for it. Nothing very exciting in there, and not a particularly good trailer, just a little clip show with a boring voiceover.