Pete’s Dragon – High-Flying Edition (1977/Disney DVD)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C+     Film: C+

 

 

After WWII, Walt Disney made many of his productions in England and this grew into a tradition at the studio to continue to produce shows and films there.  Don Chaffey was one of the great gentlemen British directors whose long experience included feature film, major action and spy series on both sides of the Atlantic and work with Walt himself, so he was hired to helm Pete’s Dragon, a hit in 1977 that tried to combine fantasy, comedy and musical numbers.

 

It was a moderate hit and in the year of Star Wars surprise success, but also marked the end of an era of a studio that had seen better days and would soon be fighting for its survival before its revival.  It also combined animation with live-action and that was its biggest selling-point, but George Lucas was now the new fantasy king and the studio would soon have to change to survive.

 

The film has a great cast or veteran actors like Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters and Jim Backus who help save the film and help it endure after all these years, while Sean Marshall has the child lead as Pete.  Comedian Charlie Callas voiced Elliott the Dragon and red-hot singer Helen Reddy (I Am Woman, Angie Baby, Delta Dawn) had the female lead in what became the wrap-up of her peak of success in the music business.  Jeff Conway appears here a year before the more successful film of Grease.

 

Pete becomes best friends with Elliott after hearing about him and some unusual events shake up the small town he is from.  Much better when it was released, the songs are not too memorable and scenes decent at best, but Disney would move away from this kind of production and it was a moderate success overall.  Even when it does not work or hold up, it was an ambitious production and young children are likely to still enjoy it, while its cast, visual effects and live action/animation combo will make it a curio for those who do not think of it as nostalgia.

 

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 image is more like 1.78 and the film was supposedly shot at the British “flat” widescreen aspect ratio of 1.75 X 1.  Either way, it is soft, has weakness throughout and worst of all, the dragon look color-weak as you can actually see the cell dust on how he was hand-drawn.  That is even when the live-action footage looks good.  For Blu-ray, Disney really needs to take the money and reinsert all the animation with fuller color and no noise, dust or other artifacts.

 

The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix tries to upgrade the old Dolby A-type analog stereo with basic mono surrounds.  It does this with some success, but the sound needs to be upgraded a bit more as well.  In an interesting irony, this is one of the only films you will ever see the Dolby logo next to the logo for RCA Photophone analog optical sound.  The musical numbers sound best.

 

Extras include still sections, trailers, deleted storyboard sequence, demo recording (including a separate piece on a song completely dropped), Brazzle Dazzle Effects featurette on the history of mixing live-action and animation to that time and songs from a mini-album soundtrack.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo