I just found a place to vote to get this released on DVD. Here's the site:
http://www.tcmdb.com/title/title.jsp?stid=92868
It looks like Turner Classic Movies (tcm.com) keeps a tally. Let's get this released!!!!
Does Turner own the rights? I thought this was an Italian film.
share I don't know if they own the rights... it's in their library. I recall seeing a post asking what the difference was between owning the rights and having it in their library but there was no reply. Sometimes I wonder who's running the TCM website. Perhaps someday someone will pull back the curtain and reveal one man running everything who is a very good man but a very bad wizard.
Waste anything except TIME time is our shortest material
Good to know there's a print hanging around somewhere. We can only hope that it's color corrected and crisp.
shareThanks Zerogirl, I did vote. I was completly enchanted by this version of TOB as a young boy. For years I hoped for the introduction of a true blue rose, largely because of this film. I remember being very frightened by the faceless soldiers that Reeves battles and those creepy trees of death! Steve Reeves was so handsome and charming as Karim. The Soundtrack is dreamy. Scarecrow Video in Seattle has the Embassy release copy for rental and it's pretty bad (faded and full screen.) So many of the films I love have been restored and released I really can't complain. This movie is truly a guilty pleasure and perhaps some day I'll see it restored to all it's dubbed and cheesy glory.
Waste anything except TIME time is our shortest material
If you found the soundtrack for the Steve Reeves version of The Thief of Baghdad dreamy, then you'll be very happy to know that Digitmovies has released on CD the complete original score of Steve Reeves' The Thief Of Baghdad by Italian composer Carlo Rusticelli. The CD has 68 minutes of this great score on 41 tracks digitally remastered. You can get this CD for $17.95 from Screen Archives Entertainment on their website, www.screenarchives.com.
shareThe Thief of Bagdad would seem to be a likely candidate for release in Warner Home Video's new Warner Archives series. These are DVD-Rs of high quality, no extras except for occasional trailers (but then many regular classic film DVD releases also unfortunately lack any extras), and they're all in their correct aspect ratios -- which, for Thief, would be 2.35:1. Warners is releasing lots of titles the studio controls from the WB, MGM, RKO and Allied Artists libraries in this series, many of them long requested, so Thief would be a good fit.
TTOB was released theatrically in the US (and elsewhere) by MGM, so Warner (which owns most of the MGM library) most likely still has the rights to the dubbed version, though almost certainly not the original Italian. Of course, the optimum resolution would be to have a standard DVD release featuring both the original Italian and dubbed-in-English versions, but I'd happily settle for just the dubbed version, as long as it was in widescreen and a good print. In 2007 Warners released four sets of so-called "Cult Classics", one of which contained three epics of the ancient world. One of these was another Italian-made film, The Colossus of Rhodes (1960), which was also released here by MGM, and the version on DVD is the English-dubbed one. That set would have been a perfect venue for The Thief of Bagdad/Il ladro di Bagdad, but at least it proves that Warner will release such films if they still have the rights. At this point in time, a Warner Archives release would probably be more likely. Whether it'll actually ever happen is another issue.
Meanwhile, at least we have the CD with the film's wonderful score. Thanks again to our friend above, alanbobet, for notifying us about that. A great CD.
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