COLUMBO Coming on Blu-Ray From Kino

[Eric Paddon]

Their first FB announcement did *not* mention the isolated music/FX tracks so Kino is to blame for making the rest of us think the last few days those were out. They might have toned down the outrage if they'd made sure to stress *only* the commentaries were impacted.

Last night I had decided not to get the set and even felt that Kino should cancel it outright to get the legal issue straightened out. With the score/FX tracks back in, I suppose I can live with the release as is, but I still wish they would postpone it to work this out. Scott Skelton is talking about rolling over the commentaries into print in a new book to rival the Night Gallery one, but honestly I'd rather not see that because the Night Gallery book while impressive is very clunky and unwieldy to go through especially when there's no digital version and I really wouldn't be able to access the material with ease in a giant sized book with no digital counterpart (anyone ever tried to go through the "James Bond Archive" book???) Plus, Columbo has had two very good books already and I'm not as interested in a book. I wanted to hear these things on the episodes and I still feel screwed we're not going to get them.

[mkaroly]

I don't recall any commentaries on the DVD set I have (could be wrong though), so I may buy it depending on price. Would have been nice to have them, but I don't consider this as big a loss as if commentaries had been on the DVDs and were not ported over onto the new Blu-Ray discs. I hate when studios short change consumers in that way...so cheap.

Depending on price, I may have to wait for a sale.

[Eric Paddon]

It's because the DVDs were so bare-bones that Columbo buffs like me were really looking forward to hearing commentaries on all 45 episodes. For me, "Columbo" is one of the best TV series of all time and deserved that kind of treatment and now it's been lost due to some idiotic "technicality". I'm frankly a bit more disgusted that lesser titles like Kolchak and Outer Limits have the commentaries that Columbo will never have now.

[AndyDursin]

I don't recall any commentaries on the DVD set I have (could be wrong though), so I may buy it depending on price. Would have been nice to have them, but I don't consider this as big a loss as if commentaries had been on the DVDs and were not ported over onto the new Blu-Ray discs. I hate when studios short change consumers in that way...so cheap.

Depending on price, I may have to wait for a sale.

Their pre-order price is $104 on the website -- IMO that's a really good deal for 7 seasons (20 discs). They cut $30 off the price for the loss of the commentaries (which they recorded but had to throw away for reasons they're not telling us).

I'm interested in comparing this with my Japanese discs. These are older HD masters but they look good and, well, you never know. Even some of these 4K remasters get it wrong at times!

[mkaroly]

Well, that's cool that they aren't charging full price for the set since they yanked the commentaries off. Thanks for the head's up!

[Eric Paddon]

I've decided I am not going to get this when it comes out. They're going to have to knock the price down to no higher than $50 in order for me to get what I now regard as a compromised release that should have been cancelled so that commentaries could have been redone or the "technical" issue worked out to free them from the limbo they've been sent into. To me, this is an absolutely unacceptable end product given how iconic "Columbo" is in the history of TV.

I'm not going to hold Kino blameless for this. They should have anticipated this problem and not been put in this position and I'm also angry that they've imposed a total blackout as far as explaining why this has happened. Accordingly, they're not going to get my business on any future sales of theirs in which I've been doing nothing but blind buy movie titles that too often end up being lousy ones (or they often end up having awful commentaries on them. God almighty, how I wish some of the commentaries I've been forced to endure on their movies had been cancelled instead of these!). If they release a Grail item for me that will be different but they've lost all their goodwill with me as a result of this.

Yeah, I know this isn't the first time I've decided to "take a stand" regarding a company's practice that might come off as cutting one's nose to spite one's face or taking the angry curmudgeonly approach but at this stage, I don't care. The last chance to see one of my favorite TV shows done right on physical media was ruined and I'm not going to just passively accept that. I won't do a 100% boycott of Kino products, but my days of being generous with them in sales are over.

[AndyDursin]

Ya gotta do what ya gotta do, so to speak, but even without the features $100 is a perfectly good price for the amount of content in a set like this. IMO I can see it floating downwards a little during a sale period but I think $50 is unlikely to happen with a 20 disc set. (They sell BUCK ROGERS for about that, and it's a 9 disc set).

I paid $200 for the Japanese box years back -- IMO it was money well spent and, yes I realize it had the later movies on there, but I feel like I got my money's worth.

[mkaroly]

Maybe you dodged a bullet with the commentaries Eric - they might have descended into the kind of political stuff which you have been critical about on other commentary tracks from Kino. If that had been the case then I am guessing you would have been upset over having spent the money on the set. But, as Andy says, ya gotta do what ya gotta do!

[Eric Paddon]

Nope. I know these people who did the Columbo stuff (Gary Gerani, Mark Dawidziak, David Koenig) and their stuff would have been strictly about the making of the show in keeping with the fine work of theirs I've read over the years. Plus, I've noticed how TV series commentaries generally stay on-topic because at least with a TV-centered commentary you are also spared the tediously boring types of "auteur" focused commentaries on a director that have plagued many a Kino movie commentary as well ("Arabeseque" for instance).

It's more a sense of disappointment that a show I enjoy like this got screwed out of getting the kind of treatment it deserved on Blu-Ray. It's never going to get another chance to be done right and that's the tragedy.

But I'll issue this caveat. If someone gives the set to me for Christmas as a gift in which I am spared having paid for it, I won't throw it back in their faces.

[AndyDursin]

A review copy has found its way here and I can safely say the transfers are a night/day upgrade on the Japanese release. The color is the main enhancement, showing a whole other spectrum than the old HD masters the Japanese discs utilized. Something like DAGGER OF THE MIND goes from looking drab and flat to nearly cinematic, it's that much of a difference color wise, like a layer of fog was lifted off the image.

The included episode booklet is slender and I think it would've been helpful to put the episode names on the back of the cases or at least the discs -- as such you have to refer to the booklet to know where each episode is located -- but there's no quibble at all with these 4K remastered transfers.

[Eric Paddon]

I admit, I'm still upset about the commentaries. But I asked my sister to get it for me Christmas anyway. (at least this way it's for free!)

[AndyDursin]

I don't understand someone reviewing this set on Amazon and complaining about the commentaries without seeing the transfer quality but that's how it goes. Just don't buy it and move on IMO.

Preorder down to $88

[Eric Paddon]

So I got it for Christmas. The transfers are certainly an upgrade and the evidence of the original commercial fade-outs are more apparent than on previous releases of Universal TV shows where they tended to streamline those out. The isolated music F/X tracks are interesting in spots (like for instance when Jack Cassidy murders Barbara Colby in "Murder By The Book" it becomes a lot more chilling when you can see the scene without any of the final dialogue and hear the beginning of the cue) but as far as ripping them to make listenable stand-alone digital files of the unreleased scores, you can pretty much forget it as F/X are quite prevalent even in dialogue free scenes for the most part (especially true in the case of Gil Melle's three Season 1 scores which are Holy Grail items for me).

But this release alas, as I feared, still seems woefully inadequate without the commentaries and there's also the matter of the missing NBC Mystery Movie intros. We don't even get one of them as an extra which I find hard to believe. If they still exist on the 35mm masters which were used for this release, they should have been included. If they weren't available, then just give us the explanation, but of course Kino is now the company that doesn't believe in giving us explanations since they still won't explain why all those commentaries that this show *needed* to have on this set were just tossed into the junk pile. It's just as well that Kino hasn't been releasing anything else I've been interested in getting for the last six months. I'm also done participating in their sales since I bled them dry of what I was interested in long ago and after this debacle of theirs I'm not going to force myself to look for blind buy titles to justify taking part in one of their sales.

Sorry to sound like a Grinch about this, but this is a show I've loved for decades and remembering how overjoyed I was by the initial announcement that *every* episode in the series was going to get a commentary I was more anxious for this set than any other TV show release that I can recall since Battlestar Galactica first made it to DVD in 2003 with all their bells and whistles of hours of deleted scene footage. It's been very hard to accept what happened especially with the deliberate refusal of Kino to provide answers.

[sprocket]

I'm enjoying the series, the first time I've ever seen any Columbo episodes in full.

So far, I've just seen '"Suitable for Framing" and "Short Fuse" but the series' production values are amazingly high.

So far, the villains have all been arrogant sods.

As you mentioned in your review Andy, its a shame that the release is so bare-bones that its takes an effort to identify which episodes are on which disk. That's pretty poor, but at least its not a TV series where the image and sound are compromised, like a lot of these TV show blu-ray releases are.

And the price is right.

I don't miss the commentaries and other extras because I'm not a special features type of guy, although I'm always impressed when I see a n effort being put into those things. I do look at trailers to see how things were promoted in the day and look for deleted bits and pieces which may turn up in them.

Kino didn't spend the time and effort to record commentaries to leave them off the release, so I can't blame them if they are tight lipped on why they removed them. I'm sure they are not happy about it.

Wait five years: maybe they will turn up on a 4K release if this one sells well. In the meantime, maybe the later episodes will be released with commentaries if they can iron out the problems by that time.

In the meantime, I'm happy this set is here.

[AndyDursin]

I'm right with you Sprocket.

Recording commentaries are very similar to writing liner notes. There's no rhyme or reason why some things irritate studios or not -- or whether there's some buried issue there that could be a problem down the road.

With COLUMBO I can only surmise the problem was something substantial, like they had to run every one of them by the Peter Falk estate, and/or hire lawyers to do so, and undoubtedly had to sink even more money in getting them cleared. With commentaries recorded on every single show it was probably too Herculean a task to do so -- but obviously an additional expense was going to be involved there and it was daunting enough they just decided to dump all of them. A seemingly drastic measure since they paid all the participants to do the commentaries, but I'd guess it's something that falls along the lines of what I described. (As far as the lack of the NBC Mystery Movie opening goes, that could be as simple as Kino not wanting to pay royalties to Henry Mancini).

Either way nobody is owed anything by the commentaries not being there, Kino announced they were withdrawing them and even lowered the price of the set as a result. It's not as if anyone wasn't aware or it was a bait and switch when the final product came out. Most TV on disc releases never have commentary tracks either never mind on every episode so I don't believe this is a misfired or botched release. (I just wanted the episode titles on the discs or cases!). The transfers are stellar, the bit-rates are high and the price is just right for the amount of content that's there.

The more I think of it, I also don't blame them for not knowing about an issue ahead of time. I always look at my experience doing liner notes because it's impossible to know, again, where there could be a potential issue.

Just to point out one example (of many) -- on LaLaLand's THE SWARM, the Jeff Bond liner notes talk about what kind of disaster the film was, how bad of a director Irwin Allen was ("left to his own devices" is exactly how it's phrased), how the studio freaked out after bad test screenings, how terrible the performances were...and yet all of that got cleared by Warner Bros (and presumably Irwin Allen's people also seeing as their brand was on it!).

When I did the notes for Quartet's INTERSECTION, all I did was say the film was a box-office disappointment and had to be moved off its release schedule, later won some Razzies, and Paramount freaked out. Even the guy at the label acted like I should've known better as I frantically had to fix a few paragraphs (and I remember it well because it was the day we finalized Theo's adoption!). Nowhere in the notes did I even say a bad word about the film yet it was like the end of the world!

I could point out a million examples of "honest" writing in liner notes yet somehow just saying a movie had to be moved from December to January was triggering enough for the Paramount lawyers on the day I wrote that. Just bizarre and evidence that, again, sometimes you never know. And that goes for commentaries too. When so many commentaries "go dark" it's almost always not a "dramatic pause" but the speaker saying something the studio doesn't like and "muting it out" as a result.