As I'm sure I've said here many a time, my favorite entertainers in the whole wide world have been and probably always will be Mr. Stanley Laurel and Mr. Oliver Hardy…and I'll tell you how much I love them. I'll even watch them in the late features they made for M.G.M. At their worst, I still love them.
Naturally, I want to know everything I can about them and many years ago, a devout Laurel and Hardy scholar named Randy Skretvedt put everything there was to know about their movies into a superb book called Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies.
I didn't think a better book about them would ever be written and I was wrong. A few years later, a much better book about them appeared. It was the updated version of Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies. Whereas most "updated" editions merely give you a new chapter or two and some corrections, this really was an updated edition with loads of new information. Almost everything in the first edition had been revised and improved.
So then I was sure that a better book about Stan and Ollie would never be written…and once more, I was wrong. Randy's about to bring out The Ultimate Edition, which is bigger and contains 50% more text and quadruple the number of photos as were in previous editions. It also has generous chunks of script excerpts including deleted or never-filmed scenes and there's new data on all their past movies and…well, if you're a Laurel and Hardy buff you've got to get this, even if you have previous Skretvedt volumes.
The book will be out next June but it's being offered right now on Kickstarter. They're already close enough to meeting their goal that it's surely going to happen so if you're as excited about this as I am, you'll want to scurry over there and get your order in. I did. Here's a little promotional video…