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24 July, 2001

Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory

Hollyfeld filed this report on the upcoming DVD release that was previewed at the San Diego Comic Con.

This long-awaited DVD did not yield anything so wholly remarkable as multi-angle options, but did yield the following observations.

The menu is particularly interesting, and very family oriented - the menu is actually inside a Wonka Bar, waiting to be opening. The background for the menu is the Chocolate Waterfall from the film, and featured prominently are Gene Wilder as Wonka, swinging his cane back and forth (and occasionally all the way around), and a sporadically appearing Oompa-Loompa. An interesting feature of this DVD (right now, at least) is that if you stay on the menu too long without touching anything, the movie simply starts up without you. This feature, the DVD producers mentioned, may become more prominent in the future.

The extras aren't too great in number, but what is there looks great. Two documentaries are present, including a 30 year old feature running at 10 minutes, and a retrospective documentary, entitled "Pure Imagination," running at 30 minutes. Apparently the producers of the disc had more footage, but there the top brass apparently have some sort of problem with documentaries running too long on DVDs (something about the difference between "Featurettes" and "Documentaries") - this is one of the reasons why the Hannibal disc chose to separate its documentary footage into smaller pieces, in fact.

The audio commentary for the disc features all five child actors from the film (all grown up now, of course), who reportedly had NEVER seen the film together before. Sounds interesting. Other special features include a Sing-Along option (3 songs only, apparently), and both wide-screen and full-frame options. The disc looks beautiful, I must say, with the colors quite literally popping out of the screen. Its release is apparently Warner's biggest DVD campaign of the year.

You can read the entire report from the Con here.

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