rebranding inflationary measures

hello there

no, alas, i have not yet seen Mad Max Fury Road. the chances of me seeing it at the cinema are, look you see, presently slim to none. i shall simply wait for the tape to come out. well, what the hell, it's only been 25+ years that i have been waiting for a new Mad Max film; a couple of months more isn't, like totes, any sort of biggie.

the arrival of the revived Max has led to Warner Bros, as something of a given, pimping out the original Mad Max films. and why not. today was the day, courtesy of Tesco no less, that i got to see the reissued DVDs of these three most excellent and righteous movies. and, thanks to the magic of my blueberry phone thing, you can have a gander at them too.

well, if you have not seen them yourself whilst out and about, or browsing other corners of the net.

i am, i must confess, most taken by the artwork on covers of these reissues. they look like they have been, for the most part, created by someone that actually likes the movies. the cover of Mad Max, for instance, features a decent Mel. covers usually feature either a chubby looking Mel behind a driving wheel, or a random model with glasses and a hankie over his face to hide that it is not Mel. basically any image you like off of Mad Max 2 would make a great cover, but i am particularly excited about angry, or if you like mad, Mad Max, being visible. and i totally love the image selected for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and i hope it causes the people of the world to show the film the love it deserves.

there are, however, one or two issues with these reissues. ones that more or less stopped me buying them for reasons other than that i have so many copies of the films that it would be pointless to purchase them again.

for a start, you will observe they are £5 each. that means you are spending £15 to get the three films. pictured here is the blu ray set of the films that HMV sold me for £9.99 earlier in the year, or if you like late last year. ever keen to cash in, HMV have bumped their asking price up to £11.99. which is still £3.01 less for the blu ray set than the DVDs. yeah, this paragraphis is of relevance to the title of the blog post.

also, the second film is simply listed as Mad Max The Road Warrior. the film was never called The Road Warrior; it is a silly name some work experience kid in America stuck on it when he or she got confused about a sequel to a film they had not seen. the film was, is and always will be called Mad Max 2.

beyond my moans and gripes about the above, there is a practical concern here. all copies of the film that feature the credits which call the film The Road Warrior are the version of the film which was hacked to ribbons to get an R rating in America at the time. censorship is one thing, and may well be appropriate from time to time, but the way in which the edits were made to the film were of a nature that suggests whoever was allowed to do it had never edited film before and just hacked away with scissors and a bit of tape. when you watch the edited version, the jolts in the running of the film are so harsh you think there's something wrong with the tape or disc.

i have no idea at all if it remains the hacked up version of the film, or if the uncut, properly named Mad Max 2 as it appears on Blu Ray has now, at long last, been transferred to DVD. sorry, dear reader, i was not prepared to shell out £5 to find out if it was the cut version again.

also, as impressed as i am with the new artwork for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, it is very sad to see this original artwork gone. yeah, i know, this is an awful quality photo of it, sorry.

the poster, video, original DVD and blu ray cover for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome have, up to now, been consistent in showing off this, one of the most breathtaking, amazing and beautiful paintings ever commissioned for a film poster. these days, as you are all no doubt far too aware, five minutes of work on photoshop, or even maybe MS Paint, is considered good enough for a film poster. hard to believe that one upon a time it was a highly valued aspect of the movie, and that a great deal of care and attention was paid to what was designed and created to promote a motion picture release.

finally, again there are no extras. the blu ray set doesn't have any either. this is just about as annoying as the Blade Runner saga, where the world literally had to wait for some miserable bastard to die so that they could access the rights to release mountains of unseen footage. and we do know there are extras that could go for all three films. there were "making of" documentaries for the first two, and there's a stack of rarely seen footage for Mad Max 2 sat in a vault somewhere. in respect of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, well, there's the two music videos for the songs that Tina Turner did, and the video for We Don't Need Another Hero features a good deal of footage from the film not in the final cut. which tells us that there are a number of deleted scenes sat unreleased.

i would quite happily shell out for yet more copies of the Mad Max films on any format if they would just throw some of the unreleased extras at us. yes, i was nearly convinced to buy anyway, just for shiny new pictures. will they throw the extra stuff at us with the inevitable further re-re-rerelease of the films when Fury Road makes it to tape? one can only live in hope.




be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!