Shout! Factory / Scream Factory

[tenia]

Ah ok, my bad. I did indeed understood you were specifically refering to Shout.

[Adam X]

No worries tenia, and I agree, Scream do indeed appear to have an ongoing QC problem, though I don't doubt that those running the side label are doing the best they can with the resources they have.

[Rayon Vert]

Specs for The Thing:

NEW 2K scan of the Inter-positive supervised and approved by director of photography Dean Cundey
NEW 4.1 created from the original 70MM Six Track Dolby Stereo soundtrack
NEW Audio Commentary with director of photography Dean Cundey
NEW The Men of Outpost 31 - interviews with Keith David, Thomas Waites, Peter Maloney and more…
NEW Assembling and Assimilation – an interview with editor Todd Ramsay
NEW Behind the Chameleon – interviews with visual effects artists Peter Kuran and Susan Turner, special make-up effects artist Rob Burman and Brian Wade and more….
NEW Sounds from the Cold – interviews with supervising sound editor David Lewis Yewdall and special sound effects designer Alan Howarth
NEW Between the Lines – an interview with novelization author Alan Dean Foster
Audio Commentary by director John Carpenter and actor Kurt Russell
John Carpenter’s The Thing: Terror Takes Shape – a documentary on the making of THE THING featuring interviews with John Carpenter, Kurt Russell, special effects make-up designer Rob Bottin, legendary matte artist Albert Whitlock plus members of the cast and crew (80 minutes – SD)
Outtakes (5 minutes - SD)
Vintage featurettes from the electronic press kit featuring interviews with John Carpenter, Kurt Russell and Rob Bottin (12 minutes - SD)
Vintage featurettes – The Making of a Chilling Tale and The Making of THE THING (1982 – 14 minutes - SD)
Vintage Product Reel – contains a promotional condensed version of the film with additional footage not in the film (19 minutes - SD)
Vintage Behind-the-Scenes footage (2 minutes - SD)
Annotated Production Archive – Production Art and Storyboards, Location Scouting, Special Make-up Effects, Post Production (48 minutes - SD)
Network TV Broadcast version of THE THING (92 minutes - SD)
Teaser Trailer
Theatrical Trailers (U.S. and German Trailer)
TV spots
Radio Spots
Still Gallery (behind-the-scenes photos, posters and lobby cards)

Over the last days, I've been getting into this and going through all the extras. Selecting and listening to the new commentary with Dean Cundey, I noticed (in the audio options menu) there's an unlisted 3rd commentary, with co-producer Stuart Cohen. I checked and dvdbeaver doesn't mention it, but blu-ray.com does.

[captveg]

The Pink Panther Collection starring Peter Sellers - 4/11/17

6-disc set with:

The Pink Panther
A Shot in the Dark
The Return of the Pink Panther
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Revenge of the Pink Panther
Trail of the Pink Panther

[swo17]

First time I think they'll all be together.

[Ribs]

Wow, this, er, seems like a pretty big coup, and another depressing entry in ongoing "who'd have thought the studio would license this?" developments.

[AfterTheRain]

The Pink Panther Collection starring Peter Sellers - 4/11/17

6-disc set with:

The Pink Panther
A Shot in the Dark
The Return of the Pink Panther
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Revenge of the Pink Panther
Trail of the Pink Panther

A Homer Simpson quote is most appropriate for this announcement: "Yes! Yes! Oh, god, Yes!"

[captveg]

Wow, this, er, seems like a pretty big coup, and another depressing entry in ongoing "who'd have thought the studio would license this?" developments.

MGM had sat on this set for years because they were hoping to tie it in with a feature animated Pink Panther film that has been endlessly delayed in development. Looks like they finally decided to not wait around for that any more.

[cdnchris]

Getting "Return" in the set is great. Getting "Trail" is still awful. At least it doesn't have "Curse" or the Benigni one.

[Cinephrenic]

I'm really would like the cartoon collection on Blu.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

John Carpenter sale this weekend.

[AfterTheRain]

The Lawnmower Man and James Gunn's Slither have been announced for release as Collector's Editions for the Summer.

[domino harvey]

Slither is one of those titles you can't believe took so long to come out on Blu. Would love a Stephen King extra on the Lawnmower Man talking about his rotten history with tangential adaptations of his work!

[captveg]

The Lawnmower Man and James Gunn's Slither have been announced for release as Collector's Editions for the Summer.

They also clarified on FB that The Lawnmower Man is licensed from the original producers, who now control distribution for the film after New Line/Warner let the rights lapse.

[Brian C]

I was a big fan of THE LAWNMOWER MAN when I was a kid and the idea of virtual reality was still new in cultural terms, but honestly it's probably been 20 years since I've even thought about that movie. I didn't realize it had enough of a following to be worth resurrecting.

[colinr0380]

My mum used to talk about "that movie where the man turned people into balls". That kind of sums up Lawnmower Man, I think.

[CSM126]

The Lawnmower man is pretty awful, at least until you watch the sequel which is so beyond terrible as to make one question every decision you've ever made up to that point in your life. I mean, wow.

[colinr0380]

What on earth was going on in 1995 to foist The Net, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity and Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace on the world all at once?

[knives]

Television writers discovered the Internet in 1994?

[Adam X]

Given that the use of the internet was becoming more common around this time, I'm sure that's exactly it. Also virtual reality's last big push to become a thing was around this time. William Gibson had finished his Sprawl trilogy by the end of the '80's too, ready to be plundered for material over the next 15 odd years.

But more importantly Colin, you forgot to list the short-lived TV series VR.5!

[colinr0380]

Aarggh! Not VR.5! I seem to remember in the late 90s that the BBC blasted through that in late night Friday slots after they ran out of Space: Above & Beyond episodes to show, but it was nowhere near as compelling (Apropos of nothing, Space: Above & Beyond was my mum's favourite show, and I quite enjoyed its cheesy 'Starship Troopers played without any irony' gung ho approach to space wars as well! There's also a great drinking game to play of emptying your glass every time three or more characters line up diagonally one behind another in the 'hero pose'! (The kind of framing that Futurama posters parody) It happens at least once an episode but at different points in each one, so you can never anticipate when all the characters are going to drift into alignment for the perfectly framed camera angle that lets them muse in a soldierly fashion about the current space conflict!).

Though of course I forgot that 1995 was also the year of the ultimate cyberpunk film, Ghost In The Shell!

[Adam X]

I remember enjoying Space: Above & Beyond too, especially in later episodes before it was axed, getting closer to it reflecting its WWII allegory. Never noticed those 'hero' poses though!
VR.5 was responsible for my ongoing screen crush on Lori Singer, so while I remember very little about the show, I'm a little biased.

Both of these remind me the mid-to-late '90's was also the era of short-lived US genre TV shows, where the rule seemed to be that if they showed any promise of being more interesting than the norm, they were axed before the first season ended.

[colinr0380]

At the very least Space: Above & Beyond was better than the Wing Commander movie! (Even if Wing Commander had Saffron Burrows in it!)

Both of these remind me the mid-to-late '90's was also the era of short-lived US genre TV shows, where the rule seemed to be that if they showed any promise of being more interesting than the norm, they were axed before the first season ended.

The other one that I particularly remember is that Prey TV series in which a just prior to Will & Grace Debra Messing stars as a 'bioanthropoloogist' who finds out that there is a newly evolved species of humanity who walk among us all right at this moment!!! (And that they conveniently for budgetary reasons just look like normal people until we get to the DNA level, or the particularly outlandish mutant-y stunt that has been costed out to take place in that particular week's episode). Someone's put up the first episode on YouTube, reminding me of the era when everyone was looking for the next X-Files show, as well as in thrall to Se7en's title sequence, and also that Frankie Faison and Larry Drake are in the supporting cast!

I remember it being rather boring at the time, so probably not worth tracking down as anything more than a curio of an era where American television makers didn't yet seem to know about the X-Men or Parasite Eve, though it didn't help that it had to follow the first season of Oz in the same late night/early morning timeslot in the UK, which raised extreme sci-fi horror, action and gore expectations that were just never on the cards! Instead its more about the heroine (anticipating Twilight) getting caught in a romantic tryst, torn between two interchangeably bland hunks on different sides of the evolutionary divide! Will she fall for the bad-boy rebel neo-human with floppy hair, or stick with the straight-laced doctor colleague?

(EDIT: Apparently, at least if I'm interpreting imdb correctly, Sherilyn Fenn played the title role in the pilot before Debra Messing took the role in the series itself!)

[Adam X]

Going by that wonderful piece of artwork on Prey's imdb page, it looks like it was more than just said 'hunks' that were bland about that show. Interestingly Tobe Hooper appears to've directed the unaired pilot. Poor Tobe Hooper.

[colinr0380]

Wow, and apparently that unaired pilot episode of Prey that Tobe Hooper directed also featured an early role, perhaps even the first, for Michael Stuhlbarg (who has gone on to star in A Serious Man, and appear in Steve Jobs and Arrival, etc) who would have been playing the 'bland Doctor hunk' role in the love triangle. He, like Sherilyn Fenn, got swapped out for the eventual series itself.

I'm really curious to track that epsiode down now.

Both of these remind me the mid-to-late '90's was also the era of short-lived US genre TV shows, where the rule seemed to be that if they showed any promise of being more interesting than the norm, they were axed before the first season ended.

By the way this discussion has also reminded me of that ambitious but similarly short-lived show that tried to follow in the footsteps of The X-Files: Dark Skies. That apparently had an ambitious plan to cram a decades worth of historical conspiracy theories-mixed-with alien events into every season until by season four they had reached the present day (i.e. the 1990s). But they only managed to do the series set in the 1960s before cancellation!

And what about American Gothic, a piece of Southern supernatural shenanigans starring a malevolent Gary Cole? I remember that feeling quite Stephen King in tone, but it only lasted a single season. It was also one of the earliest series created (and with a number of episodes written by) Shaun Cassidy! Though it seemed a long way from Da Do Run Run!, even if he had a pre-Spider-Man Sam Raimi to produce the show with him!