About a month ago, I wrote

whoever put the DVD version of Zulu on the market needs an assegai stuck squarely into his chest.

Zulu, for the uninitiated, is the story of the Battle of Rorke's Drift. Told with the usual in-filling of artistic license, the film nevertheless conveys a pretty good picture of the battle, 22-23 January 1879, in which some 150 British soldiers held off about 4,000 Zulu warriors, forcing them to withdraw with heavy casualties. Redcoats of the 24th Foot, a mostly Welsh regiment, were awarded 11 Victoria Crosses for the action.

[By way of comparison, only four men received the Medal of Honor for the D-Day landings at Normandy. And yes, the British are notoriously stingy with the V.C. - in 1879, there was no allowance for posthumous awards, for instance.]

The DVD release of Zulu which I had was put out by some outfit called Diamond Entertainment. I bought it because it was the only DVD release available in 2000.

It profoundly sucked.

In every way a DVD could be awful, this one was. My heavily-worn VHS copy from 1988 was better than that craptastic DVD. Extra features: nonexistant. The video quality was appallingly bad, as though someone had videotaped it off a screen in a theater - complete with "pan and scan". The sound was equally bad - a particularly awful flaw for a movie so heavily reliant on singing.

At the local Circuit City yesterday, I spotted a Zulu DVD on the shelf... but it was different. This one was from MGM Studios - and at $10, worth picking up just on the off chance that it was better than what I already had.

Oh, yeah. Clean clear widescreen video - possibly remastered, but more likely taken from a clean print of the film. The audio was spectacular - I kept hearing things in there that I'd never heard before. Bear in mind that this is one of my all-time favorite films - I know it backwards and forwards... or I thought I did, at any rate. Add to that a bit of hearing loss I've suffered since 1988; the fact that I'm hearing new things speaks very well of this edition of the film.

Go. Buy. Now.

[Diamond Entertainment execs still deserve assegais in their chests for producing what has become my newest coffee-mug coaster.]

Posted by Russ at 11:51 PM, September 26, 2003 in DVD