Dumbo is the latest live-action version of a Disney animated classic to reach home video.

For eighteen years, 101 Dalmatians was the only animated Disney film to get a live-action remake from the studio. Then in quick succession we got Sleeping Beauty (as Maleficent), Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, the current Aladdin, and the forthcoming The Lion King, Lady and the Tramp, and The Little Mermaid. Discounting Universal’s Snow White and the Huntsman, there’s currently talk about remaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a live-action film as well. There’s no talk of a live-action Disney remake of Pinocchio but Guillermo del Toro is planning his own animated version of Carlo Collodi’s beloved classic.

There’s certainly no harm in reimagining these classics as live-action or combination animated/live-action dramas. Most are based on centuries old tales that have been filmed before as live-action events. Aladdin, for example, was first filmed live-action in 1917 as Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, then in 1926 became the first animated feature as Germany’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed combining Aladdin’s story with that of the prince. 1940’s The Thief of Bagdad, which was a variation on the Aladdin story, remains a beloved live-action masterpiece. The 1992 Disney animated musical version of Aladdin was equally beloved in its day, the current live-action remake, not so much.

I found both Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent to be ho-hum versions of the classic fairy tale. To me, both Disney versions of Cinderella pale in comparison to Rodgers & Hammerstein’s made for TV musical.

I’ve always preferred the 1942 non-Disney live-action version and Disney’s own 1994 live-action version of The Jungle Book to Disney’s animated 1967 musical version and certainly to their 2016 live-action remake of the 1967 animated musical. While I love Jean Cocteau’s 1946 live-action French version of Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s 1991 animated musical version has been my favorite Disney film ever since. I found the 2017 live-action remake to be pretty good in its own right as well.

The original 1941 version of Dumbo was the most successful animated film released in the 1940s. At one hour and four minutes, it was a breezy tale about a young circus elephant who is ridiculed by his fellow pachyderms because of his large ears which, because of their size, he discovers give him the ability to fly. The new version, directed by Tim Burton, adds 48 minutes to the running time which is padded with a story about the owners of the circus and the father and daughter who care for the elephants. The story didn’t need the padding. It was perfect as it was. Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito and the rest of the cast are wasted in the film in which the few memorable moments belong to Dumbo and his mom.

Please, Disney, do not ever remake Bambi as a live-action film. No one wants to see Bambi’s mother shot in real life.

As with all Disney releases, if you want to own the DVD or Blu-ray of the 2019 Dumbo, grab it while you can before it’s withdrawn and costs a small fortune to buy it out of circulation.

Fatso, the 1980 cult film about food addiction, has been given a Shout Select Blu-ray release on which the extras are more interesting than the film.

Although the film has its enthusiasts, it’s basically just a lot of overeating interrupted by lots of yelling and screaming and carrying on at the funerals of overweight people who couldn’t stop eating. It was written and directed by Anne Bancroft who based the characters on members of her own Italian family. She co-stars in a Stinkers Bad Movie-nominated role for Worst Supporting Actress as the loudmouthed sister of Dom DeLuise who has the title role. In one of the two Blu-ray extras, Bancroft’s husband, 93-year-old Mel Brooks, who produced the film, says that had Bancroft, who died in 2005 at 73, lived she would have become one of the all-time great directors. That’s extremely unlikely given that Bancroft, who was in her mid-fifties when she directed this, her only film, lived another quarter of a century without directing another one.

The second extra is a more incisive interview with historian Maya Montanez Smukler who goes into detail about the women directors who played a large role in silent films but disappeared when the studios became owned by Wall St. with the advent of the talkies, imposing strict hierarchy rules in which men were given “men’s jobs” like directing and women were given “women’s jobs” like hair and makeup and costume design. Only Dorothy Arzner (Craig’s Wife, Dance, Girl, Dance) survived into the early 1940s. Actress-turned-director Ida Lupino became the sole woman director in the late 1940s, directing her last film (The Trouble with Angels) in 1966. The now 97-year-old Elaine May would usher in a female director renaissance in 1971 with A New Leaf. If Bancroft were to have the kind of career behind the camera that she had in front of it she would have had to have followed Fatso with more such work, but she wasn’t interested.

David Lynch recently complained that the Kino Lorber release of his 1997 Lost Highway “falls short” but didn’t elaborate. Kino responded that they had reached out to Lynch to provide input on a new master, but he refused to cooperate, leaving them no choice but to go with the existing Universal transfer. At that point, they had wanted to include extras but were prohibited from doing so because even that would have required approval from the director.

In actuality, the look of the film is fine, but the audio needs to be upgraded. Music and background noise are heard just fine, but the dialogue is muted to the point where you need to either ramp up the volume on your speakers or turn on the English subtitles to follow what the actors are saying.

The film itself is one of Lynch’s most intriguing as well as most bizarre. Bill Pullman stars as a man convicted of the murder of his cheating wife (Patricia Arquette) but who, after suffering from jailhouse hallucinations, morphs into Balthazar Getty and tracks down Arquette and her wealthy handler (Robert Loggia). The eclectic cast includes Robert Blake, Gary Busey, and Richard Pryor.

Also new from Kino Lorber are Blu-ray upgrades of the American Film Theatre presentations of Lost in the Stars starring Brock Peters and Melba Moore in Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s musical version of Cry, the Beloved Country, directed by Daniel Mann; and Galileo starring Topol and Edward Fox in Charles Laughton’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s play, directed by Joseph Losey.

This week’s new releases include Mia and the White Lion and The Best of Enemies.