The King And I: 2-disc (Special Edition) [DVD]

The presentation of this film is breathtaking, having gone back to the original 55mm film negatives and recreated the film from scratch. The picture now looks cleaner and more colourful than you have ever seen it, and the sound is as if it was recorded yesterday. The second disc is packed with extras about the stars, the music, and even the remastering process. Regarding the comment left previously about the Overture and Intermission being removed for this DVD, the film here is shown as originally presented, without these items, which were only added later on, so what is on the disc is completely complete!

The restoration of this new issue of "The King and I" is nothing short of magnificent - the colours are really vibrant, and there is no hint of graininess or colour loss. A really beautiful job.

One thing however that strikes me as rather strange - I think this issue presents the movie as it would have been when it first went on General Release, as opposed to a RoadShow version. There is no Overture, no intermission (and therefore no intermission music) and no exit music. So ... if you have a previous edition of this DVD which contains these, don't ditch it!

I posted the below as a response comment to an earlier review - but I thought I'd post this as a review for anyone not fully understanding why the picture of this film is cropped at the top & lower portions on their TV (& for those who have not viewed the restoration documentary). The same will apply for Rogers & Hammerstein's "Carousel"

Here's an abbreviated technical response of why this DVD does fill the entire frame of your TV, hope you can stick with it.
This feature along with "Carousel" are the only 2 movies ever to be printed in Cinemascope 55 which has an aspect that would approximately require one & a half widescreen TV's to reproduce the width of the film information. Here lays the root of problem since the modern day television screen format is somewhat incompatible with the filming format.

Incidentally, only our original 4:3 TV screens (pre-widescreen design) were designed to be compatible with the Academy screen format. Our modern day widescreen TVs are only 1.77 times wider than the height (commonly called 16:9). This shape was realised as the geometric hybrid ideal of all the known screen formats & was devised around 1980 but was initiated with further development by the European Broadcast Union at a cost of nearly $230 Million in the early 1990's. Most movies for decades have been shot either at 1.85 or 2.35 times wider than the height. Cinemascope 55 is the exception displaying at 2.55 times wider than the height. Imagine if a movie director had choreographed leading actors taking positions at opposing edges of the frame in a given scene, then for TV transfer purposes the question would remain which actor to crop from being "in-vision" & would this not tamper with the original intended created effect?

In early 1950's in the quest to create a bigger/wider picture with higher resolution for large theatre screens this film was made using 55mm frame format (combined with anamorphic lenses) instead of using regular 35mm celluloid film stock. The camera was actually an early 1930's 70mm camera with a modified gate to reduce the image to 55mm to accommodate space for newly invented optical stereo soundtrack. Each singular frame was taller (twice the height) & wider than 35mm film - resulting in about 4 times the surface area yielding considerably greater resolution. An engineering marvel for the time but too expensive to maintain & not every theatre could afford to re-equip with this technology, so 35mm reduction copies were similarly dispatched for general release but these would have had a certain amount of field rejection to fit into the frame.
In 2003, 20th Century Fox out-sourced Cineric NYC to help make the restoration, who not only made a great job but who had (quite rightly IMHO) chosen to retain the original filming aspect ratio but shrink it accordingly which means the film will always appear "letter-boxed" on a 16:9 widescreen TV but without the need for frame cropping or compacting techniques to ensure we will see all the width information. You are seeing the movie as it would have been screened in a theatre.

Armed with the above trivia, you may by now realise that most movies you see these days which appear to fill your TV screen whether they be broadcast or played from a DVD/BluRay have around 15-20% or so of their visuals removed compared to cinema presentation to complete the vertical upscale.
Hope this helps.