WB's Gone With the Wind Blu-ray, their second ultra-deluxe collector's edition of the year, is a tremendous achievement in picture and audio quality. The color depth and picture clarity rivals or exceeds my estimation of the outstanding Wizard of Oz set from earlier in the year. I'm far from a devoted fan of the narrative. The history of the production and the cinematography are what I'm head over heels for. All the extras from the previous 4-disc DVD set are carried over so far as I can tell, supplemented by some new bits here and there.
As I've warned before, the Target exclusive "non-velvet-box" version is the movie and none of the extras (save the commentary). If the Velvet Box price tag isn't your thing, then wait for a lower-priced version that does include the disc-based extras. I've included an unboxing video below that gives a look at all the extra bells and whistles included in the box. I've also included an unboxing of the 4-disc DVD Special Edition from a few years ago for comparison. As seen very briefly in the video, the DVD version had a smaller-sized reproduction of the original premiere program, which is found full-sized and unabridged in the Blu-ray box.
The most interesting and engaging among the new supplements are 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year and Gone With the Wind: The Legend Lives On. The "1939" piece is particularly interesting to watch now, 70 years later, when I'm seeing colleagues struggle to squeeze down to a top ten (or twenty, or thirty) list of best movies they saw in 2009. We've seen something of an echo of one of the greatest single years in cinematic exhibition this year in the sheer number of top shelf theatrical releases. The "Legend Lives On" piece was most entertaining in that it addresses how re-releases of GWTW on video and in theaters were arguably among the precursors of the now-infamous DVD double dip. Moviola: The Scarlett O'Hara War, a 1980 TV movie starring Tony Curtis, isn't particularly good, but it fits the theme and is a nice extra bit for completists. It covers the process of casting Scarlett, one of the many epic struggles that occurred during the making of the film. The same MGM: When the Lion Roared 6-hour doc that was included with the Wizard of Oz "deluxe box" set is in there as well. The copious docs and featurettes on the previous set are too numerous for me to bother including here in anything but what would look like a press release bulleted list, so I'll leave that for the curious to find elsewhere on the web.
As a whole, the packaging and treatment will be everything that die-hard fans of the novel and movie could dream of, and they'll probably be fine spending $40-plus for it. I don't know why anyone would get the DVD at this point, which Amazon lists at $51.99, a whole $9 more than the Blu-ray at $42.99. This theatrical-quality presentation of Gone With the Wind hit the street back on 11.17, and as much as I hate double dips in concept, this one offers drastically-improved picture and audio at a lower price than the previous DVD edition debuted at five years ago. File this one under "film school in a box".