DVDs: I am Simba, Hear Me Roar

No studio has enjoyed greater success in the straight-to-video market than Disney, and with this week's release of The Lion King 1 1/2, the company's 10-year-old Lion King franchise is likely to set even more sales records. Besides three feature-length films, it includes video games, a Broadway musical and international touring company, sing-along videos, and a billion plush toys and other ancillary products.

Today, the concept of expanding a studio's brand through video and DVD sales, bypassing theaters, seems obvious. In fact, this paradigm shift wasn't nearly that simple to accomplish. It required Disney to re-think its time-tested strategy of re-distributing its most popular titles in theaters and on video every seven or eight years, then pulling them from circulation yet again. Because the straight-to-video titles would be produced on substantially lower budgets than the originals, it also meant that loyal consumers would be asked to accept something slightly below the studio's traditional standards.

It also meant that exhibitors who stood behind Disney no longer would be given a shot at exploiting the popularity of franchises they had helped build.

No matter. This prequel to the 1994 blockbuster raises the bar for children's animated comedies. The Lion King 1 12 takes place before the events in the first film. As such, it focuses on the backgrounds of Timon the meerkat (again voiced by Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa the warthog (Ernie Sabella), who offer a slightly different perspective on Simba's eventual ascension to power. Extras include interactive games, deleted scenes, documentary featurettes and new music.

Originally released in 1977, Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo was created as both homage to Disney's Fantasia and a declaration that fine animation can emerge from places other than Burbank and Hollywood. Using the works of Debussy, Dvorak, Ravel, Sibelius, Vivaldi and Stravinsky, the film is introduced by its narrator as a "show destined for immortality. Music interpreted in cartoons." The presentation we're about to see, he points out, is Fantasia, a declaration that provokes a phone call, and this admonition, "They say some guy already made this picture, a certain Crisney, Prisney, an American." Like Sylvain Chomet's Oscar-nominated Triplets of Belleville, Allegro Non Troppo succeeds on its own terms as a both charming entertainment and testimony that America isn't the only country able to master animation as art.

Also new on DVD, The Frank Sinatra Show: Welcome Home Elvis is a wonderful look back at a time in history when really big stars hosted TV variety shows of their own, with regular appearances by top entertainers of the day. In 1957, Timex sponsored a series of ABC specials, starring Ol' Blue Eyes, in his pre-Rat Pack period. The episode that featured a newly civilianized Elvis Presley was taped May 12, 1960, in Miami. It shows its age, but is still delightful.

Fans of last year's delightful documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, will enjoy Only the Strong Survive, which surveys the influence of Memphis-based musicians and producers on the popular culture of the '60s. The centerpiece event is a reunion concert featuring such giants as Isaac Hayes, Wilson Pickett, Carla and Rufus Thomas, the Chi-Lites and Ann Peebles. After all these years, it's great fun to see these artists performing well, and the re-establishment of Memphis as the primary home for R&B in the '60s.

Not so wonderful is Dimension's special R-rated version of My Boss' Daughter. Along with Showgirls and Freddy Got Fingered, the David Zucker-directed comedy provides yet another prime example of how low Hollywood will stoop when it decides to pander to its audience's basest instincts, and exploit a hot young star's (Ashton Kutcher) popularity. To merely describe it as vile isn't saying much. It's difficult to imagine what constitutes the additional material, but the most logical guess is a long-ish scene in which a hoodlum pisses all over the furniture in the living room of Kutcher's boss (Terence Stamp) and ethnic jokes as gratuitous as they are humorless.

Upon its debut on ABC in 1983, The Thorn Birds, starring Richard Chamberlain as a handsome, horny and heterosexual priest, instantly became one of the most popular of all TV mini-series. Based on Colleen McCollough's epic family drama, it covers 60 years in the lives of the Clearys, who were brought from New Zealand to Australia to run their aunt Mary Carson's ranch. Then-newcomer Rachel Ward was enlisted to play the temptress, Meggie, and she didn't disappointment. Twenty years later, Chamberlain would emerge from the closet—surprising no one.