Image Entertainment is announcing a new DVD that will present the entirety of the three episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show on which Elvis Presley made his legendary appearances.
Well, not exactly.
I'm not sure if this will be mentioned on the DVD or not but there were a couple of non-Elvis segments on those episodes where there were legal clearance problems. They're not historically significant so they're being replaced on these DVDs with segments from other Sullivan programs. If you watch carefully, you may note Ed's wardrobe changing suddenly as he introduces them. The Will Jordan monologue on the January 6, 1957 episode is one of them. Will wasn't on that program but his spot has been edited in to replace one that couldn't be included.
These should be great DVDs for two reasons. One is that they're including all the other material for those of us who don't care all that much about Elvis. There's a spot with Carl "The Amazing" Ballantine. There's one with Señor Wences. There's Carol Burnett and Charles Laughton and a great musical number from the Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella. For those who don't care about such performances, the DVD producers are including a menu option to play only the Elvis songs. I wouldn't mind another option that said, "Play everything except Elvis."
The other selling point is that I've seen a preview of the video quality and it's incredible. The photo above left is not from the DVD. The video on the DVD has been processed by a new restoration process called Live Feed that makes it look like…well, like a live feed. It looks like Elvis is performing today, there's a black-and-white video camera on him and you're next door, watching him on a monitor. I'll try to post something about this amazing technique in the next week or two. It's salvaging old kinescopes and making them highly watchable today. After you see it, you'll want to join me in encouraging more companies to employ it. The video quality on some recent releases is disgraceful or, at least, not as fine as it could have been.
You can see the full listing of what's on these peachy DVDs over on this page at TV Shows on DVD, which is your one-stop source on the Internet for info on what old treasures of the cathode tube are coming out on DVD. It's a great place to find out that while you already bought all seven seasons of The West Wing individually, your completist tendencies will force you to also purchase the special "gift set" for yourself, even though it contains the same seven seasons, because it also has extra material available nowhere else. (I need to write more about that scam…)