The Fixer Uppers is the name of a Laurel and Hardy film that's not on this great new release called Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations. Here's the simplest review I can give it: If you're a fan of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, you will want this. You will want it a lot. It's two of their feature films (some would say their two best) plus many of their short comedies, all miraculously restored. You probably have seen these films but you've never seen them look or sound this good.
That alone would be enough to warrant buying these on DVD or, as I did, Blu-ray. But the set also comes with extras galore, including 2,500 rare photos and documents, several commentary tracks, trailers, interviews with folks who worked with Stan and Ollie, plus various odds 'n' ends. In truth, I have not made it through the almost-nine hours of material on this set but I've already gotten more than my money's worth.
I talked about this last night on the webcast with Leonard Maltin, who loves this set as much as I do. We're close to the same age. We first experienced Laurel and Hardy mostly on TV, which meant watching bad prints with many splices, missing scenes, garbled sound tracks, commercial interruptions, etc. Those of us who loved old movies back then put up a lot of that, plus the fact that we could only see the films we craved when some TV station deigned to show them. And you had to watch them when they ran them, not when it was convenient for you. You couldn't even go to the bathroom unless you could get there and back during a commercial break.
I was not the only Laurel and Hardy lover who had the following fantasy: A room in my home with a screen, a projector and shelves with one print of every Laurel and Hardy film. At the time, that fantasy involved 16mm films, which were hard to find and maintain, and I was sometimes clumsy threading them into a projector. You could have spent years and way more money that any of us had and not make that fantasy come true…and the prints probably wouldn't have been that wonderful if we could even have found them.
We did not dream of home video and digital restoration. You have no idea how it pleases me to see these films looking this good.
I have one teensy-tiny microscopic quibble with one thing about this set and I'll address it in another message here shortly. It in no way should prevent you from buying this magnificent creation which I expect to be raving about even more as I savor the rest of the nine hours. At a time when the news is usually bleak and in some ways getting bleaker, it's nice to have something that makes me so happy. Thank you to the Fixer-Uppers who fixed-up that which was in need of fixing-up.