The Complete Show Boat

[Lino]

Back in the LD days, such a collection was issued. Here is a review:

Combining every rendition of Show Boat at their disposal, MGM/UA Home Video is releasing a four-platter box set entitled The Complete Show Boat (ML104870, $125). Included are another reissue of the 1951 Show Boat directed by George Sidney, which MGM/UA has released twice previously (May 89, Nov 91), the outstanding 1936 Show Boat directed by James Whale, which was previously issued by the Voyager Company (Jan 90), a sort of complete presentation of the 1929 Show Boat , directed by Harry A. Pollard, excerpts of which were included on the Voyager disc, and the Show Boat segment from the 1946 Jerome Kern biopic, Till the Clouds Roll By , released in its entirety by MGM/UA in Sep 90. (The 1929 and 1936 films were produced by Universal Pictures and were bought by MGM when the color remake was first conceived.)

Read on.

[whaleallright]

In the meantime, there's this.

[Lino]

This would be very desirable. But I suspect the holdup is that the 51 Sidney version is in desperate need of restoration - ideally the three strip Ultrarez treatment. Aproper resto of this should also give us the three vocal tracks for Gardner's Loving that Man - her own voice, the present dubbee and the great great Lena Horne's version.

You can find a clip of Ava Gardner singing that song on That's Entertainment III. And I can't imagine why they decided to dubb her -- she sounded great!

And this, from a poster on HTF:

"1929 SHOWBOAT DISCS FOUND

The 1929 version of SHOWBOAT was partially reconstructed with most, but not all, of the soundtrack discs for a 1990's laserdisc set. Several reels had no surviving sound, and excerpts from existing discs were used to fill in the gap. Among the missing were discs for reels 9 and 11. Both were found this summer and are now held by the Project. We will make them available to Warner Home Video when they assemble their planned 2007 DVD set of all three versions of SHOWBOAT (1929, 1936 and 1951) to commemorate the Broadway show's 80th anniversary. The newly discovered discs include dialogue, music and singing throughout, so are a significant find."

Got this from The Vitaphone Project Website. We probably wouldn't get this Show Boat collection until November 2007 since that would mark the 80th anniversary.

[Jeff]

This is already mentioned in the distinct possibilities section of the "forthcoming" thread. Here is what George Feltenstein said in an interview earlier this year.

Well, it's my plan and hope to do something I did on laserdisc, years and years ago, which is called The Complete Show Boat and it had the 1929 part-talkie version and then the 1936 version and then the 1951 version which we already have out but is in dire need of a restoration. Happily when we did the laserdisc in 1994 we were missing some of the sound discs from the part-talkie version and had to actually use cutting continuity to subtitle those reels where we didn't have sound and just run basic music underneath it. But collector-friends of the company came up with another Vitaphone disc that had over 20 minutes of dialogue which we didn't have so we'll have a lot more of the 1929 Show Boat audio when we come out with this again.

[shearerchic]

Yeah, and on Amazon it says "not yet released" for the 1936 version. You are able to request an e-mail notification. This means it's on the way.

[justeleblanc]

I only wish

[shearerchic]

Why are you wishing. they said 2007 anyway? I was just giving an update. It's been from past experiences that they're right.

[justeleblanc]

There's no relationship between signing up for notification and DVD releases. David Lynch's Lost Highway should be a good enough example. Certainly someone else on this forum will back me up on this.

[Lino]

Well, normally I never take as granted a title is being released soon on DVD by this kind of page. They're just taking notice of just how many people are interested in this title. It's kind of like a "voting" for a particular title. If it gets enough "votes", it might get a release in the future. But I have "voted" for other titles in the past and it was only years later that they got a release, so I'm skeptical on this one too.

On the other hand, pages like these where you don't get to "vote" for them, are usually more indicative that a title is forthcoming. And this, I have seen it happen often.

But who knows? Let's just hope I'm wrong and you're right, shearchic because I have been waiting far too long for those Esther Williams titles to come out, anyway.

[shearerchic]

Well the Esther Williams set was supposed to come out this year, but it was bumped to next year. Red Dust and hold your man are "currently unavailable" on Amazon so I take it those are for sure titles in the Harlow set.