Judging from that most accurate barometer of the American mood — my e-mail — I'm not the only fan of the obscure comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. Many of you are hankering for their movies to become more legally available on DVD in this country and many of you possess and enjoy bootlegs or imports. Some of you have region-free DVD players and so have ordered the new British release of Hellzapoppin', the cover of which is seen above left. A few of you even own the local, obscure VHS release depicted next to it.
As Joe Dante and others have reminded me, some of their films have more complicated legal situations than the norm because they were based, as least nominally, on their Broadway shows. Often, when studios acquired the underlying rights in the days before TV exhibition, the contracts were for limited periods that expired. That was the thing that kept the Marx Brothers movie, Animal Crackers, unavailable for years. It was based on a play and Paramount had only purchased the rights to the play — or maybe it was to the songs in the play — for a few decades, not in perpetuity. A whole new deal had to be worked out to liberate the film from the estates and the lawyers, which meant that someone had to think there was enough of a demand to make it worth the expense.
In the case of Hellzapoppin', there seems to have been an added complication because of the 1977 stage revival. The legendary producer Alexander Cohen thought Broadway would welcome a new version and purchased the rights to mount one, even though just about all he was purchasing was the title. He then signed the legendary Jerry Lewis to star in it and the result was one of the legendary troubled productions that toured but never made it to the Great White Way. (A "troubled production" is hard to define but when the producer and star are making daily death threats towards one another, you have one.) Anyway, the deal Cohen made apparently kept the film off American TV for some time.
But such details are renegotiated all the time, especially now when there's a buck to be made on home video. Someone's made a deal to put some of the Olsen-Johnson body o' work out in some forms and venues. They can and probably will make one to put out DVDs in the Land of the Free here. One of these days.