Yesterday
a report was posted by the folks at trade journal
Home Media Magazine, announcing that Universal Studios Home Entertainment has pacted with Amazon.com to provide manufacture-on-demand ("MOD") content through the online retailer's CreateSpace program (which is already used for MOD releases by other studios, including MTV and Nickelodeon). These remastered classic films will be released under a banner called the "Universal Vault Series."
This is not Universal's first effort along these lines. Last year, the studio worked with Turner Classic Movies ("TCM") to release a number of remastered Universal classics as part of
TCM's Vault Collection lineup. But Amazon offers greater visibility, which might be why Universal has decided to go down that road for MOD offerings.
The new "Vault Series" titles, roughly two dozen of them, are now
purchasable at Amazon (the release date on these shows "January 11, 2010," so these have actually been listed for a week and a half). There are some true gems among the choices there, including one of my absolute favorites:
The Black Shield of Falworth (a 1954 Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh movie which was the very first Cinemascope film in Technicolor).
All of the titles on this first round of MOD releases are theatrical films, which means we don't really cover them at the site no matter what their ties are to television (after all, you've never seen us cover
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan or
X-Files: Fight the Future, have you?). Still, since we're reporting on the fact that Universal is doing MOD at all, it's worth it to bring up a pair of films in the slate which have obvious TV ties. The obvious one is
Dragnet, the 1954 cinematic version of the original 1951 television show. The TV stars, Jack Webb ("Sgt. Joe Friday") and Ben Alexander ("Officer Frank Smith"), lead the film cast that also includes Ann Robinson ("Sylvia Van Buren" in
The War of the Worlds). The less obvious tie-in is
The Brass Bottle, which co-stars Barbara Eden and served as the inspiration for
I Dream of Jeannie. Eden wasn't in the bottle this time, though: she was the fiancee of Tony Randall's character, who himself was master of the too-helpful genie played by Burl Ives. Both could be worth a look if you are a fan of those programs.
Even though we won't be listing those two releases here at TVShowsOnDVD (since they are cinema films), we'll still show off their cover art so you can see the uniform look that Universal and Amazon are giving to these "Vault Series" titles. And stay tuned, because if any future releases under this banner are truly TV shows (or a multi-episode mini-series), then we'll be sure to post some news for you about it!
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