It often happens that shortly after I file my latest column for Cinema Scope (“Global Discoveries on DVD”), an especially notable release lands in my mailbox. This happened most recently with Flicker Alley’s Laurel & Hardy Year One: The Newly Restored 1927 Silents, a two-disc Blu-Ray package containing thirteen two-reelers and countless extras that illustrate in detail how Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy became the comedy team that we know for the remainder of their lives.

From the beginning, Stan Laurel, the more creative member of the duo, had most of his own comic persona down pat, whereas “Babe” Hardy already had many of his own defining mannerisms and gestures but not yet a single character to display them. Frequently cast as a villain, he’s a thief in The Lucky Dog (financed by cowboy star Bronco Billy) and a house detective in 45 Minutes from Hollywood (the first of their many Hal Roach shorts, this one costarring the Our Gang kids and Theda Bara playing themselves in brief cameos) whereas Laurel plays respectively a “brash young man” and (unrecognizably mustachioed) “starving actor” in these two films. But in their third short, recently rediscovered and restored after being lost for over half a century, and titled Duck Soup (six years prior to the Marx Brothers masterpiece), they’re already a team — recognizable as “Stan and Ollie” to us if apparently not to their contemporaries, because they both turn up in at least six more two-reel comedies before they finally emerge as the familiar comic duo.

All thirteen shorts are equipped with audio commentaries by Randy Skretvedt that tell us even more than we could possibly want to know about production details, including the precise Los Angeles addresses where scenes were shot and the identities of all the cast members. If this sounds like a complaint, it’s really only a slur on the capacities of us viewers and listeners. As a package, this is as complete as anyone could wish. [8/28/23]