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Review: At last a Laurel & Hardy DVD boxset available in the UK containing nearly all the Hal Roach classics from 1926-1940. Packing is fantastic with silver lettering complementing the black and white drawings of L&H. Each disc has a 3-4 page leaflet with production notes and photos. 20 DVDs of classic shorts and feature films plus a bonus disc containing the rarely seen original 1930s version of Brats and the 1991 documentary. The B&W versions are the newly restored prints, which are the same as the renowned German Kinowelt series. Also included are colour versions, which although derided by film buffs and L&H historians are not as bad as has been said. Sure the clarity is not as high on the colour versions but some are fine and are certainly not a waste of disc space as has been suggested. For completists this set is missing the feature films Fra Viavolo, Bonnie Scotland and Flying Dueces and Babes in Toyland. But the 3 of these are I think owned by MGM and did not appear on the Kinowelt boxsets either. Whilst babes in Toyland is far from a L&H classic and is mostly one good scene with musical filler material. If you want to argue that the boxset is not complete then you might as well complain that it contains none of their 1941 -1 954 features. As it is what you get here is all the material that's worth having in a great package with a documentary bonus disc and rare foreign language versions of Murder Case, Blotto, Laughing Gravy and more which because L&H performed these phonetically contain slightly different scenes from the English spoken ones. | 
DVD Films
