Kid With The Golden Arm is the movie that got me hooked on classic kung fu flicks.

Kid With the Golden Arm is the only one in that list that I'd consider essential, although the rest are fine enough. Actually, I'm not sure if I've ever seen Magnificent Ruffians. The Venom movies all start to run together in my brain.

Hopefully they've got some bigger titles lined up for v2. 36th Chamber is in there for sure and I wouldn't be surprised to see the first sequel. I'd also guess that Five Element Ninjas and Avenging Eagle (uncut please!) are in there as well. I know the guy at Arrow mentioned that the boxes were chronological (they're actually not, but close enough) which is a bit of a shame because there's so many great titles from the early 70's that they skipped over and I can't say that the 80's stuff is my favorite.

This is a beautiful set and I’m in for Volume 2. I can’t believe that I got this set early!

I have yet to watch Kid with the Golden Arm but Ruffians and Tigers are in the lower tier of Venom films for me. Tigers is a mess because of the filming issues it had even with the great cast.

Crossing my fingers Robocop 4K is not authored with any defect technical issues. 🤞

That disc will be mine. I don't think I ever owned the DVD. Never got the blu either. 4K it is!

I just sold my old Criterion DVD of Robocop….for a glorious $32! Profit!

I’ll pick up the 4K if they are actually able to really improve on the PQ.

I'm keeping that one because it's the only one, along with the LD CC version, that has the Alex Murphy "screams" as he's getting shot, with the proper non-looped scream sound that every future edition has. It may not be anamorphic but fuck it, it's accurate.

Unboxing of the Shaw Scope collection Number 1

Are those going up in value?

I bought a sealed copy off of eBay a few years ago for ten bucks, free shipping.

That was the one early Criterion DVD I regretted not getting back in the day. I remember that some of my first Criterion DVDs were This is Spinal Tap and Silence of the Lambs that I bought for about fifteen bucks a piece when Best Buy had their first big DVD sale around Black Friday of 1998. I actually bought those two DVDs (and about ten others) before I even had a DVD player.

Not sure why I didn't get Robocop then; maybe it was out of stock.

I’m not sure really, it was just one of the pile I was planning on selling at some point. It’s time has come. I’m more interested in a much better picture quality than any of the past releases as well as having a theatrical and the unrated director’s cut. I’m fairly certain Arrow will remedy that.

Doesn't the Criterion editions of Robocop have an audio commentary not available elsewhere? Its probably worth holding onto for that.

My Shawscope box just turned up. It was sent by Diabolik with 2 day shipping and it only took 6! But who's counting. Anyway, the box is gorgeous and I took a couple of minutes to flip through the book. Sometimes I think these booklets are just filled with fluff as a way to pad out the press release, but this one's legit. Right of the bat, there's a short article about the various translations and spellings of the names that frequent the box. It's not incredibly in-depth, but absolutely vital for a newcomer. Even as someone who already knows that Lau Kar Leung and Liu Chia Lang are the same person, it's nice to see Arrow take the time and be intentional about how people's (whether that be character or cast/crew) names are presented.

I also noticed that My Young Auntie is mentioned as forthcoming in vol. 2 along with the Venoms titles posted above. I've only seen that one once, and it was quite a few years back, but I remember liking it a lot. It's a little bit silly, but the action is great and Kara Hui is awesome/adorable.

At this point we now know for sure 6 of the 12 titles in vol.2:

36th Chamber of Shaolin
Kid with the Golden Arm
Magnificent Ruffians
Invincible Shaolin
Ten Tigers of Kwantung
My Young Auntie

So I popped in King Boxer and I was IMMEDIATELY taken by how organic the new 2k master looked in comparison to the legacy Celestial masters we've been watching for the last 15-20 years. The work Celestial did on these films way back when is pretty much the only reason I've seen any of these movies, so I'm grateful they exist, but it's easy to take issue with a lot of the choices they made. They were hyper aggressive with the filtering, and when they came across damaged frames and splice points, they oftentimes elected to just cut those frames out instead of restoring them. They also way over-processed the audio.

Since I don't have an older blu-ray copy of King Boxer, I took a peak at the new 2k scan of Crippled Avengers and compared it to my German blu-ray. This is my first try at making a screenshot comparison, so I may not have done it exactly right, but I think what you'll see speaks for itself.

https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/19919/

Of course now I'm bummed all the titles in the set don't have new masters. And despite being a massive fan of 88 Films, this immediately downgrades the awesome work they're doing on Shaw titles. As I mentioned in that thread I recently watched The Chinese Boxer. It was great, but now I desperately want a new scan for that one. Especially since that one was supposedly one of the worst examples of Celestial cutting frames. Just to give you an idea of how insidious this practice is, the new Arrow version of Crippled Avengers is a full 2 minutes longer than than the German blu!

I think it does, yes. The MGM SE from 2005 (or thereabouts) has a different commentary with the same participants, so that might lead to some confusion.

Looks like the Criterion commentary will be on this new release. Same people as on DVD listing. And Dolby Vision and HDR, so I’m feeling better about it being a good transfer.

https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=29817

It's going to be the same teal-and-orange master Arrow used on Blu-ray, which they licensed from MGM, just upgraded to 4K and HDR now.

Ran into a copy of Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) at a local record store today.

Immediately bought it as I was slow to initially get a pre-order in. I also wasn't able to get a copy during Barnes & Noble's 50% Arrow sale back in October.

I watched The Boxer From Shantung from the Shaw set yesterday. The new scan is just as amazing as King Boxer's. In this instance, the new Arrow BD runs almost a full 5 minutes longer than the previous master used on the HK BD. Again, this is because Celestial cut frames from almost every single edit point in the film. I ran the two side by side and they were out of sync almost immediately. There was also a moment late in the film during the final fight where on the Arrow, Chen Kuan Tai tosses a dude off the balcony of the tea house and there's a wide shot with a freeze frame before a closeup shot of the stuntman going to the ground. Even though Chang Cheh used freeze frames at times in his movies, I don't think there are any other instances in Boxer. It seemed like it might be an authoring error, but when I checked the HK disc, the shot with the freeze frame was just completely cut out. That tells me that either the original elements are damaged and this freeze is a result of the that damage, or it was intentional and Celestial thought it was as awkward as I did and just decided to cut it. I'm going to assume it was intentional, but either way I prefer Arrow's approach.

The only other thing is that according to a note in the extras, the original elements for the title credits are apparently damaged beyond repair, so Arrow was not able to use those and instead had to use the digital credits Celestial created. It's kind of a bummer, but the fact that Arrow is going back and using the original credits whenever possible is another reason why this box set is such a treasure.

My Shaw Brothers set shipped today and I should have it sometime tomorrow. Going to try to make some time to watch it since I put in some good money for it.

Glad to read that the Arrow set fixes a lot of Celestial's issues, although I still can't part with the vast majority of the IVL HK DVDs (or even the Shaw-stuffed Ziieagle player, which had even worse cuts to the films thanks to Singapore's antiquated censorship system). It's becoming apparent that the only Hong Kong cinema of interest to these labels is the martial arts stuff, which makes perfect sense as those are the films that have had the longest following overseas, which in turn has produced plenty of seasoned experts who can pad out these special editions with context. I suspect these Arrow editions (and Eureka, 88, etc.) will be the definitive versions for good now. But when I consider just how many martial arts films Hong Kong produced from the 1970's onward, there's just no way we'll ever be able to get them all restored on Blu-ray, even when original elements exist (which is proving surprisingly common these days, after years of being told pretty much the opposite). I'd love for these companies to consider budget-priced multi-film combo packs where they could bundle up lesser-but-no-less-interesting kung-fu films that don't feature the usual suspects (Sammo, Yuen, Lau, Venoms, etc). Those could be nice gateway drugs to these pricier sets, and give some hidden gems a chance to shine. But alas . . .

On a related note, even though I ordered it as well, I'm kinda sick of all the unboxing videos of this thing (and so many others) on YouTube, the vast majority by middle-aged white guys who don't seem like Hong Kong movie fans so much as fancy-box bauble collectors! Shows how the design work on these things pays off for the distributors as much anything on the discs. And, just like all of Arrow's other sets, this too will be released in a much more streamlined and affordable box (or two) later on, a la Gamera, Herschell Gordon Lewis, etc.

I'm part of some social media groups and other forums and I've started to roll my eyes at all the pictures of when they just get this (and Armour of God) in the mail. Yea... we know what it looks like now...

So you don't want to see pics of my Armour of God set that came today (after a 23 day journey from the UK to Connecticut that included a brief stopover in San Francisco)?

I will politely decline.

I'm betting that 36 Chambers will get a separate release like Come Drink With Me. I'm basing that on the fact that 36 Chambers got its own promotional postcards in Arrow releases.

I'm hoping for a 36 Chambers box set! Make it happen Arrow!

I'm waiting for my Shawscope box set in the mail.

The rumor is that Young Auntie will be in vol. 2. Love that movie!.

I'm a tad disappointed Arrow didn't shell out cash to include the Tarantino commentary track on King Boxer from the Dragon Dynasty DVD.

Tarantino commentary tracks are always a plus.

Either way, still stoked.

Received my copy of the Shawscope box and it is sweet, sweet, sweet! Beautifully put together! The only thing I'm missing now is a bucket of oily popcorn and a clunky mono speaker in my car window!