My Wild Irish Rose (Warner Bros. 1947)

Thought I would mention this, since the Warner Archive features a nice handful of Andrea King’s films available for the first time on DVD! If you buy five movies, they’re $11.00 each, and come with free shipping!

Currently, you can order God Is My Co-Pilot, My Wild Irish Rose, Roughly Speaking, The Man I Love, Darby’s Rangers, and Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting.

For those of you curious about the Warner Archive, I was a little skeptical at first. These are on-demand discs. They’re DVD-Rs, meaning they’re burned to a disc when you order them. They’re not replicated from a glass master for 1,000s of copies and stored in a warehouse, waiting for shipping.

They’re also not restored or remastered for DVD. But they are generated from the current broadcast masters, and come from the “best quality source” available (short of a full restoration).

So, how good are they?

Better than I thought. At least so far. I have purchased several.

The quality is just fine! Sound and picture are solid, and they look better than they do when airing on TV (probably because TV signals are compressed to some degree, and there isn’t much if any noticeable compression flaws on these DVDs). They have labels on the discs, but they are either super-thin, glossy labels or they’re burned onto the DVD-Rs. I can’t quite tell (which is a good thing). I’ve had bad luck with paper labels on DVDs. After multiple plays in a hot player, the labels can start to separate ever so slightly from the discs and cause skipping issues during playback.

I recommend trying them out, if you find titles you like.

I’m also hoping the other movie studios start similar on-demand disc services. I understand that Warner Archive has been very successful as a business model, and they’re making money when so many now in the Home Entertainment (DVD/BD) industry are not.

Warner Archive Link

If you’re interested, don’t delay! The sale runs from March 24 to March 31, 2010.