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Xanadu
Kino Lorber (Blu-Ray, 2025)
With everything jumping all over Xanadu during it’s 45th anniversary, it was quite a nice surprise to hear an art house/cult label like Kino Lorber is giving Xanadu a royal treatment…..they might not be Criterion, but it is better than noting….scratch that, better than what Universal treated the film over the decades, much less the 2008 reissue and the 2016 Blu-ray edition. Both these sets had some bonus points, but to hard core fans and those in film fandom, it was a take it or leave it proposition; a good digital clean up, the 5.1 mix and that documentary was the pluses, but the minus included the inaccurate captions, airbrushing those skates under Kira’s feet on the cover (minor, I grant you) and the production behind the documentary was so cheap that they forgot to add a title card and used none of the music and songs.
This time however, there’s not much to complain about.
As far as the technical aspects are concerned, I must warn you that I’m not a big tech-y person, well, not technical to demand THAT much from the screen just short of yelling at it or the other way around that the screen and that digital flashy-ness demands submission from my eyes and brain; DVD and blu-rays do the job for me just fine but I can’t take this 4K UHD jazz seriously, so I didn’t order the later. I had to stand pretty close to the smart TV at some parts to suck in the details briefly before the headache sat in and sat back down for this review, so I took one for the team here.
I will say that the job here is slightly better than Universal’s; in fact, the job is so good that you get to see the film’s analog optical limitations, like a good long shot of Venice Beach where Sonny starts his long skate of doom and the muses glow is more refined and brighter. I’m glad somebody didn’t do an A. I. job and force details from out of nowhere and make things worse and more desperate.
As for the extras are concerned, there’s a lot more than Universal offered.
The official inclusion of the ‘Sizzle Reel’ is a serious bonus, it is a major upgrade from the bootleg copy on YouTube (and I aught to know, I put it there); both audio and video wise, it looks cleaner, crisper and it is in a letterboxed format. Though I have a complaint with K-L for how they handled this film leading up to the release (it is the Product Reel or Making Xanadu?!?!); it is, in reality, the ‘Product Reel’ that was shown on Xanadu Weekend, an event Universal held for the exhibitors and press in 1980. In fact, there’s even a YouTube video of the film itself with ‘Product Reel’ written on it.
Still it’s better than nothing (again) and I’m getting tired of my own anal retentive fan talk here, so I better let this go.
In terms of quality, the TV spots was a bit of a jolt as they were taken directly from YouTube, with quality issues and all! It was nice to see these in this professional package, but slightly disappointing. I suspect the studio didn’t keep everything related to Xanadu in their vaults and KL had to gather all that they can get. As the radio spots are strictly audio, there’s no bones to pick here. The documentary? Same as the previous Universal packages, warts and all.
However, the bigger piece of the Bonus Material cake here are the commentaries and there’s a lot of them: 4 tracks with a total of 6 people talking over the movie. The notable one is from the director himself, Robert Greenwald. Even though he doesn’t go into exact details of each of the scenes, it was interesting to hear him talk about all the concepts and the heartbreak behind his end of the movie and his relationships with the cast and crew (while his connections with Gene Kelly being a little rough, his description of working with the professional and pleasant Olivia as “the least pain-in-the-ass star that you can imagine”). Speaking of which, Robert offered an interesting ONJ-related antidote: during his first meeting with her, Olivia opened the meeting with one word for him: “Leg Warmers!” as she wanted to start a leg warmer trend with Xanadu. Later on in the commentary, he mentioned reading a book about trauma and how it effects memory and, a tad later, admitted that he doesn’t have much detailed memory of the film. I don’t know if that was a slip or not, but, considering what he went through with this project, I wouldn’t hold that against him.
At the end, it was agreed between Robert and the moderator that the message of Xanadu of ‘love conquers all’ and inspiration still resonates through the mucky side of Xanadu.
As for the three other commentary tracks….I’ll have to confess that I hadn’t listen to them all, chunks of each, but I lost track of who said what and who said them after awhile. I do not want to relive my hyperactive days of youth, watching Xanadu so many times and in such a short amount of time that I need to double my medications keeping my nose from bleeding.
Anyways…..
One of them did start off mentioning that she was going to cram as much into 90 minutes to defend this movie and that is more or less what everybody else does here; complete with personal stories, historical facts and figures leading up to and after Xanadu, etc. from all possible angles. The bottom line is you can compare this to either a multi layered cocktail party at a comic con, or an aimless “kitchen sink” audio book variation of my site played all at once. Take your pick of which channel, or bar, and go from there.
I wasn’t familiar with the names within these channels outside of Greenwalds and was tempted to spend some time googling their names, but I ended up contacting film buff and fellow fan Marc Edward Heuck for help. He told me that he knew all but one and assured me that he can vouch for them and they do have interesting things to say and from what I heard so far, he was right; bouncing around these bars, I heard bar talk that was entertaining and informative, though they were small speed bumps here and there, like one commentator claimed that the Popcorn Girl is the same actress who played the replacement Muse. I have to say “Wrong!” here.
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Those two roles were performed by two separate people; Lise Lang played the Girl roll and, I suspect, the commentator was confusing Lise with Debbie Bartlett, an actress who came in later in the production replacing one of the 8 muses…..and there’s the off-handed claim that Xanadu is a disco movie…..but I need to wrap this review up soon before I take this part and stretch it longer than Lord Of The Rings. As I said elsewhere, Xanadu is a disco movie without the disco. End of (that) line!
The bottom line: I do recommend this disc. The only thing that might influenced your decision is the price and it becomes a bigger issue with the 4K edition. Sure the quality on the later is supposed to be a higher step from blu-ray, but it comes with fewer extras and you need a player to handle that format. Luckily, the 4K set comes with the blu-ray, so you’re not cut out of the deal. Or if you are not tied to whatever formats comes down the pike, the Universal discs (be it DVD or Blu-ray) is going for between 5 to 8 bucks on either amazon or ebay; cheaper than buying and watching it from most streaming channels.
Go figure….
Don-O
P. S.: Long Live Popcorn Girl!!
P. P. S.: Long Live Physical Media!!
P. P. P. S.: my thanks to Marc Edward Heuck and David Mas for the research help.
