ANot yet: A whopping 3.5
hours of the A&E Nero Wolfe series adapted for networks in more
than 50 countries abroad have never been seen in the USA and Canada.
A&E Home Video has issued three boxed sets of Nero Wolfe on DVD
-- Season One, Season Two, and an eight-disc megaset containing both
seasons -- but only with the versions designed to accommodate the
A&E Network's shorter time slots and commercials.Furthermore, although the entire series was filmed in widescreen, only
overseas audiences have been treated to Nero Wolfe in widescreen.
With the sole exception of "The Silent Speaker" from Season Two,
included in 16:9 letterbox as a "bonus program," all of the episodes
reproduced by A&E on DVD for the series' strong home base are in
the inferior pan-and-scan format, which lops off the sides of the
picture.Most of the scenes and partial scenes that were displaced by A&E
commercials and not restored for the DVDs are straight from Rex Stout's
Nero Wolfe books. These are just a few examples of these priceless gems
in the approximately half-hour of cut-for-commercials material: Almost
all of Priscilla Eads' Brownstone tour-de-force with Archie and Fritz
in "Prisoner's Base"; Fritz's "pie-eyed" scene with Archie in the
kitchen in "Eeny"; Wolfe and Cherry Quon's final round in "Christmas
Party"; and the 'morning after' scene with Archie and Fritz in
"Motherhunt" (The Mother Hunt) -- the concluding chapter of the book.The overseas editions of Nero Wolfe are also enriched by three full
hours of material created by the show's writers and producers,
themselves all longtime Nero Wolfe fans, to take the viewer to places
only mentioned or suggested in the books and flesh out characters only
sketchily drawn by Stout himself. This material is along the lines of
the Flamingo, poker game and Mrs. Cramer scenes in the A&E series
that became instant fan favorites. It doubles the length of four
episodes: "Poison a la Carte," "The Next Witness," "Before I Die" and
"Immune to Murder."Representative screenshots of scenes excluded from two episodes of the
A&E's Nero Wolfe first appeared on the Web site of The Wolfe Pack
organization --
http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/AE_tv_series/missing_minutes.htm .
An expanded display site for scenes from the longer international
versions of these and other Nero Wolfe episodes has since been
created on Flickr, where screenshots will be added on an ongoing basis
as they become available -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/39555894@N00/The Flickr display also illustrates the dramatic difference in the
widescreen versus full screen Nero Wolfe with side-by-side screenshots
of scenes that appear in both the A&E-issued versions, where
characters as well as set are chopped off, and the international
versions, where viewers see the whole picture. Another screenshot
comparison, made from the letterboxed and full screen versions of "The
Silent Speaker" on the DVDs, can be seen in Adam Tyner's review of the
Nero Wolfe megaset at DVD Talk --
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=21386#ws . As Tyner notes,
"widescreen framing suits Nero Wolfe exceptionally well."
