March Of The Wooden Soldiers

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1934	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	77:20 minutes	Other Extras	Cast Biographies Featurette - Hustling For Health (15:23)
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Gus Meins Charles R. Rogers
Studio Distributor	Force Video	Starring	Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy Charlotte Henry Felix Knight Henry Brandon Florence Roberts Ferdinand Munier William Burress Virginia Karns
RRP	$29.95	Music	Victor Herbert

    March Of The Wooden Soldiers is a Laurel & Hardy black and white classic, loosely based on the Mother Goose characters. Stannie Dee (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dum (Oliver Hardy) are dimwitted toymakers in Toyland. They live with The Old Woman Who Lives In A Shoe, who happens to be Bo-Peep's (Charlotte Henry) mother. Bo-Peep loves Tom Tom (Felix Knight), but the nasty Silas Barnaby (Henry Kleinbach) threatens to foreclose on The Shoe unless Bo-Peep marries him. What follows is a series of adventures through both Toyland and Bogeyland which are comical, touching, frightening, and most of all, entertaining.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer lacks definition and there is little detail in the picture, even considering the vintage of the source material. This DVD transfer has been clearly taken from a fairly low quality video source, and the overall definition of the transfer suffers for it. In terms of absolute clarity, this is marginally higher than videotape in quality, but not by much.

    The first reel of the movie is quite problematic, with a cyclic variation in the intensity of the image - once every second a single frame is significantly brighter than the surrounding frames. This became quite distracting after a while. As the movie progressed, this artefact disappeared and the transfer brightness was much more even.

    Shadow detail was not great, but I attribute this to the source material. Low level noise was present to a minor extent in the darker areas of the picture, but was not at all distracting.

    MPEG artefacts were rarely seen. The only times when they became noticeable was during fade ins and fade outs, where very minor pixelization was discernible. Film to video artefacts consisted of some telecine wobble which was never particularly bad. There was a video dropout artefact at 8:16 where we see dark streaks appear briefly through the top part of the picture. Film artefacts, as are to be expected in a transfer of this vintage were plentiful. However, they were never unacceptable and never particularly bad.

Audio

    Dialogue was acceptably clear and audible taking into consideration the fact that this is a 65 year old optical audio track.

    Audio sync was not a problem with this transfer, again taking into account the age of this movie.

    The music by Victor Herbert adds significantly to the enjoyment of this movie.

    There was no use of the surround audio channels or the .1 channel.

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Biographies

Featurette - Hustling For Health

• Stan Laurel Home Movie
• Oliver Hardy Interview
• Theatrical Trailer

• Hustling For Health

    The Region 4 version of this film accordingly wins hands down as the preferred version of this movie, even though the video quality is not all that great.

    The video quality is lacking, and a little disappointing, even considering the age of the source material.

    The audio quality is passable considering the source material.

    The extras are passable.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
7th November 1999