The Gnome-Mobile (1967) - DMC Exclusive - March 8, 2022
Thread for the DMC Exclusive Blu-ray release of The Gnome-Mobile
Quote:
Jasper (Tom Lowell), a two-foot-high gnome, has been desperately searching for a suitable bride to please Knobby (Walter Brennan), his 900-year-old grandfather. Two young children (Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice) agree to help Jasper with his predicament—a problem that develops into a wild chase when an enterprising showman (Sean McClory) discovers the gnomes and quickly masterminds a kidnapping plot! Enjoy the ride for the first time on Blu-ray!
Code:
Total Video
Title Codec Length Movie Size Disc Size Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track Secondary Audio Track
----- ------ ------- -------------- -------------- ------- ------- ------------------ ---------------------
00100.MPLS AVC 1:24:36 22,048,045,056 22,158,278,856 34.74 33.00 DD AC3 1.0 96Kbps
While on his way to Seattle to sell valuable timberland, D.J. Mulrooney, a lumber company tycoon played by Walter Brennan, stops for a picnic in a forest of Redwood trees with his grandchildren, played by Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, and becomes unwittingly involved in the plight of two gnomes, both of whom are searching for others like them, since their kind has been diminished by deforestation. When these two little people are kidnapped by a sideshow carnival owner, Mulrooney and his grandchildren come to the rescue in their Rolls-Royce “Gnome-Mobile.”
The 1967 Disney live-action adventure, The Gnome-Mobile, is a fun-spirited endeavor that flies by with its 84-minute run time, squeezing plenty of memorable visual effects and car chases into the proceedings. Director Robert Stevenson, who also helmed Old Yeller (1957), Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), and Mary Poppins (1964), used a variety of camera tricks to great effect here, making the two lead gnomes, played by Tom Lowell and Brennan (in a second role), look convincing next to their normal human friends.
In our present day and age, when forests have been largely depleted, when climate change due to man-made causes is all but irreversible, and when the only remaining gnomes dwell on manicured suburban lawns, this lively screen tale, based on an Upton Sinclair story, serves as an early message about the importance of ecological awareness. A wondrously catchy theme song and several endlessly amusing scenarios, however, provide just the right spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
The picture quality on this Blu-ray is excellent.
Last edited by The Great Owl; 04-17-2022 at 08:53 PM.
Very glad to finally have this in widescreen. The only problem that I feel must be pointed out is the audio: I had to turn it up to at least 85% just to hear the dialogue.
Very glad to finally have this in widescreen. The only problem that I feel must be pointed out is the audio: I had to turn it up to at least 85% just to hear the dialogue.
DMC exclusive all have that issue in common at least the 3 preceding blurays from DMC
Well, gnomes aren't really the same as leprechauns, but in honour of St Patrick's Day I watched this one tonight. Somehow I had missed it for all these years, so I picked a copy in the going-out-of-business sale a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever seen it.
And I thought it was a lot of fun; a charming bit of fluff. Great transfer, with some lovely location shooting among the redwoods. And the special effects are excellent throughout; impressive! How come Disney could manage great effects in the 1960s, but in the 1970s so many of their films featured lousy effects that were definitely sub-par?
How come Disney could manage great effects in the 1960s, but in the 1970s so many of their films featured lousy effects that were definitely sub-par?
Because Walt was dead and no one was pushing the staff to higher creative effort vs. budget savings (like now). Many of the old guys who ran things in the 70s (who worked on the classics, even) got a slack "they don't know the difference" attitude. Walt never settled for "okay" -- his goal was to make the unreal seem real and encouraged the crew to go beyond their standard effort no matter the cost. The illusion of life was everything to him.
Last edited by merlinjones; 03-17-2024 at 06:48 AM.
Because Walt was dead and no one was pushing the staff to higher creative effort vs. budget savings (like now). Many of the old guys who ran things in the 70s (who worked on the classics, even) got a slack "they don't know the difference" attitude. Walt never settled for "okay" -- his goal was to make the unreal seem real and encouraged the crew to go beyond their standard effort no matter the cost. The illusion of life was everything to him.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) was certainly an exception to that. Excellent effects for the time.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) was certainly an exception to that. Excellent effects for the time.
Oh, I'll agree---Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always been one of my favourite Disney pictures, from the time I first saw it when I was about ten years old. (And I loved the books too, though they have a distinctly melancholy feeling that is not reflected in the film.) It was only as the 70s progressed that the quality of Disney effects dropped so markedly.
Disney had most of its money invested in the theme parks at the time of Walt's death. Most of the money from Robert Stevenson's first musical went into a division of the company called MAPO (not to be confused with Maypo breakfast cereal; perhaps a future corporate regime can restart it and rename it BEBRO instead) that was separate from the film division. And honestly, they were letting things slide even before Walt died. Even in black-and-white, there are shots of The Shaggy Dog and The Absent-Minded Professor that you can tell were process shots. The addition of color to subsequent films of this nature just made the most obvious ones even more obvious.
Roy O. Disney's death made it harder for them to get money for new technology, so other studios caught up with them. Pete's Dragon used the same old Petro Vlahos sodium vapor process as its two post-Uncle Remus predecessors, and they let things slide that Walt, in theory, would have caught (he would have been 76 by 1977, so who's to say how long he would have kept working had he lived longer?) but not as much as its post-1971 contemporaries. Don Knotts had to work overtime to overcome the cheap optical effects in his films, but since No Deposit, No Return has him hanging from an unfinished building, an apt metaphor if ever there was one, it would have endangered his life to do that scene on location without a stunt double. Imagine the bad publicity for the studio if he had been injured on location. Harrison Ellenshaw worked on Disney's shows and Star Wars while getting to use the fancy new equipment Lucasfilm had access to, but it wasn't until The Black Hole and TRON that they started using more up-to-date technologies. Those two movies being shot in widescreen made it impossible to use the Vlahos system for them because IIRC it was made with converted 3-strip Technicolor cameras and it would be hard if not impossible to adapt them for an anamorphic workflow. Before that, though, there was no reason Elliott should have gotten, in the words of Marilyn Monroe, the fuzzy end of the lollipop, but in the moment they saw no incentive to change a system that had already won two Oscars when the cultural impact of some other studio's space opera from the guy who made American Graffiti was unknown at the time.
Post-production clearly seems to be where the biggest end zone fumbles took place, and the one place where Walt's judgement was the most sorely missed. Nobody wanted to step up to the plate and be "the new Walt" because they'd just be compared negatively to him, but that turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway. The rest of Hollywood wasn't exactly waiting around for the Second Coming of Walt when Jim Henson, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg were trying to fill the void left by his absence and beating his own company in the process. It didn't have to be this way, though. All they had to do differently is dot the I's and cross the T's. Just like Walt would have done. They could have easily avoided the need for a "renaissance," especially when they learned all the wrong lessons both from that initial decline and the unprecedented recovery from it. I think they still wanted to make good movies but were hamstrung by the level of bureaucracy involved in getting anything made.
Last edited by WonkaBedknobs83; 03-18-2024 at 10:54 PM.
When I was a kid, I was part of a group of kids invited to see Escape From Witch Mountain in the theater on the Disney lot. After it was over, they had question and answer and one of the first questions was, "The film isn't finished, right?" The people running the screening said, "Yes this is the finished movie." And the kid said, "With all those wires on the toys and the weird lines all around the Winnebago?" The Disney hosts looked like they all had frogs in their mouths.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
The Gnome-Mobile (1967) - DMC Exclusive - March 8, 2022
Linear Mode
