The Don Knotts Collection (Shout Select) - October 5th, 2021

[MifuneFan]

The Don Knotts Collection Blu-ray

Shout! will be releasing a Don Knotts Film Collection

Original post:

[Show spoiler]Shout! Factory will be releasing a Don Knotts Collection through their Shout Selects line.

Includes:

• The Ghost And Mr. Chicken
• The Reluctant Astronaut
• The Shakiest Gun In The West
• The Love God?
• How To Frame A Figg

Bonus Features
Don Knotts Guest Stars On The Red Skelton Show: "Deadeye And The Gunslinger"
Trailers From Hell: The Ghost And Mr. Chicken And The Love God?
Theatrical Trailers For Each Film
Image Gallery
TV Spots
Savings Bond PSA
Radio Spots

A staple of everyone’s favorite classic American television shows, Don Knotts carved a hilarious swath through some big-screen Hollywood hits as well. The king of fish-out-of-water comedies, Knotts stumbles and bumbles his way through five laugh-out-loud adventures including: The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, as a timid would-be reporter who finds himself trapped in a haunted house for the night; The Reluctant Astronaut, as NASA’s least-likely-to-succeed spacefarer; The Shakiest Gun In The West, as a clumsy dental student who finds adventure and love on the prairie; The Love God?, as a hapless, straightlaced copy editor scapegoated into fronting a bawdy girlie magazine; and How To Frame A Figg, as a toady bookkeeper framed for financial corruption by big-time city officials and their even shadier supercomputer!

[Graboid]

I have all of these titles on individual blu-ray releases from Universal, except for The Love God, which was never released. So I guess I’ll have to re-buy them all to get the one missing disc. Hopefully they will improve the transfers, maybe to 4K rescans.

[dylrichard02]

Big Don Knotts fan, so I'll have to get this!

[Gunsnroses092789]

Originally Posted by Graboid

I have all of these titles on individual blu-ray releases from Universal, except for The Love God, which was never released. So I guess I’ll have to re-buy them all to get the one missing disc. Hopefully they will improve the transfers, maybe to 4K rescans.

I unfortunately doubt it. Usually with these actor-centric box sets, they use existing masters and only upgrade if they're very big titles, especially horror. I expect this to be close to the Anne Bancroft set.

[Professor Echo]

Originally Posted by Gunsnroses092789

I unfortunately doubt it. Usually with these actor-centric box sets, they use existing masters and only upgrade if they're very big titles, especially horror. I expect this to be close to the Anne Bancroft set.

I never got the Bancroft set, but were there any extras included? The Knotts Blus from Universal were bare bones and I would at least like to get the trailers.

[dylrichard02]

Originally Posted by Professor Echo

I never got the Bancroft set, but were there any extras included? The Knotts Blus from Universal were bare bones and I would at least like to get the trailers.

The Bancroft set lifted the Criterion disc of The Graduate, a Shout version of Fatso, Agnes of God, The Pumpkin Eater, 84 Charing Cross Road a Twilight Time version of Don't Bother to Knock, an Olive films disc of The Miracle Worker, and the Fox disc of To be or Not To Be.

The extras were somewhat sporadic, some of the discs they created for the set were completely bare bones, others lifted from other distributors had extras. The set did have a booklet included.

Hopefully there's some stuff on this set, but if not the price might be kind of low which would be nice. Maybe a booklet will be available with this as well.

[filmgenius89]

Originally Posted by dylrichard02

The Bancroft set lifted the Criterion disc of The Graduate, a Shout version of Fatso, Agnes of God, The Pumpkin Eater, 84 Charing Cross Road a Twilight Time version of Don't Bother to Knock, an Olive films disc of The Miracle Worker, and the Fox disc of To be or Not To Be.

Shout authored a new disc for "Dont Bother To Knock" Which according the the reviewer on this site, they "didn't feel that there was ample grain on the TT and have added faux grain to compensate". They also mentioned that "There are scenes and moments where the image looks very good but others where it's akin to an unpcoverted DVD or a victim of too much electronic post-processing. This had the potential to be a great transfer had Shout simply replicated TT's"

The other discs, i believed were ripped from the other labels.

[gates70]

Damn I have all of these except one. Will probably double dip anyways.

[Dragon78]

Cool, I will be getting this one.

[Batman90]

I will definitely be getting this day one for sure. I’m a big fan of Don Knotts. When he left The Andy Griffin Show it went down hill fast He was the true star of it.

[Dragon78]

"How to frame a fig", don't remember this one, what is that one about?

[MifuneFan]

Originally Posted by Dragon78

"How to frame a fig", don't remember this one, what is that one about?

Here's the synopsis

The city commissioner of Dalton (Bill Zuckert) has been embezzling money from public funds, and now he's worried that the city's bookkeepers will find out. So he replaces the three best number crunchers with LEO, an accounting computer, and promotes the incompetent Hollis Figg (Don Knotts) to feed the machine the raw data. Unfortunately for the commissioner, Figg's promotion has gone to his head, and it isn't long before he discovers what's been going on.

[lilboyblu]

Though not in this set, where would you fans rank The Incredible Mr. Limpet in Don Knotts' filmography?

[ltb2.0]

I have yet to pick up any of this. I'll definitely get this.

[Professor Echo]

Originally Posted by lilboyblu

Though not in this set, where would you fans rank The Incredible Mr. Limpet in Don Knotts' filmography?

I would rank it very highly. It's a fantasy film that manages to weave in gentle humor, bittersweet drama, suspense, a bit of action and just a general overall feeling of charm. A combination of live action and animation, it differs from similar fare from recent times in that it is not made up of perpetual jokes, winking references to pop culture and relying on frantic pacing to compensate for a flimsy story and thin characters. It has both kid and adult appeal, but if it has one flaw I would say it could be shortened a bit as the 99 minute running time tends to get a bit draggy. Otherwise, a sweet film that is both fun and sentimental and more substantial than many other movies which try to balance those two things.

CHICKEN, ASTRONAUT and SHAKIEST are all equally great and it's impossible for me to rank one above the other. LOVE GOD a little less so, but it's grown on me over the years and I find lots in it to enjoy. I certainly would never exclude it from the canon. FIGG unfortunately has just never worked for me, though there are still some funny situations and character quirks to keep it from sinking. I haven't seen it in awhile so I'll be happy to give it a rewatch and maybe discover there's more to it than I remember. For me, the biggest problem was that they introduce a character who is even more inept than Don and the actor playing the part just can't cut it. When they tried a similar set up on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, they had Jim Nabors as Gomer be Barney's foil and it worked fantastic, but here a similar attempt just lays there and an extended sequence toward the climax becomes ponderous.

[MifuneFan]

Pre-order up at Amazon: The Don Knotts Collection Blu-ray

Artwork shown is different, but possibly just what the case looks like under any slipcover

[hammer99]

Originally Posted by lilboyblu

Though not in this set, where would you fans rank The Incredible Mr. Limpet in Don Knotts' filmography?

Limpet is very enjoyable and definitely a keeper. My fav is The Love God, though, I think it has more laughs in it than the rest of them combined. Knotts is great and the cast is stellar (particularly Edmund O’Brien, BS Pully, and James Gregory). I already have the other BD’s except for Figg (zzzzz), but I will happily pay for this Day 1 to get Love God on BD.

[dylrichard02]

So this is no longer a Shout Select title I guess. The spine doesn't show a place for a number. My guess is this will be bare bones and be down to about $35 in a couple of months.

[MifuneFan]

Weird that they dropped it as a select title. It does show on their site that "Extras are in progress" so there should be something. The downside though is it's a 3-disc set. Probably not a big deal since these aren't very long films, but the existing titles were of course all on their own disc previously.

[Chase540]

It’s a major bummer if it’s not a Select title. The Shout Select is floundering as it is so a title being removed the line seems odd. The Select artwork is better too. I already own the two films from the set I really want, but I would have double-dipped just to help fill out my Select collection a bit more and if the special features were nice. Probably won’t now.