The Film at 11 podcast is back with its original co-host, my 11-year-old son Joseph. This week, I introduce him to Edward Scissorhands, the movie that may serve as a statement piece to define director Tim Burton’s entire career. Joseph tells me he doesn’t typically like movies with too much drama, and this one sure has a lot of it, but he came ready to make some pretty good observations in our discussion.
I’m not sure whether I’d actually watched Edward Scissorhands again in the interim after initially catching it on cable or VHS in the early 1990s. I’ll be honest; I liked it but didn’t really love it at the time. This viewing, with some more decades of life experience under my belt, the film hit me a lot harder than I expected.
| Title: | Edward Scissorhands |
| Year of Release: | 1990 |
| Director: | Tim Burton |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Disney+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
The Blu-ray
Edward Scissorhands was a fairly early release on the Blu-ray format back in 2007. I bought the Blu-ray at that time, but regret to say that it sat for years unwatched in my “I’ll get to it someday” pile of discs. Not helping much with my motivation to watch it, reviews at the time cited the video transfer as very mediocre.
20th Century Fox reissued the movie in 2015 with a remastered 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray that was said to be much better. Again, I bought that (in a nice SteelBook case), and again it sat collecting dust on my shelf for a while. At the time of this writing, Fox (or current parent company Disney) has not seen fit to release the movie on 4K Ultra HD.
I gave away the older Blu-ray without ever spinning it, and can’t make a direct comparison here. For its part, the anniversary remaster looks decent enough, but may still have some room for improvement. The opening credits are very soft, and the movie has a lot of optical effects, dissolves, and sometimes what look like general focus issues that may all just be endemic to the production. I don’t blame the Blu-ray for those. For the majority of its running time, the 1.85:1 image is acceptably sharp, bright, and colorful. However, should one ever come, a 4K edition could probably eke some extra detail out of the source, make colors pop a little more vibrantly, and enrich the contrast with HDR.
The movie’s soundtrack is offered only in a DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 configuration, with no center or dedicated LFE channels. Perhaps this is meant to represent the original Dolby Stereo theatrical mix, but it seems odd to me that the studio never remixed this one for 5.1 when that was virtually standard procedure during the DVD and Blu-ray eras. In any case, the lilting Danny Elfman score is rendered with nice fidelity, if not much dynamic range. The track has no real low-end, and dialogue is sometimes a little soft (though always intelligible enough).
The only extras on the disc are two audio commentaries (by Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, respectively), a vintage four-minute Press Kit featurette, and a couple trailers (both in wildly incorrect aspect ratios, one overmatted to 2.35:1 and the other open-matte 4:3).
Related
- Tim Burton (director)
- Johnny Depp
- Danny Elfman (music)
The Video File Blog 