Beauty and the Beast DVD

[Grunches]

Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King are all Platium Edition are all great even the 2nd disc. I wonder if Mickeymouseboy will watch them on the second disc.
Also I hope Aladdin will be great and no lame art cover please.

I always look at the whole DVD.

I hope there is no lame art cover for Aladdin

[diebob21]

i love the beauty and the beast DVD!! but i think Lion king dvd is better :

[2099net]

Been away, so I'm catching up here:

I agree, though I'm more warm towards the DVD than most people. I felt that everything we really needed we got-extensive galleries, trailers and tv spots, pencil and camera tests, commentary, etc. I felt it was a great DVD package. Perhaps not up to Snow White/Fantasia/Atlantis quality, but good enough. Basically, Snow White went head deep into the waters of making of, B&tB went a nice, solid waist deep, and TLK merely dipped its toes while trying to draw attention to other things *coughanimalkingdomandbroadwaycough*.

Given the fact that B&tB is a more modern film, I 100% refuse to believe that there was actually less in the Disney archives than there is for Snow White or Fantasia.

The galleries are disappointing. I'm sure they only show a fraction of what was available. Some trailers are missing. There is virtually no archive footage (what about the TV "Making of" - Snow White and Fantasia are more interesting because we can compare the old material to the new) and the history of the production is skipped over. Where's all the information on the live action film Disney were originally planning? Where's the information on the initial treatment without the enchanted staff?

B&tB is a good DVD. It's better than most. The thing is, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Disney to release better and better DVDs as time advances, rather then releasing worse and worse DVDs. I'm sure none of you expect the Return of the King: EE DVD to be full of games, half-hearted galleries and brief featurettes that stop just as the interviewee starts to say something interesting. There would be an outcry. So why not for the Disney DVDs that de-evolve?

Now Cinderella is apparently pushed back (again) I worry what the eventual DVD will be like. The longer it goes unreleased, the more I expect LD features to be missing, either replaced with "all-new" documentary snippits lasting 2 or 3 minutes or children's games.

Given Disney's early DVD success, B&tB and LK are some of the most disappointing DVD releases on the format - both promised so much, but gave us nothing more than average (or slightly above average).

[Prince Adam]

They'd better not mess up the Cinderella release. Honestly, I think it is the most beloved of all the Walt-era films, and it was one of his favourites. It deserves a SE, not Platinum release, and should have awesome, enchanting cover art.

[Jake Lipson]

Okay, guys, here's my theroy.

With Snow White, most of the original creative team has passed away, so instead of conducting new interviews and fluff, they HAD to go back and raid the vault. So we got a quality release. We'll call this kind of Platinum a Classic Platinum for right now.

With Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, those are modern films (and unlike Atlantis they were huge successes) so they could shoot new footage. And because they were successes, the Disney suits and other perticipants were satisfied with just sitting back and being self-congratulatory and eager to promote tie-ins and whatnot. We'll call this kind of Platinum a Diet Platinum.

However, after Aladdin - well, that's the last modern movie in the Platinum Collection, so's after that they'll have to raid the vaults again. Which means thatf Aladdin should be the last Diet Platinum and then we'll get back to the Classic Platinums a la Snow White and Sleeping Beauty SE.

It's sad, because they COULD do more with the modern films because all of the talent is still alive, but the fact that they are hurt the set more than anything else.

[Maerj]

Okay, guys, here's my theroy.

With Snow White, most of the original creative team has passed away, so instead of conducting new interviews and fluff, they HAD to go back and raid the vault. So we got a quality release. We'll call this kind of Platinum a Classic Platinum for right now.

Also don't forget that the Snow White DVD was so good because all they had to do was port over the extras from the LD Box Set. The extras for Snow White had already been done for them, in fact they left a couple minor extras off of the DVD. Same with Sleeping Beauty, I believe. Too bad they didn't port over more of the LD extras from the Lion King set.

[Joe Carioca]

From "Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast" by Bob Thomas:

Ollie Johnston recalls, "Probably before Cinderella, Walt asked us to read "Beauty and the Beast'" and come up with some ideas for it. The story guys may have done some work on it, but I never heard any more about it. If there had been any work done on "Beauty and the Beast" during Walt's time, it is lost to history. Not a trace remains in the studio's seemingly infallible Archives.

[Disneykid]

Jake explained it perfectly. I believe that every release after Aladdin will be Snow White-quality due to the fact that Disney will have to base their documentaries and featurettes on archive footage and film historian interviews. My addition to Jake's theory is that with Beauty and the Beast, Disney didn't have any mondo laserdisc to fall back on, so they essentially had to start from scratch when producing the DVD. With Snow White, they got most of the supplements off the laserdisc. The only exception to this is The Lion King, where Disney apparantly decided new features were better than using older ones. The only Platinum DVD's left that can have features ported over from laserdiscs are Cinderella and Pinocchio. Every other title will have to rely a lot on new footage as well as some archived material.