Fans of Laurel and Hardy (I am one) have long lamented their fate on home video. It's been a frustrating litany of sporadic releases, most of which didn't do a very good job of packaging, presentation or promotion. Sometimes, the issuers have managed to get one of those three things right but never quite all three. You can buy the complete works of Cheech and Chong on DVD. But Stan and Ollie? Well, not in the United States, you can't.
Just to rub it in, a superb set was issued a few years ago in the United Kingdom. It contains darn near everything The Boys did as a team, lovingly restored and presented on 21 (!) DVDs, totalling about a thousand minutes of my favorite comedians. That's the good news. The bad news for most of us is that it's a PAL/Region 2 release. The DVDs will play in Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Vatican City, Yemen and Yugoslavia…
…but not, grumble grumble, the United States. Osama bin Laden can watch this set. We can't.
So American lovers of Laurel and Hardy had a few options, one being to move to one of those countries. Another has been to purchase a region-free DVD player. They aren't expensive. WalMart sells the Durabrand-1002, which claims it'll play anything from anywhere, for $24.88 and other brands are available for not all that much more.
Third option? You could always do without. If you've done without this far, the following might interest you…
Laurel & Hardy – The Collection has now been seriously discounted. It originally sold for £199.99 (about $333 USD) and it's now down to £32.98 (around $55 USD). Here's a link to order it from Amazon UK.
There's a fellow skulking around comic book conventions offering a bootleg version of this set, converted to NTSC/Region 1 but you don't want that. First of all, it's a bootleg. Second of all, I saw the picture quality of one disc and it looked like Stan and Ollie were trapped in one of those multi-layer Jell-O parfait desserts with different color streaks throughout. You're much better off buying the genuine article plus a region-free player…especially since there's no reason to believe we'll soon have a playable-in-the-U.S.-of-A. version on this thing soon. If and when we do, it'll cost a lot more than $55 plus the cost of a region-free player.
Thanks to David Kirkpatrick for letting me know about this.