AIRPORT 4K UHD Box Set - September

[AndyDursin]

No TV cuts regrettably...maybe Arrow or whoever will take a look overseas at doing them.

[Monterey Jack]

Sleeve packaging…

[Eric Paddon]

I am passing not only because they don't include the TV cuts, but because I have ZERO desire to listen to any commentary that Julie Kirgo is part of or any liner notes that she is the author of. Get set for her to go off about feminist subtexts or a lot of discourse on abortion for the first film.

Honestly, the more I look at Kino's screwups starting with the Columbo release where they yanked commentaries I WANTED to hear and keep shoveling insipid commentaries on their other film releases and now this one where they drop the ball on the bonus content that should have been an obvious no-brainer, the more ticked off I get. I no longer take part in their sales stuff and I'm through with blind buys of their titles for the sake of supporting the label.

[AndyDursin]

Preorder on the Kino site is very agreeable at $79

If you want to wait for overseas releases, which I have to assume will happen because these are popular titles, it's possible the TV cuts could pop up there. Kino for whatever reason has never been a label that's dabbled into the TV cuts. Other people have, but they pretty much will just release "whatever was on the previous studio disc" and that's it 99% of the time.

[Eric Paddon]

Preorder on the Kino site is very agreeable at $79

If you want to wait for overseas releases, which I have to assume will happen because these are popular titles, it's possible the TV cuts could pop up there. Kino for whatever reason has never been a label that's dabbled into the TV cuts. Other people have, but they pretty much will just release "whatever was on the previous studio disc" and that's it 99% of the time.

It didn't use to be that way. Kino in the past would give us alternate cuts of key releases like the theatrical and TV cut versions of the "Buck Rogers" pilot and they also delayed their release of "SOS Titanic" to find the original longer ABC TV cut which was a major find (they also gave us both cuts of "One Million Years BC" too, mindful as they were of the differences there). This approach is just cheap on all levels and I especially don't want to hear a Julie Kirgo commentary or read any essay by her.

Since Via Vision/Imprint has been doing a lot of Universal catalog material I would rate them the best hope at this stage to do something right. For now, I'll get by with what I have.

[AndyDursin]

This approach is just cheap on all levels and I especially don't want to hear a Julie Kirgo commentary or read any essay by her.

They're charging $20 per-movie (in the box set) for 4K UHDs carrying brand new, remastered scans of these movies. That's a good deal whether the extras are lame or not. And to be fair, it's a lot more than Imprint usually does, when they charge Criterion or Arrow-level pricing for discs that many times are HD masters that are 10-20 years old. None of these boutique labels has really expended less effort collectively than they have (I assume the money they charge must go to the people they recruit for supplements) from a technical angle, and only recently have they started turning that around. And I like Imprint discs still -- I always give Imprint credit for curating catalog content into interesting collections, but it took them a while to realize releasing scans of HD masters that were years old was not a prudent idea.

As far as Julie Kirgo, politics aside, she knows her history at least and I find her enjoyable to listen to. Otherwise I'm mostly tired of these talking head participants that routinely get hired (does Alexandra Heller-Nicolas work on every label's disc?) who are would-be "intellectuals" and film theory "historians" who overanalyze a movie and generally provide a viewpoint as far to the left as it gets. Many times they're not even informed...but at least we seem to have broken out of the COVID era where every disc had a Daniel Kremer commentary or visual essay.

Regardless, I find it easy to glance at these things and never pay attention to them, nor do they detract my enjoyment of watching a movie.

[Eric Paddon]

The TV cut of "Airport 77" though is something that can't be dismissed as unnecessary because in all honesty, that version is more comprehensible to me as a narrative than the theatrical one is. For years the only times I ever saw the film was in its TV version because NBC showed it about six times between 79 and 83 collectively and when I saw the theatrical version there were so many narrative gaps I felt like I was watching a film where someone had pressed the pause button and missed things. I do have my own off-air versions of it, but I wanted to have an official one at last to go alongside those efforts that have also received commercial release ("King Kong", "Two Minute Warning" and even the foreign release of "Midway" had the TV cut which I was then able to burn back to regular Blu-Ray)

If they'd done '77 without the expanded "Concorde" (which is a bad film either way) I would have been okay with that.

[AndyDursin]

I do wonder if the actual masters for those are gone because a) they havent been broadcast in forever and b) they've never been attached to any home video release. Even some of the off-air versions are not the best quality, which is odd because they used to be shown so many times.

[Eric Paddon]

That is certainly possible, though in that case if Shout! could include an old TV airing of "Two Minute Warning" as a bonus, Kino could do likewise with "Airport '77" since there are decent looking ones out there. All they'd have to do is make an effort.