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On the twenty ninth of December, Warner Archive will put a 1954 Randolph Scott western on Blu-ray in 3D, and it has never played a cinema that way.
The film is The Bounty Hunter, directed by Andre de Toth, seventy nine minutes, with Marie Windsor and Ernest Borgnine. It was shot in the stereoscopic 3-D process. It was never shown that way. In the announcement’s own words, the film “was shot in the stereoscopic 3-D process but only released to theaters in standard 2-D prints,” and this disc “presents a meticulous restoration of the original 3-D presentation as the creatives intended.”
Read more: Friday Blu-Ray News: ‘The Bounty Hunter,’ ‘Marie Antoinette,’ ‘Experience’ (PM Weekly #19)
So a stereoscopic feature photographed in 1954 will reach an audience in stereo for the first time at seventy two years old. On a disc. In a format no streaming service carries and none is going to.
It is not alone. Three 3D Blu-rays arrive from one label inside eight days: The Charge at Feather River on the twenty second, The Bounty Hunter and Phantom of the Rue Morgue on the twenty ninth. The honest version of that sentence, which is better than the triumphant one, is that two of the three are there because they slipped. Screen-Connections says they are “moving to December following production delays.” Yogi Bear’s complete series slipped with them, to the fifteenth.
But a delay is a scheduling fact, not an argument, and the argument is in the specifications.
Phantom of the Rue Morgue is the better evidence of the two. It is a two disc set: stereoscopic 3D on disc one, flat 2D on disc two. Its master line, from the original September announcement rather than the December one, reads “NEW 2026 1080pHD master from 4K scans of the original 3D Left Eye and Right Eye Camera Negatives.” Not a negative. Two negatives, scanned separately, because that is what a 1954 stereoscopic production left behind. The restoration is credited in the copy to Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services, working “from the original 35mm left-and-right eye camera negatives.” The bonus feature is a 3D stereoscopic Popeye cartoon.
Somebody at a studio signed off on a named department doing eye separate scans of a seventy two year old film, for a format nobody is launching into. 3D Blu-ray has no new releases to speak of, no shelf at any chain I can find, and an installed base of players and displays that stopped growing years ago.
Which is the thing worth saying out loud. A format does not die when the audience leaves. It dies when the rights holder stops paying to make the discs. Warner has not stopped, and what it is paying for is not a dub of an old master. It is scanning work, done twice per frame, on titles whose 3D versions have in one case never been commercially seen.
I want to be careful about that last point, because it is the one that will get repeated wrongly. The claim in the source is specifically about theatrical release prints. It does not say The Bounty Hunter’s 3-D version was never screened anywhere, at any time, in any form, and I have not established that it was not. Nor is this necessarily the only film in the condition. It is simply the one Warner has chosen to spend money on this December.
Note also that two outlets carried this announcement and both are working from one Warner release, so two sources here is one source twice. More on that below, because the two outlets did not print it the same way.
Welcome to PM Weekly. Let’s get into the week.
THIS WEEK ON DISC
Confirmed street dates only, all streeting Tuesday, November 10. On shelves now.
Reconciled from four sources, format and edition as the pages state them. Criterion’s own store could not be read from this desk this week, so the three Criterions rest on blu-ray.com and the aggregator calendars rather than on the label.
• Marie Antoinette (2006), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
• Shoot the Piano Player (1960), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Criterion
• Blue Heron (2025), Blu-ray, Criterion
• Planet of the Vampires (1965), 4K UHD, Radiance
• Cutter’s Way (1981), 4K UHD, Radiance
• Four Rooms (1995), 4K UHD, Kino Lorber
• Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and Digital, Sony
• The Lovely Bones (2009), 4K UHD, Blu-ray and Digital, Paramount
• Paddington (2014), 4K UHD SteelBook, Lionsgate
• Never Let Go (2024), 4K UHD, Lionsgate
• Saw V (2008), 4K UHD SteelBook, Lionsgate
• Saw VI (2009), 4K UHD SteelBook, Lionsgate
• Saw VII: The Final Chapter (2010), 4K UHD SteelBook, Lionsgate
• Above the Law (1988), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Toy Robot Video
• The Corruptor (1999), 4K UHD and Blu-ray, Toy Robot Video
• Demigod: The Legend Begins (2021), Blu-ray, Deaf Crocodile
• Dark Romances Vol 1+2 (1990), Blu-ray, Culture Shock Releasing
• Lock Up: Season 1 Volume 1, Blu-ray, ClassicFlix
• Miranda, Blu-ray, Cult Films
• Mad Bills to Pay (2025), Blu-ray, Oscilloscope
• The Apothecary Diaries: Season 2, Blu-ray, Crunchyroll
• Call of the Night: Season 2, Blu-ray, Sentai
(Three notes. Criterion put three discs out on one Tuesday, two of them 4K catalogue and one a 2025 title, which is three in one week from a label that normally spreads a month across several. Toy Robot Video’s Above the Law and The Corruptor are Arrow’s budget sub-label turning up on a mainstream Tuesday, which is the price ladder from October doing what it said it would. And Static Multimedia calls the Paddington SteelBook the film’s first US 4K release, which is their claim and we have not checked it.)
Not on the 10th, whatever you have read. Fall 2: Deadpoint was never a date fight. There are two products. The Blu-ray with DVD and a digital copy streets on 17 November at $28.82, and the 4K with Blu-ray and a digital copy streets on 1 December at $29.99. Both are open pre-orders today. Each outlet named one and left out the other, which is the kind of dispute that dissolves the moment somebody opens both product pages.
Next Tuesday, the 17th, is the heaviest date of the quarter. Universal’s Odyssey arrives in a premium gift set at $299.99 limited to five thousand copies and a limited SteelBook at $42.98. Arrow has three 4K limited editions, Criterion has two more discs, and Shout has a twelve disc Chow Yun-Fat box, all of that from an aggregator calendar rather than from the labels. The SteelBooks may or may not be gone: one outlet says sold out and blu-ray.com says currently unavailable, and those are not the same claim.)
MARKET SIGNAL
Warner Archive announced ten Blu-rays for December on Wednesday, and the interesting thing about them is the grammar.
Screen-Connections, which carries the full product blocks, prints Warner’s spec lines like this: “NEW 2026 1080pHD MASTER FROM 4K SCAN OF NITRATE PROTECTION ELEMENTS!” for Decoy, and “NEW 1080pHD 3D/2D MASTERS FROM 4K SCANS OF THE ORIGINAL CAMERA NEGATIVES!” for The Bounty Hunter. A 1080p master, struck from a 4K scan. You know exactly what you are buying.
blu-ray.com, carrying the same announcement the same day, prints “NEW 4K RESTORATION FROM NITRATE PROTECTION ELEMENTS” and “NEW 3D/2D 4K RESTORATION FROM THE ORIGINAL CAMERA NEGATIVE.” The 1080p has gone and the scan has become a restoration.
Those are different claims about different objects, and only one of them tells a buyer that this is a Blu-ray.
Before this turns into an accusation, two things. Neither outlet is Warner, so neither version can be called the label’s own wording, and it is entirely possible Warner issued both forms. And blu-ray.com is not consistent with itself inside the same page: for The Mask of Dimitrios it prints “beautifully restored in High Definition from a 4K scan of its original nitrate negative,” and for the Abbott and Costello box “Painstakingly remastered in high definition.” Those two are the honest formulation. They are on the same page as the other two.
The detail that proves the longer wording is doing real work, rather than being boilerplate somebody trimmed for space, is Test Pilot. It is the one title in the ten with no 4K scan claimed at all. Its block reads “NEW 1080p HD MASTER FROM BEST SAFETY PRESERVATION ELEMENTS.” When the negative is not there, the copy says so, and it says so in a sentence precise enough to be worth preserving.
A 4K scan feeding a 1080p master is good practice and worth paying for, because the scan is the part that outlives the disc. Calling the resulting Blu-ray a 4K restoration is not a lie. It is just the one piece of information that would tell you it is not a 4K disc, going missing somewhere between the label and the reader.
STORE OF THE WEEK
Hi-Voltage Video, 2104 NE 123rd Street, Suite 217A, North Miami.
WSVN’s Deco Drive ran a piece on it on the second of November, by Lynn Martinez and Matthew Auerbach. One person speaks throughout, a man named Marc Ferman, and the story never says what he is. Not the owner, not the manager, not a member of staff. He is simply the man in the shop with the microphone in front of him, and I am going to leave that where the piece left it rather than promote him to something nobody printed.
What he says about the stock is the ordinary part. “We offer a wide selection of vintage VHS, laserdiscs, DVDs, out-of-print titles, imports, 4K restoration discs from boutique labels, Blu-ray.” Every shop in this column could say a version of that sentence, and most of them have.
Then he says this.
“We have a whole Made in Miami section, like a section of films on VHS, on LaserDisc, on DVD, of movies that were shot and produced, not just in Miami, but in surrounding areas.”
Nineteen weeks of this column, and I have not come across that shelf anywhere else.
Think about what a Made in Miami section actually requires. Somebody has to know which films were shot there, which is not a field you can sort by. It is not a genre, not a studio, not a director, not a decade. No distributor has ever organised a catalogue that way because no distributor has any reason to. It is a fact about a film that lives outside every category the industry uses to file one, and the only way to build the shelf is for a person who lives in the place to recognise the place on screen.
Then they have to find the discs, across four formats, including LaserDisc, which means out of print material acquired secondhand. Then they have to put it somewhere a customer will walk past.
A streaming service cannot do this. Not will not, cannot. The catalogue has no geography in it. There is no Miami row because there is no field for Miami, and if you went looking you would be reduced to searching titles you already knew, which is the opposite of what a shelf is for. The entire value of the thing is that it shows you a film you did not know was shot four blocks away.
This column has spent four months circling the question of what a physical shop is actually for, now that the convenience argument is lost and the catalogue argument is lost. Philadelphia answered it with a membership. Toronto answered it with a lending library of the films streaming does not carry. Cologne answered it by giving up renting an entire category so children could come in.
North Miami’s answer is the most local of the four, and the hardest to copy. The shop is useful because it is in Miami and knows it.
A caution, since this journal runs on them. Ferman also says, and this is a direct quotation, that “Hi-Voltage Video is the only stand-alone, dedicated video store boutique in South Florida.” That is his claim and I could not establish it either way. This column has twice printed a last one standing framing that did not survive contact with a map, most recently in Toronto, where the shop’s own manager refused the description and three other physical media businesses turned out to be trading in the same city. Treat it as what a shopkeeper believes about his own market, which is interesting for different reasons than a fact would be.
One more quote, because it cuts against the easy reading of who buys this stuff. “I’m seeing kids in their 20s and 30s starting to collect VHS tapes themselves. I think that’s great, and they’re picking up films they’ve never seen before.”
Films they have never seen before. Not the ones they remember.
(Next week: Very Good Video in Sacramento.)
THE STACK
What I pulled off the shelf this week.
Experience (1968)
Format: VHS, Warner Reprise Video. The sleeve carries a 1992 copyright and no street date; a retail product record puts it at March 1992. Catalogue number 38297-3, barcode 7599-38297-3. VHS Hi-Fi, Dolby B NR on linear tracks. Approximate running time 33 minutes per the sleeve. Directed by Peter Neal, produced by John Marshall, narrated by Alexis Korner. Art direction Deborah Norcross, design John Heiden, cover photo Joe Sia. A Douglas Music Films production. The copyright line reads, in full, © 1992 Are You Experienced? Ltd.
Contents: Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, Hear My Train A Comin’, Wild Thing, plus excerpts from Rainy Day Dream Away, I Don’t Live Today, House Burning Down, Voodoo Chile, Up From The Skies, Castles Made Of Sand, Wait Until Tomorrow, Little Miss Lover, May This Be Love, Bold As Love and If 6 Was 9.
This is the first VHS tape to appear in this column in nineteen issues, which I did not plan and which turns out to be the point.
Start with the sleeve, because the sleeve is wrong in an instructive way. “Filmed in London in 1967, this video features live performances and rare interview footage.” Wikipedia’s Hendrix videography describes the film’s locations as various, and the two it names are the Opera House in Blackpool on the twenty fifth of November 1967 and the Bruce Fleming Photo Studio in London on the nineteenth of December 1967. One of those is London. The other is in Lancashire.
The film is also known as See My Music Talking, which the box does not mention.
Now the thing the box is right about. It calls the acoustic Hear My Train A Comin’ the highlight, and it is more than that. It was filmed on the nineteenth of December 1967, at Fleming’s studio, during a publicity photo session, on a twelve string Zemaitis acoustic restrung for a left handed player that happened to be on hand. Wikipedia’s entry on the song puts it plainly: the documentary Experience “features the only version released during Hendrix’s lifetime.” He died in September 1970. Every other recording of that song anyone can buy was released after he was gone.
A publicity shoot, a borrowed guitar, a camera that happened to be running, and the only version of a song he ever lived to see released.
So why is this in the Stack rather than in a museum.
Because of two lines of small print on the back of the box, and what happened three years after they were printed.
Are You Experienced? Ltd and Douglas Music Films are the Alan Douglas era. Douglas supervised the Hendrix catalogue as what Wikipedia calls an interim producer, and The Ultimate Experience, released in November 1992, was “among the last to be supervised by interim producer Alan Douglas, before the Hendrix family regained control of his recording legacy.” My tape shipped in March of that year. In 1995, after what the Experience Hendrix page describes as two years of legal issues, Al Hendrix gained control of his son’s music, name and likeness, and founded Experience Hendrix to run it. The Ultimate Experience went out of print and was replaced in 1997 by a different compilation with a different tracklist.
The film came back in 2001, from MCA, as Experience Jimi Hendrix, on DVD, certified platinum. The videography calls it a re-release of Experience “with additional material.” It does not itemise what was added, but its listing for the 2001 version carries Stockholm, the ninth of January 1969, and five songs the 1968 entry does not: The Wind Cries Mary, Red House, Sunshine of Your Love, Hey Joe and Dolly Dagger.
Which is where the reader of this column already knows what I am about to ask, because we have been here twice this autumn with Hellboy and with Wonka.
Is the longer edition a superset.
I cannot tell you. No list I can read sets the 2001 contents against the 1992 contents item by item. What I can tell you is that the 1992 tape is thirty three minutes of a 1968 short, assembled under one management, and the 2001 disc is a longer thing assembled under a different one after a change of ownership, a two year legal fight and a catalogue reshuffle in between. Every time this journal has looked at a pair like that, something has been on the older one and not the newer.
I would like to be wrong about that. The record so far says I probably am not.
What I am certain of is narrower and stranger. There is a thirty three minute film, shot in 1967, narrated by one of the founding figures of British blues, that Warner Reprise put into American shops in 1992 under a copyright held by a company whose stewardship of Hendrix ended three years later. It contains the only performance of Hear My Train A Comin’ that Jimi Hendrix lived to see released. And the reason I can tell you what is on it is that the list is printed on the back of the box, in green, under a photograph by Joe Sia.
THE CORRECTIONS DESK
Two, and both are ours.
Last week we wrote that Cinema Guild’s Moving, one of the four titles we pulled off the 27 October list, “now shows on the 17th,” and that we were right to pull it. We were right to pull it. We were wrong to replace it with another date. Cinema Guild’s own store carries no consumer street date for Moving at all, and the 17 November listing came off the same kind of aggregator calendar we spent the rest of that paragraph warning readers about. The method note in that issue told you to ask who published the date. We did not take our own advice two sentences earlier.
And Issue #17 listed Phantom of the Rue Morgue 3D in This Week on Disc as a 27 October release. It did not ship that day. Warner moved it to the twenty ninth of December, with The Charge at Feather River and Yogi Bear, and the reason given is production delays. We had the right date from the right source in September and never checked whether it still held by the time we printed it, which is the one job a street date list has. The test would have taken ninety seconds: the page for that disc carries a notify me box, not a stock state. Announced is not the same as shipping, and from now on this column checks the date in the week it runs the list.
THE SIGN-OFF
That is Issue #19. A studio spending money to scan a 1954 western twice, once per eye, so that a version of it nobody bought a ticket to can exist on a disc; ten Blu-rays whose spec lines say 1080p master from a 4K scan at one outlet and 4K restoration at another, with one title saying neither because the negative is gone; a shop in North Miami that built a shelf out of films shot in and around Miami, which is a category no catalogue anywhere has a field for; and a VHS tape from 1992, narrated by Alexis Korner, carrying the only Hear My Train A Comin’ its author lived to see released, issued under a copyright that changed hands three years later. If you know one person who still alphabetizes their shelf, forward this to them. That is the whole engine we have, and it is a good one. See you Friday.
PM Weekly
Sean Reid
seanreid@worldonetv.com
