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Three Stooges shorts coming to Blu-ray this summer

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Offline NoahYoung

I'll give you a nickel if you can find one person at Sony who even knows what you're talking about!
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

I'll give you a nickel if you can find one person at Sony who even knows what you're talking about!

Brother, can you spare a nickel?


Offline NoahYoung

Brother, can you spare a nickel?

No, but I can spare a dime.  ;D
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

My FOMO and curiosity continues to increase, so I decided to order the set from Amazon. It's out of stock at the moment and won't be delivered until next month, but I can wait. Time marches on! :D

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised at the lack of information (both on the reviews and customer feedbacks) on this set, considering this has been released two days ago and has already sold out on Amazon. I guess I will have to watch it and find out for myself.


Offline NoahYoung

Well, Sony already botched the release before it was even released by not including all the shorts, so I guess expectations need to be set relatively low.

There must be places to buy except amazon, I presume.

It will take awhile for the people who buy it to watch all 100 shorts before the reviews pile in...
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

Well, Sony already botched the release before it was even released by not including all the shorts, so I guess expectations need to be set relatively low.

There must be places to buy except amazon, I presume.

It will take awhile for the people who buy it to watch all 100 shorts before the reviews pile in...

I prefer to buy from Amazon because with 20 discs, the risk of a defective/scratched disc seems quite high. And Amazon has a very good return policy. I don't know about everyone else, but Blu-rays today seemed to be pre-scratched from the factory.


Offline NoahYoung

I prefer to buy from Amazon because with 20 discs, the risk of a defective/scratched disc seems quite high. And Amazon has a very good return policy. I don't know about everyone else, but Blu-rays today seemed to be pre-scratched from the factory.

Plus if you have Amazon Prime, free shipping! But if you can't wait...

It's been a long time since I bought a box set of discs. It does take some of the fun out of it since you are pressured to watch everything within the return window. But that was from brick-and-mortars like Best Buy.

I don't know how easy it is to rip blu-rays, but it's easy with DVDs and that's a quick way to check them out. If they rip OK, you're fine -- and now have a backup to boot!

And I've mentioned those old Abbott and Costello "Best of" DVD sets before -- they looked clean as a whistle yet some would freeze up anyway.

Have I ever mentioned that you won't have that kind of problem with actual film?
 >:D
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

Plus if you have Amazon Prime, free shipping! But if you can't wait...

It's been a long time since I bought a box set of discs. It does take some of the fun out of it since you are pressured to watch everything within the return window. But that was from brick-and-mortars like Best Buy.

I don't know how easy it is to rip blu-rays, but it's easy with DVDs and that's a quick way to check them out. If they rip OK, you're fine -- and now have a backup to boot!

And I've mentioned those old Abbott and Costello "Best of" DVD sets before -- they looked clean as a whistle yet some would freeze up anyway.

Have I ever mentioned that you won't have that kind of problem with actual film?
 >:D

The good thing with Amazon is that not only do they have a nice 30 day return window, but they ship you the replacement right away and you have 30 days to return the old set. So if just one disc is bad, you can just swap the one disc before shipping back to Amazon. Other retailers require you to send the whole thing back first and you have to pray that your next set of 20 discs are all ok.

Agree that watching within the return window does take some fun out of it. That's actually why I like buying digital copies instead. I can buy a whole mess of TV shows and not feel pressured to watch everything right away. In fact, I still have a lot of TV series I bought on iTunes that I have yet to watch, lol.

Speaking of which... let me know if these shorts end up in HD on iTunes. Because if that happens before my set ships, I may just cancel my order and purchase digitally instead. :)


Offline falsealarms


Offline NoahYoung

The good thing with Amazon is that not only do they have a nice 30 day return window, but they ship you the replacement right away and you have 30 days to return the old set. So if just one disc is bad, you can just swap the one disc before shipping back to Amazon. Other retailers require you to send the whole thing back first and you have to pray that your next set of 20 discs are all ok.

Agree that watching within the return window does take some fun out of it. That's actually why I like buying digital copies instead. I can buy a whole mess of TV shows and not feel pressured to watch everything right away. In fact, I still have a lot of TV series I bought on iTunes that I have yet to watch, lol.

Speaking of which... let me know if these shorts end up in HD on iTunes. Because if that happens before my set ships, I may just cancel my order and purchase digitally instead. :)

I guess I'm out-of-date because I haven't used iTunes in ages, and when I did it was an app on my PC that I used to rip CDs and transfer them to an iPod or iPhone. So they sell movies now? How do you watch them? Is it streaming, or do you download and keep the physical files that can be watched in perpetuity in a format like .mkv?

Back to those A&C "Best of" sets -- at least they only had 8 movies per set. But the time I did have to return one to the store, it was because the 8th movie I watched froze up -- the first 7 were fine. Then when I exchanged it at Best Buy -- I had to immediately watch all 8 movies again!

Amazon should get with the program and just send you a replacement disc for the defective one -- but what you describe is really just as good -- though inefficient from Amazon's perspective.

Which gets down to QC -- you would think companies like Sony would do a better job -- but before we beat them into the ground, let's wait to hear the success-rate of good discs vs. bad.

And I think I mentioned before -- a 2-bit company like Passport issued the whole Abbott and Costello Show on box sets for bargain prices almost 20 years ago, and the discs were physically fine, but 2 discs had bad mastering, if you wanna call it that. For whatever reason, they transferred sped-up versions of about 2 episodes that had been done that way for TV broadcast years before. Anyway, a simple email to the company resulted in getting the 2 corrected discs sent to me with no questions asked -- they didn't need any "proof" that I had actually bought the sets. And it was impressive that they corrected the "mastering" error so quickly.
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline NoahYoung





I'll repeat here some of what I just wrote in another thread:

Even back in the early 70s, the people in charge of releasing Stooges shorts for home viewing in Super 8 did not know what they were doing. They released HOT STUFF and CREEPS instead of FUELIN' AROUND and THE GHOST TALKS, respectively. Notice how it says "unedited", but THREE SAPPY PEOPLE is edited. They later released A BIRD IN THE HEAD, but that one was edited, too! (The box it came in said "unedited"!)

They released a few more than what is listed on that box -- I created a thread a few years ago with a complete list: https://threestooges.net/forums/index.php/topic,6998.0.html

I guess we can all argue about the great shorts they didn't issue back in the 70s as well. So 50 years or so later nothing has changed!

BTW, since I wrote that thread about Super 8 releases, I now have all the "uncut" Super 8 sound ones released officially by Columbia's Home Movie division except WOMAN HATERS. Any time I've bid on it I lost and the selling price was through the roof -- I'm talking well over $100!
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Mark The Shark

I do understand it’s being released the way it was initially released in theaters due to the filming date Vs transition to widescreen.  That said - and this is one man’s opinion - I’d prefer it would be released by how it was actually filmed.  It looks much better.

I'm likely in the minority, but they should have just released them all in full frame. "Snow White And The Three Stooges" is one thing because it was actually filmed in Cinemascope, but when you're *cropping* the image for "OAR," I'm just like...no.


Offline NoahYoung

I'm likely in the minority, but they should have just released them all in full frame. "Snow White And The Three Stooges" is one thing because it was actually filmed in Cinemascope, but when you're *cropping* the image for "OAR," I'm just like...no.

I had always thought that all widescreen movies were shot with a scope or similar lens, then I found out that a few Disney animated features were filmed full-frame and then cropped for release -- sometimes with a special gate-mask in the projector. Films like THE JUNGLE BOOK are available on disc full-frame and cropped.

I'm in the camp that if it was captured on film, then I wanna see it! That being said, be prepared to see boom mics and other equipment or things you are not supposed to see. That obviously won't be the case with animated films.

One thing I definitely don't like is pan-and-scan -- but that's something that went the way of the woolly mammoth!
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz



Offline NoahYoung

Some good insight on this set:

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/the-three-stooges-collection-blu-ray-available-for-preorder.382754/page-19#post-5350701

All you really need to read is the last paragraph:
Quote
This set is almost must-have, but not quite. It looks great. But for the price? The complete dvd set wins, case closed.
Not surprised.

Note that the guy who wrote that also collects Stooges on film!
 :D
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

I had to cancel my pre-order because Amazon keeps pushing back my delivery estimate. I don't think Amazon is going to get these in stock anytime soon. There was even a poster on another forum that said he pre-ordered this months ago on Amazon and still didn't receive his set.

It's all for the best anyway. Not sure I really want this set anyway. Would really be nice to watch these in HD, I admit, but I would also be disappointed that it's missing a lot of my favorite shorts. Like why did they butcher Shemp and only include 26 shorts?? I can't wrap my head around that!


Offline NoahYoung

I had to cancel my pre-order because Amazon keeps pushing back my delivery estimate. I don't think Amazon is going to get these in stock anytime soon. There was even a poster on another forum that said he pre-ordered this months ago on Amazon and still didn't receive his set.

It's all for the best anyway. Not sure I really want this set anyway. Would really be nice to watch these in HD, I admit, but I would also be disappointed that it's missing a lot of my favorite shorts. Like why did they butcher Shemp and only include 26 shorts?? I can't wrap my head around that!

I wonder if anyone at Sony reads this forum. I wonder if anyone at Sony even knows about this forum. I wonder if anyone at Sony actually has a brain.

Did I mention that nobody at Sony knows what they are doing regarding this release?

People were already on the fence about buying this set, now they can't even fulfill the orders, and people have canceled.

No one can wrap their head around anything that Sony has done with this release -- because if you unwrap Sony's head, you will find nothing -- they decided to leave out the brain, which is sitting in a room with the 90 Stooges shorts left off this set!
 >:D
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Larrys#1

It appears Sony made a very very limited quantity. Don’t know why. Doesn’t make sense.

I’m going pray and hope all 190 shorts will eventually be available on iTunes in HD to purchase. Even if it’s more compressed, I would rather prefer that over this butchered set.


Offline Larrys#1

No one can wrap their head around anything that Sony has done with this release -- because if you unwrap Sony's head, you will find nothing -- they decided to leave out the brain, which is sitting in a room with the 90 Stooges shorts left off this set!
 >:D

I can give them a brain tomorrow if I can find one small enough. What size hat do you wear, may I ask?  >:D


Offline Tony Bensley

Code: [Select]
I can give them a brain tomorrow if I can find one small enough. What size hat do you wear, may I ask?  >:D

I think Moe's hat size is 6 & 7/8s! Might be too big for the Sony numbskulls, though? ;)


CHEERS!  [3stooges]


Offline NoahYoung

I can give them a brain tomorrow if I can find one small enough. What size hat do you wear, may I ask?  >:D

Are they including A BIRD IN THE HEAD?

They are all moot points to me anyway, unless they include a free blu-ray player! [pie]
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline Tony Bensley

Are they including A BIRD IN THE HEAD?

They are all moot points to me anyway, unless they include a free blu-ray player! [pie]
Yes, they are and LOL!!  ;D

CHEERS!  [3stooges]


Offline NoahYoung

Yes, they are and LOL!!  ;D

CHEERS!  [3stooges]

Did you mean "Yes they are giving away a free blu-ray player?"  ;)

BTW, here's the guy at Sony in charge of the blu-ray release, taken while he was reading the comments on this forum:



Later, I went to visit him in his office to apologize about my comments here. This is what happened:




Regarding if they ever are put on iTunes:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8365864?sortBy=rank

Lots of back and forth on whether or not you can watch movies purchased forever. It's as clear as mud to me. All I know is that I can still watch my old films, because the projectors were built like tanks and are fairly easily maintained and repaired if you have any mechanical sense and are handy with basic tools like screwdrivers and allen wrenches.

For digital, whether you have a physical shiny disc, or have files stored on a hard drive, and assuming the physical media remains undamaged and/or is properly backed up, there's a chance you may not be able to view it in, say, 20 years. You need software to view it, and the old software may not run on new hardware and/or new operating systems. This could happen it the file format or codec is abandoned and there is no way to convert it to a new format. Else, you would have to have the source code for a media player, and a compiler for the language in which it is written, and that compiler needs to be compatible with the new hardware and operating system. If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. At the end of the day, your movies are a series on 1s and 0s that approximate what was put on film. The way they are arranged is coded, and you need to be able to decode it to view the movie. That's why a thousand years from now, a film buried in a time capsule has a better chance to be viewed by the person that found it than a blu-ray disc. You can hold a film up to the light, and you can see a series of images. What do you see when you hold a disc up to the light?

I long ago threw away floppy discs, because I no longer had hardware that could read them. Same thing can and will happen with DVDs and blu-ray discs. The films I still have and that still can be viewed were bought long before I bought any of those floppy discs. And my projectors are older than any VHS player or DVD player I had that's now in a landfill.

What's that old saying? I think it's something like, "You keep buying and rebuying music and movies you like in new formats, then you die."
Burt Lancaster was too short!
- The Birdman of Alcatraz


Offline falsealarms

I keep waiting for a full-fledged review of this set to pop up, somewhere, but it seems not even those who review discs have gotten any copies yet.


Offline Larrys#1

It's so crazy Sony would even go through all this trouble to release this set, but not rollout enough copies. This whole thing is just messed up!