Incredibly informative and often pretty personal, these are well worth a listen, particularly those by the enthusiastic Skretdvedt. In new 2K and 4K digital restorations from original 35mm nitrate sources, Laurel and Hardy’s classic comedies are here in the best quality since their first release!

What reads like cliched dialogue from some forgotten B-western or gangster movie are among the most momentous words in the history of screen comedy. When you purchase through links on our site we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.The films look better than anyone has seen since the ’20s and ’30s, and the extra features are great. com/2019/05/07/thats-that-a-curiosity/, which includes a link to the UCLA Film and Television Archive version on YouTube. Their work spans from the latter days of the silent film era all the way up through to the early 1950s. The trove of features and shorts collected on this four-disc set were painstakingly remastered in 2K and 4K mostly from 35mm nitrate prints and negatives. This is all rounded out by a series of trailers and a very interesting and rare silent promo (The Tree in a Test Tube) from the U.

This strategy of drawing out gags is evident in many of their shorts, from Towed in the Hole, where the duo takes turns pouring water on each other, to Way Out West, where Laurel spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get an heirloom necklace off of Hardy, only to continually strip more clothes off of him after it slips down his shirt.There’s also a near-absence of grain in many of the shorts, giving them a slightly waxy, overly digitized look. That we now have the once long-lost Holy Grails in the Laurel and Hardy canon, “ Duck Soup,” and the complete-ish “The Battle of the Century” with its epic pie-fight-to-end-all-pie-fights (3,000 pies were reportedly used in the skirmish), is testament to the miracles of film preservation, and a tantalizing tease at what other treasures are out there waiting to be unearthed.