"This time," I said, "the responsible party should be required to spend a day locked in a room opening hundreds of these damned packages."

The occasion for this outburst was yet another sealed DVD box (see "Pass the Crowbar" below), this time the DVD for the original version of Fantasia, now out in the 60th anniversary edition, which I bought before it "goes back into the vaults," as the Disney people put it.  I was encouraged, at first, because the package had only one plastic strip across the top.  However, this one strip, it turned out was plastic glued to plastic and could be removed only by tearing away tiny bits at a time.  After I nearly gave in to the urge to fling the thing across the room, my wife finally came to the rescue with a pair of surgical scissors.  Surgical scissors!  Good grief!  Hey, Disney – You don't need to put these discs back in the vault; they're already in one.

Review:  Though such struggles should be totally unnecessary, let me note here that the Fantasia DVD is worth the effort.  Except for a couple of outstanding segments, Fantasia 2000 was a disappointment, and I was eager to see the 1944 original in a remastered version.  The images come across fresh as new paint,  amply fill a widescreen TV set (recall that widescreen movies did not exist in 1944), and are all the more awesome because every frame was hand drawn (no computer-generated graphics in those days).  For all our advances in technology, nothing today matches the artistry of that work.  Of course, old Walt was alive then to godfather this highly risky and experimental film; the studio has since sunk into mostly mediocre commercialism (as the second-rate Fantasia 2000 showed).  My only regret is that the remastered sound still shows its age somewhat.  I suppose that there is only so much that can be done with a soundtrack made in pre-stereo days, though, even in this respect, I was amazed that stereo effects were often realized in the remastering.  My wife even suggested that maybe they did record a new score, but there is just enough absence of depth to the sound (even through a 6.1 sound system) to make it unmistakably merely a re-engineering of the 1944 performance by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  Did I say "merely"?  It's still magnificent.  Synchronizing a brand-new soundtrack with the old images would probably be prohibitively expensive (and Disney has little interest in "culture" anymore), but I'd pay $100 or more to own such an audiovisual masterpiece.  Until then, I shall watch and listen to the remastering of the Fantasia over and over and over.