Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Hang on to your old Rhino DVD of "The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash". The new Blu-Ray version is a major disappointment. The first problem I noticed is that the whole thing has been re-cropped for wide screen, This is typical, and not surprising, but it seems that for some scenes, they couldn't properly crop the top and bottom, so instead, they added an artificial border at the sides, consisting of a blurry image of the right and left edges of the frame to fill out the sides of the screen. Looks awful and distracting. Next up, the print they used looks bad. It's the cut of the film used for the DVD, which is supposed to be an early edit with a few extended scenes, and a few scenes shuffled around in different order than the broadcast version. Unfortunately, some of the transitions are pretty rough, and if this is an "early" rough cut, then why do I still hear a note or two of music from the start of the scene where the cut was made when the sequencing was moved? Obviously, no clean up work was done on the movie. The "Yellow Submarine Sandwich" sequence looks awful. Like a dull, dirty syndication TV print of "Yellow Submarine" from the 70's. The soundtrack is another matter. The original audio track was full of alternate mono mixes with different vocals and instruments. Those are mostly gone, with the stereo versions from the LP and Rhino's later CD overdubbed on to the soundtrack. During the whole "Barry Wom's Wedding" sequence, you can hear that they couldn't quite get "Living In Hope" properly synced up with the original soundtrack, resulting in a slight double track sound. The dialogue has been altered in a few places. A couple of jokes have new "British" punch lines dubbed over the more familiar versions. Dick Jaws now "knows a thing or two about inner legs..." rather than "inseams" thanks to some rather obvious Foley work. The dubbing sounds like it was done by the original actor, so I'm not sure if this was done in 1978 for the British broadcast of the film, or was done recently. Similarly, The Rutles' plane now lands in Wales instead of Cleveland. The worst Lucas-like revision has the narration to the "Pathetique News" newsreel segment completely re-recorded, throwing out the original actor's reading for a new word for word re-creation by Eric Idle. No idea why Idle felt the need to do this. The original Rhino DVD had some pretty good extras, none of which are ported over to the blu-ray. No Jagger and Simon outtakes, and Idle's film length commentary track is missing. Instead, we get a new interview with Idle, listed as a new commentary track, that ends about half-way through the film. The interviewer frustratingly talks about things said in the original DVD's commentary track, which we can not go back and listen to on the new DVD. Idle's comments about some other people's contributions to the film, particularly those of Neil Innes, also leave a bad taste. The original "Saturday Night Live" sketch featuring the early Rutles appearance is probably the only worthwhile extra on the whole program. More weirdness: The so-called sequel, "Can't Buy Me Lunch" is NOT on the blu-ray disc, though from the advance word, you'd expect it to be there. Instead, it is presented on a second standard DVD disc, which also duplicates the contents of the blu-ray disc as well. I'm imagining that Idle didn't shoot the sequel in High Def, and it's no big loss not having this lackluster follow-up on blu-ray, but it's ridiculous to buy a blu-ray with only half the contents of the bonus DVD on it. A real head scratcher. A real missed opportunity. Unless you really want this film on blu-ray, which I did, there's no need to upgrade from the Rhino DVD..