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Apparently Universal have cropped these episodes to 16:9.
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I need to watch "Murder With Too Many Notes," in which a film composer murders a more talented musician who's been ghostwriting for him. (Insert your own joke here.)
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Apparently Universal have cropped these episodes to 16:9.
Some companies hate their customers, right?
The sales argument for me here are the m&e tracks, though. Even if we will ever get a "Columbo" CD box set, it will most likely not cover all the music from all episodes. "Columbo" on home video has been a painful story since the DVD era: when Universal in Germany issued the first two seasons they messed up the German audio and left pieces of episodes undubbed that were constantly on air in full length at the time. Of course, this constant change between English and German audio annoyed customers and from season 3 on they went the easy way and copied the current unrestored TV masters to DVD (and even that didn't prevent missing pieces). That's why the German R2 DVDs ended up with the full screen masters rather than the cropped letterbox ones.
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That is indeed part of the problem. By this point Falk was playing the role like he was doing a variety show sketch and gone were all the wonderful subtleties of early Columbo episodes, especially the pilot and the brilliant "Death Lends A Hand" that shows how Columbo is really underneath the surface a brilliant detective who reserves the moments of when to play the clown for when he needs to.
Another problem is these stories are simply not well-plotted compared to 70s Columbo. I've noticed how a lot of them tend to prolong things before the murder happens because they can't come up with the great barrage of "little things" that sets Columbo on the trail of the killer. More than once they recycle a gimmick from the 70s episode "Playback" of "Columbo sees something on a security tape" that becomes tiresome. Other times it seems like they're trying to evoke film noir which is not right for a character like Columbo and the less said about the two times they foolishly tried to shoehorn Columbo into two Ed McBain "87th Precinct" novels, the better.
On some occasions, they were capable of evoking the old magic, but most of the time the shows tended to misfire completely. McGoohan's two returns as a guest killer were the rare exceptions but "Murder With Too Many Notes" set in the world of film music composition was one of the dreadful ones.
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I covered the series in my thread here (links are probably all dead by now):
https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?pageID=3&forumID=1&threadID=150131&archive=0
While it appears -- scanning over it quickly -- that I didn't comment on the episodes much near the end, I did note that the final episode of the series is truly awful. And I cited nothing from the score. It and the score ere so bad, I didn't want to end the thread on such a terrible low note, that I swapped the final two episodes around.
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too sad
but these "revival" episodes were quite awful anyway
Some of them were superb. Patrick McGoohan in Agenda For Murder stands with the best of the 1970s. Also the George Hamilton episode Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health.
There were a few goodies sprinkled in with the mediocre. But none of them reach the heights of Any Old Port in a Storm, the Conspirators, Étude in Black, Double Exposure or any number of others from the 70s run. But of the revival eps did I particularly liked Columbo Goes to College and the one with Fay Dunaway. But there were too many of them which seemed like they were trying to stretch the format (Undercover was pretty bad).
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