I don't know if this has popped up anywhere else yet, but Donald S.Bruce posted the following on the Spaghetti Western Web Board (an outstanding site) some days ago.

"The restored Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and Duck You Sucker DVDs will be release in Europe around April and in the U.S. in the summer of 2005. Just finished the supplements and damn happy to be done. I know Aldo will be in the supplements as they interviewed at my house. Chris Frayling is in town to do some narration tracks. We will meet with MGM and Chris Monday and get some better dates for Leone Exhibit starting in August 2005. Chris Frayling is doing narration for The Good, The Bad and Ugly with the hope that they will re-release the film PROPERLY in its right state later, although Sony bought MGM we will keep our fingers crossed.
Have seen the completed films and appear to have the missing scenes restored as well as the A.B.C. forward with Harry Dean Stanton in Fistful Of Dollars.
Loads of unpublished stills will be on the supplements as well."

The SWWB is worth reading at the following link below:

http://disc.server.com/Indices/160642.html

Doesn't Warner still control pre-1978 MGM titles? I hope so. By the way, I sure wish that they would release THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES in the US. That one has never even been released on VHS.

Yet another release of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY!!?

Here's hoping that the soundtrack is restored so that the gunshots sound like the ones we all know and love (as every Spaghetti Western fan knows, "Every gun has its own tune...").

Glad to hear that Frayling is on board for the commentary - I know that some commentators found his track to ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST a bit stuffy, but I found it passionate and fascinating.

Can't wait for this and the other Leone westerns...

Yes, but these Leone films weren't MGM releases; they were United Artists releases. And MGM (or whatever entity it will become after the buyout) owns the UA library.

You're correct about the westerns being UA, and Leone's uncredited THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII was also UA. However, COLOSSUS OF RHODES was MGM, so Warner controls the rights on that title.

Well, I'm glad somebody finally found the missing, oft-asked about ABC prologue. Not that it belongs in the film, but it is a curiosity and one of the odder examples of network tampering.

Is it , possibly, the oddest? And the first, feature-wise?

Networks were less practiced in those days with tampering to make things suitable for family audiences. They must have been. This ABC presentation may have been groundbreaking in bringing adult fare into the living room (a point which shouldn't be underestimated, there was a family-theater risk and experiment involved, possibly unprecedented, and paving the way for future FCC offendability standards), but it reeked of cluelessness as to how to do it. Monte Hellman or not, the prologue stuck out like a sore thumb even to a kid who hadn't seen the movie yet - the over the shoulder with someone who was obviously not Eastwood , obviously "not acting". Not till I saw the stand-in for Lugosi in an Ed Wood movie would I receive that special weird sensation again of 'not belonging' to the film, the 'insert' maneuver.. The aesthetic , such as it is, belongs to racy movies padded to play it safe in potentially troubling markets with some kind of morally squaring rationalization pasted in. That's the only model these network bozos had to fall back on, I suspect.

Can you think of other movies this 'grown up' screwed around with in similar ways for TV before this date?

I can't answer your last question, but maybe you or someone else remembers when the Bond movies started playing on television. I have some vague memory of GOLDFINGER being cut on network tv and if it and the other early Bond's preceded the airing of FISTFUL, this is perhaps where the network(s) began making grown-up movies "safe". The FISTFUL prologue did stick out but I think more because no one had ever seen it before. I've lost count of how many times I'd seen FISTFUL in theaters and drive-ins before seeing it the first time on television and I ended up thinking I had seen something that had been restored to the movie to pad it out because so much had been cut, including part of the opening credits. I don't think I've ever seen a favorite movie butchered so badly. It truly reeked of paranoia on the part of the network and I was both stunned and dismayed as scene after familiar scene kept getting cut off before any violence was shown and kept thinking of all those people who were seeing FISTFUL for the first time and imagining what they must have been saying ("What happened? What the HELL HAPPENED?:huh: ) ("What a STOOPID movie" : :angry: ) ("See if there's anything good on the other channel?")

I asked Monte Hellman about the FISTFUL rumors, and he confirmed that his prologue would be included on the forthcoming DVD. It's actually quite a fascinating sequence - Monte even remade it in his film CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37.

One of the earliest examples of network tampering that comes to mind is Joseph Losey's SECRET CEREMONY, which I believe was given a new framing story that defined the main narrative as a fantasy being related to a psychiatrist!

The Fistful Frayling audio commentary has already been passed through the BBFC in the UK. The UK distributor is MGM (same as the current one for this film).