Warner Bros. has some big plans for April!
On April 24, Warner Home Video will help make every film lover's dream come true with the release of The Essential Classics Collections, a selection of the studio's most popular classic films in attractively-priced collectible giftsets. In this first offering, there will be five different collections to choose from, each with three films focused on a specific genre. Sure to satisfy a variety of tastes, these film favorites have been cherished by movie fans for decades and have garnered a total of 54 Academy Awards.
The Collections in this first wave are the Essential Classic Romances (Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Doctor Zhivago); Essential Classic Family Films (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Goonies, Wizard of Oz); Essential Classic Dramas (The Maltese Falcon, Citizen Kane, Ben Hur); Essential Classic Musicals (My Fair Lady, Singin' in the Rain, Gigi); and Essential Classic American Musicals (The Music Man, Meet Me in St. Louis, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers).
The Essential Classics Collections will boast the very latest remastered versions of the films along with bonus content to further expand the entertainment and enjoyment. Each set will be beautifully packaged in foil and will sell at a consumer-friendly price of $30.97 SRP, a significant savings over purchasing the titles separately. The Collections are perfectly timed for Mother's Day (May 13) gift giving and priced so attractively it will be easy to buy several.
Essential Classics: Romances
Winner of 9 Academy Awards® including Best Picture. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) are a timeless match in the immortal tale of a nation divided by war and hearts torn by love. "Quite probably the most beloved movie of all time" (The Movie Guide).
Special Features:
- Commentary by historian Rudy Behlmer
Winner of 3 Academy Awards® including Best Picture. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) "sticks his neck out for nobody." Then she (Ingrid Bergman) walks back into his life...with her Resistance-leader husband. "Our candidate for the best Hollywood movie of all time" (Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide).
Special Features:
- Commentary by film critic Roger Ebert
- Commentary by historian Rudy Behlmer
- Introduction by Lauren Bacall
- Theatrical trailers
Winner of 5 Academy Awards® with stunning vistas for the eyes and epic romance for the heart. Soulful Zhivago (Omar Sharif), married to Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), is caught up in the surging tides of Russian revolution...and in his passionate love for Lara (Julie Christie).
Special Features:
- Commentary by Omar Sharif, Rod Steiger and Sandra Lean
- Introduction by Omar Sharif
- Music-Only Audio Track
Essential Classics: Family Films
Judy Garland soars "over the rainbow"...and into cinema legend. The beloved tale of a Kansas farm girl who follows a yellow brick road with three new friends is an all-time enchanter that's "just as good the fifteenth time as the first" (Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide). Winner of 2 Academy Awards.
Special Features:
- Commentary by historian John Fricke including actual interviews of the film's cast and crew
- The Wonderful World of Oz Storybook
- Prettier Than Ever: The Restoration of Oz
- We Haven't Really Met Properly... Supporting Cast Profile Gallery
- Music-and-Effects-Only Track
A treasure map, a pirate ship...and a monster! It's amazing what a group of misfit kids can discover on one drizzly day. Steven Spielberg brings his special magic to "a deliciously dizzy adventure with crowd-pleasing fun" (Kathleen Carroll, New York Daily News).
Special Features:
- Commentary - with hidden video treasures - by director Richard Donner and selected cast members
- The Making of The Goonies
- Additional scenes
- Cyndi Lauper "The Goonies R Good Enough" music video
- Theatrical trailer
Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
The golden ticket to fun: Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka, guiding five lucky children on a fantastical, phenomenal, "scrumdiddlyumptious" journey through a candy factory only imagination could build. What a treat!
Special Features:
- Pure Imagination: The Story of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
- Mouth-watering commentary with the Wonka Kids
- Four sing-along songs
- Vintage featurette
- Theatrical trailer
Essential Classics: Dramas
The Maltese Falcon
Private eye Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) follows a trail of murder and high-living lowlifes to "the stuff that dreams are made of" - a coveted priceless falcon statuette. As thrilling today as yesterday - and often cited as the first Film Noir movie.
Special Features:
- Commentary by Bogart Biographer Eric Lax
- Warner Night at the Movies 1941 Short Subjects Gallery:
A) Vintage Newsreel,
B) Technicolor Musical Short The Gay Parisian
C) Two Classic Cartoons: Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt and Meet John Doughboy
- Trailers of The Maltese Falcon and 1941's Sergeant York
Nominated for 8 Academy Awards® and Oscar® winner for Best Writing, Citizen Kane expanded filmmaking like no other work and became the American Film Institute's choice as the All-Time #1 movie. With all the dazzling technique comes a dazzlingly layered story: the mystery surrounding the last utterance - rosebud - of a dying magnate (Orson Welles).
Special Features:
- Commentary by Roger Ebert, director Orson Welles
- Commentary by Director/Welles biographer Peter Bogdanovich
- Premiere newsreel
- Gallery of storyboards, rare photos, alternate ad campaigns, studio correspondence, call sheets and other memorabilia
- Theatrical trailer
- Production notes, filmmaker postscripts and awards data
Ben Hur
Winner of 11 Academy Awards® including Best Picture. Legendary as a screen spectacle, this awe-inspiring tale of majesty and miracle includes thundering chariots, fierce clashes at sea, and Charlton Heston as the Jewish nobleman whose heroic odyssey includes fateful encounters with Jesus.
Special Features:
- Commentary by historian T. Gene Hatcher, with Charlton Heston
- Music-Only track
Essential Classics: Musicals
Winner of 8 Academy Awards® including BEST PICTURE. No one's fairer than Audrey Hepburn in this all-time Lerner and Loewe triumph. Rex Harrison is the professor who wagers he can transform a street waif (Hepburn) into a society belle. Simply loverly!
Special Features:
- Commentary by art director Gene Allen, Singer Marni Nixon and restorers Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz
Singin' in the Rain
What a glorious feeling! Gene Kelly's umbrella-swinging 'splash' hit is an ode to joy and to the bumpy era when silent movies became talkies. "Is this really the greatest Hollywood musical ever made? In a word, yes" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).
Special Features:
- Commentary by Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor, Cyd Charisse, Kathleen Freeman, co-director Stanley Donen, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, filmmaker Baz Luhrmann and historian Rudy Behlmer
- Theatrical trailer
Gigi
Winner of 9 Academy Awards® including Best Picture. Thank heaven for...the bubbly fun and glorious Lerner and Loewe music! Gigi (Leslie Caron) goes from girlishness to glamorous and yearns for more than the luxury offered by suitor Louis Jourdan. Co-stars bon vivant charmer Maurice Chevalier.
Special Features:
- Theatrical trailer
Essential Classics: American Musicals
The Music Man
76 trombones. 110 cornets and an Academy Award®...you can count the reasons this musical is so beloved. There's trouble (and plenty of fun) in River City when Robert Preston plays his rousing signature role of con artist bandleader Harold Hill.
Special Features:
- Commentary by historian Rudy Behlmer
- Documentary Right Here in River City: The Making of Meredith Willson's The Music Man
- Introduction by Shirley Jones
· Production notes
· Theatrical trailers
Meet Me in St. Louis
She's in love with the boy next door. And movie fans are forever in love with her. Judy Garland stars in a nostalgia- and humor-filled tale of life with the Smith family in 1903 St. Louis. Songs include "The Trolley Song" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."
Special Features:
- Introduction by Liza Minnelli
- Commentary by Judy Garland biographer John Fricke, with Margaret O'Brien, composer Hugh Martin, screenwriter Irving Brecher and Barbara Freed-Saltzman, daughter of producer Arthur Freed
- Vincente Minnelli trailer gallery
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture (and winner for Best Musical Score), the film is the perfect marriage of song and dance, as backwoods boys inspired by romance and the lure of hot biscuits raid the local town for brides. Howard Keel and Jane Powell head the cast.
Special Features:
- Commentary by director Stanley Donen
- Donen musicals trailer gallery