Anybody checked out the Jerry Lewis DVDs yet? I just glanced at The Disorderly Orderly very quickly and the quality seemed pretty good but I wasn't blown away. I expected there to be more extras. This one only had some outtakes and deleted material but some of the discs have comentaries.

By the way, Best Buy was apparently having an unadvertised sale since the ones I bought on Saturday rang up at $8.49. The cashier said that was OK. Don't know if this will still be true after their change-over on Sunday.

I haven't watched all the new Jerry Lewis DVD's but the ones I have watched are mostly pretty good quality but they are far from stunning. I don't think Paramount put too much money into any kind of restorations on these titles.

The extras are interesting with lots of deleted scenes and bloopers and things like that. Jerry has his friend, Steve Lawrence, with him for the commentaries and they make a good team. Jerry has always been prone to gross exaggerations about his movies but he seems to have toned that down a little now to more realistic statements but don't believe everything he says 100%. I think these 10 releases are titles that Jerry owns completely or is partners with Paramount.

It's nice to see "The Stooge" on DVD but that makes only 2 Martin & Lewis movies that are now on DVD which includes the public domain "At War with the Army". I assume that there will be more since the top of the Stooge DVD says "The Martin & Lewis Collection". It will be cause for celebration when the rest of them are released. And I hope Paramount does justice to them, especially the color ones which are eye-popping if presented correctly.

First of all, thanks for bringing Mobius back, Todd.

I'm surprised to read these remarks because all of the Lewis discs I've watched so far, with the exception of THE PATSY, have been stunning. That would be THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (the ace in this deck, as expected), THE LADIES MAN, THE BELLBOY, THE ERRAND BOY and THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY, so far. The latter is not a stunning movie, granted, but the presentation was exemplary. THE PATSY's problem is that it was composed for 1.66 and there are some headroom problems in the anamorphic cropping.

Have either of the other posters in this thread seen the discs on an HDTV monitor in proper anamorphic? I ask because that's how I saw them, and I was blown away by the detail in them, as well as the color, the sense of depth in their compositions, and the 5.1 sound mix of PROFESSOR. I don't mean to sound snobby about it, but without anamorphic playback, I can understand how the discs might look unspectacular or even dated -- but take my word, there's a lustre here that took me by surprise and showed me how important colors and textures and dimension are to Lewis' comedic craft. And to see THE LADIES MAN and THE BELLBOY on a big screen, especially, adds something very special to the big rooming house set and the big hotel location.

The extras are pretty remarkable, too. I was very angry with the PROFESSOR track because Jerry promises to tell the story about the Jennifer character, an oath which had me sitting on the edge of my chair for the last third of the movie -- and then he forgot or failed to keep it. The outtakes are incredible; PROFESSOR has a great bowling alley gag that should have been left in, as well as a Prof. Kelp screen test where the character has a different look.

In short, I was excited to look forward to these releases and, for the most part, I'm excited by them.

I picked up a few of the new Lewis DVDs on Friday at Best Buy, and noticed as well that they rang up at $8.49. I dropped by a different Best Buy on Saturday and picked up a few more, and they rang up at the same price. Strangely enough, I know at least one other person who grabbed several of these at yet another local Best Buy, and his rang up at the marked price of $9.99. I haven't had time to watch any of them yet, as I've been spending most of my spare time glued to the baseball playoffs, but I'll be surprised if they're not a major improvement over the old laserdiscs.

I'm also hoping that the "Martin & Lewis Collection" banner on THE STOOGE is a harbinger of more titles to come in the series.

Dave

Nice to be back.

I'm keen on grabbing a few of the new Lewis discs, but my personal pick (after NUTTY) is THE ERRAND BOY, a real favourite of mine. The 'Chairman of the Board' sequence is an all-time favourite. It's good that Lewis got round to participating in new S.E's of these films while he was still active and able to do so.

Does THE NUTTY PROFESSOR sport a new transfer as I'm not sure I can justify (or afford) a purchase for the extras alone, especially after reading the commentaries had a lot of dead air?

I bought LADIES MAN, DISORDERLY ORDERLY, ERRAND BOY. I've only watched LADIES MAN and sampled the others. ERRAND has some big scratches during the opening helicopter flybys over and the opening titles look too soft but few minutes I've watched after that looked fine. ORDERLY and LADIES MAN look really great with rich and deep colors. LADIES MAN looks as good as the beautiful print I saw at the Museum of Modern Art last year (part of the Positif retro for the 50th anniversary of the magazine that began the the French cineastes' enthusiasm for Jerry) with a full house of appreciative audience.

Extras-wise, the best of the batch is LADIES MAN with 2 deleted scenes and great outtakes and behind the scene stuff. I found the screen tests and the Jerry feeding chair demo footage to be quite revealing: Lewis berating a crew member to "get the hell out" of the shot and in the demo and the way he coaxed actresses were not too flattering... I've listened to 30 minutes of the commentary and there's lots of silence and too much Steve Lawrence laughing than relevant content from Lewis.

I can't swear that THE NUTTY PROFESSOR has been given a new transfer, as the previous release also had Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 mixes -- and looked and sounded spectacular. But the previous release hit stores priced at $19.95... so the new one, with the biggest wealth of extras of any of the titles (including a "making of," a general documentary about Lewis' solo career up to NUTTY, outtakes, bloopers, trailers, screen tests, etc), is definitely welcome.

While watching the new NUTTY disc, I noticed something I never had before -- which may indicate a superior transfer. As Prof. Kelp and Stella are talking after class, when Stella has asked to take her test at the end of the school day, look at the papers Kelp is holding. Drawn on the back sheet is a caricature of Lewis -- not the sort a student would draw of their teacher necessarily, but a pencil sketch of Lewis' own self caricature, which subsequently became his emblem.

Thanks Tim, I'll take a close look at the regular disc (I have the R2 PAL one) to see if I think any more can be squeezed out of the image.

I have many of the titles on LD, which offer full-screen presentations of the films; has anyone been able to see if the DVD's just crop off info top and bottom or add extra room on the sides? It would be nice not having to upgrade the likes of THE DELICATE DELINQUENT.

I'm really looking fwd to getting THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY which is one of my favourite JL films and which never made it to LD and I'll also be picking up THE BELLBOY. I'm in two minds about the likes of CINDERFELLA which contain an interesting scene or two but I don't recall being that successful as whole. It's a shame that there wasn't a box set which would have saved a lot of time and deliberation if not money!

I was very happy with the transfers on the Lewis films, but I noticed that the picture went soft every now and then during long shots in THE BELLBOY (e.g., when Jerry is walking through the massive theater in order to set up the chairs). It was a noticeable decline in image quality.

I'm very happy overall, with the extras and the commentaries (despite the "Jennifer" gaffe mentioned by Tim above), but I also noticed something on the short film about Jerry Lewis as a filmmaker included as an extra on THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. There are clips from ROCK-A-BYE BABY (directed by Frank Tashlin) including a contemporary interview with co-star Connie Stevens, and it's not one of the inital releases. I hope this indicates there are more DVDs to come in the series. (There are also several films in the current series not included in this mini-doc, but I assume that's because they are on the second part, which is on one of the DVDs I haven't seen yet.)

One of my favorite extras was the home movie footage of Jerry's bus tour to promote THE BELLBOY (narrated by his son Chris). Partly because it reminded me of Beatlemania (but on reflection, it's more like those crowds that used to follow Martin and Lewis), partly because it was interesting seeing all of the black kids in the crowd (more than you would see at an Elvis concert at the time), and partly because of the great double feature you could have seen then: THE BELLBOY / TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT. The other feature could have been TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE, but regardless, it's very evocative of the genre mixing double feature matinees I used to see as a kid in the sixties.