This week’s batch of home video hatchlings offer some heart-felt puppet fun with a rag-tag bunch old friends and a strange animated trip courtesy of one of the masters of horror/fantasy literature. The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz and arrive on disc, as does Guerrilla Prods.’ unique adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz is a made-for-TV comedic retelling of Frank L. Baum’s classic tale featuring all of Jim Henson’s creations and guest stars Queen Latifah, Quentin Tarantino, Jeffrey Tambor and David Alan Grier. This extended version includes 20 extra minutes not shown during the original ABC broadcast earlier this year. Bonus materials include outtakes, bloopers and a making-of featurette. The Buena Vista Home Entertainment release carries a suggested retail price of $24.99.
If it’s classic Muppets you crave, you can pick up The Muppet Show: Season One, Buena Vista’s four-disc set featuring all 24 episodes from the late ’70s. The $39.99 purchase also gets you such extras as Jim Henson’s original pitch reel, “Muppet Morsels,” the original pilot and a promotional gag reel.
The first feature-length film from Portland’s Guerrilla Prods., The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath employs limited animation to bring one of Lovecraft’s few novels to the screen. The film follows the adventures of Randolph Carter, a brave dreamer in the Land of Dream, as he navigates a terrifying landscape of ghouls, zoogs, Shantak birds, nightgaunts, dholes, evil priests and moonbeasts as he searches for his beloved Sunset City. The company first pressed a limited release of 1000 copies of the pic, which sold out in six months.
“We’ve really punched it up,” says Kadath director Edward Martin III. “We’ve re-mastered the soundtrack in Dolby Digital, added more bonus features, pulled out many scenes that were very loosely animated and re-animated them completely from scratch, included some very neat DVD-ROM content, and just overall have made this an even more attractive product than the first release.”
Bonus features include short film adaptations of the Lovecraft stories The Call of Cthulhu and The Testament of Tom Jacoby. There’s also a Kadath making-of slideshow, trailers and a teaser for the company’s upcoming live-action horror feature, Flesh of my Flesh. The disc sells for $18.98 and can be ordered at www.guerrilla-productions.org/Merchandise.html.
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