7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Spanky, Buckwheat, Porky and all of the Little Rascals at their hilarious best! The Gang has never looked this good - restored, in color and now available in this stunning stereoscopic 3D transfer!
Director: Robert F. McGowanComedy | 100% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 MVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Blu-ray 3D
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 2.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Hal Roach’s legendary Our Gang series, which was renamed The Little Rascals for television in a rather arcane set of rights issues involving Roach and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, debuted in 1922 in the silent film era with the short called One Terrible Day. An astounding 22 years later, the final film in the series, Dancing Romeo, appeared in the spring of 1944. Over the course of those two decades-plus, 220 shorts were produced, offering an adoring public the then unusual chance to see both Caucasian and African American children appearing together as more or less equals. Many of the Our Gang cast became very famous, at least for a time, including such standouts as Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer and Ernie “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison. Notable stars like Jackie Cooper passed through the ranks of the Gang at one time or another, but in the unintended irony department, when replacement cast members had to be found and huge national searches were undertaken, icons like Shirley Temple were passed over, forced to seek their fame and fortune elsewhere. If the rights issues that led to Our Gang being redubbed The Little Rascals were rather labyrinthine, they pale in comparison to what has happened during the home video era, where a number of different labels have brought out various versions of the shorts on VHS, DVD and, now, Blu-ray. Legend Films gained its foothold in the home video market with its colorized versions of various films, including several Our Gang comedies, and it has now revisited five of those colorized shorts by sprucing them up with the other technological treat the label is well known for, 3D post-conversion.
The Best of The Little Rascals in 3D is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Legend Films imprint 3D Classics with both an
MVC (3D) and AVC (2D) encoded 1080p transfer in 1.34:1. Legend tends to do nicely understated work with their
colorizing, as evidenced by several previous releases like March of the Wooden Soldiers and The Ray Harryhausen Double Feature. The label tends to
work with public domain material, but it also tends to feature transfers culled from decent elements, or at least elements
that have undergone significant restoration. The five shorts here are all reasonably free of age related wear and tear, and
the basic image is okay looking, within reasonable expectations. The colorization is perhaps a bit more pallid than is typical
even of Legend releases, which have never really slathered on the color to the point of making a previous black and white
film look like a Paintshop nightmare.
While the same care seems to have been granted these Little Rascals shorts in terms of their 3D post-conversion as
was shown in Legend's commendable work on The Three Stooges in 3D, for whatever reason, the results are somewhat less vivid here, with
markedly less depth and dimensionality. The best sequences here tend to be those that take place out of doors, where
depth of field increases exponentially and foreground objects are more clearly differentiated from those in the background.
It's perhaps instructive to note that taking the 3D glasses off while watching these shorts in 3D mode reveals very little
stereoscopic tinkering to the image, which may account for some of the lack of dimensionality.
The Best of The Little Rascals in 3D features a lossless mono track delivered via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. There are some occasional skips and missing syllables in these features, but overall, things sound reasonably spry, given the age of the shorts. Fidelity is about what you'd expect, with boxy, tinny sounding music but better, full bodied sound in the dialogue. There's noticeable hiss and some high frequency distortion at play in many of these shorts, but it's not overly distracting. Dynamic range is negligible.
No supplements of any kind are included on this Blu-ray disc.
I'm not quite sure what the market is for these hoary old comedy classics in 3D, but for those who want to see Spanky, Alfalfa and the rest of Our Gang leaping out at them (if only minimally), this set is an interesting if somewhat problematic compilation that includes a couple of real winners along with two entries that may serve more as "instructional videos" on how far we've come in terms of race relations and stereotyping. The basic image quality here is fine, if uninspiring, but the 3D conversion, while not presenting any real technical problems, also doesn't really provide a whale of a lot of depth and dimensionality.
1936-1949
2010
2021
2012
2011
2010
2012
2014
2014
Movie-Only
2011
2012
2011
2010
DVD Packaging
2012
Family Icons
2006
2002
2004
2016
1999
Three-disc Edition
2009