When I was a lad, I liked nothing better than watching Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. I watched them on TV, especially for about a year in L.A. when one of our local kid show hosts, Engineer Bill, ran their shorts every afternoon on Channel 9. I watched them at whatever revival houses ran their work. I even bought 8mm silent movies of them from companies like Blackhawk Films and Atlas Films, and watched them over and over and over. That's the box for an Atlas Film above, scanned right off one I bought when I was ten or eleven. Most Atlas their offerings came in two versions — the 50 ft. reel, which gave you a little less than four minutes of the movie, and the 200 ft. reel which ran around fifteen. This one was Come Clean, a two-reeler edited down to about a fourth of one reel.
As I found, even badly-edited, chopped-up, fuzzy-imaged Stan and Ollie was better than no Stan and Ollie. It's more than a little amazing that we can now own entire movies on DVD…but back then, we had to settle for this.