Mary Poppins

"Walt Disney's Mary Poppins was available in at least three separate editions on laserdisc over a 14-year period, and it's a sign of the robust nature of the digital video market that this ""Gold Collection"" edition is the second DVD version of the movie in under three years. The first DVD release, in 1998, contained nothing but the movie, and it was acceptable as far as it went. The Gold Collection release, however, is a DVD adaptation of the early '90s ""Exclusive Archive Collection"" laserdisc release of Mary Poppins, which included a massive amount of bonus materials and sold for around 80 dollars -- except that this disc is closer to 25 dollars (at the time of its release). The film-to-video transfer is superior in every way to any prior laserdisc edition of the movie. Dick Van Dyke's skin actually has a very faint, subtle glow in his first close-up in the opening scene; the color tone of just about every shot, from the admiral firing his cannon and the decor of the Banks home in the background of ""The Life I Lead,"" is so rich that it's genuinely a feast for the eyes; and the solidity of the images throughout supplants the best that laserdisc ever had to offer. Even the red smoking jacket that David Tomlinson wears for ""The Perfect Nanny"" is so deep yet detailed that it's as close to watching the movie in a theater as one is likely to get. The supplementary material looks just as impressive. Dick Van Dyke hosts a documentary about the making of the movie that features a great deal of archival material, dating back to the 1940s -- evidently Disney spent 17 years or more negotiating with author P.L. Travers for the rights. There are outtakes, behind-the-scenes rehearsals, screen tests, and other support material, some of which is drawn from the accompanying 1965-vintage Disney short ""Hollywood Goes to a World Premiere."" What's truly remarkable, beyond the content, is how good the color archival footage and the short about the premiere look. The disc opens to a simple main menu, and the special features are easy to access. The only complaint about the DVD programming is that to get to the menu, one first has to get past an extended series of promotional clips about this series of discs and the individual promotional spots on certain recent Disney titles. One can't just access the menu by pressing the button calling it up, but it is possible to avoid most of the introductory distractions (which can take up to five minutes or so) by pressing the chapter-skip command several times."