Film Credits

Screenplay by: Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel

Directed by: Ron Underwood

Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Patricia Wettig, Helen Slater, Jack Palance, Noble Willingham, Tracey Walter, Josh Mostel, David Paymer, Bill Henderson, Jeffrey Tambor, Phill Lewis, Kyle Secor

Review

Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby and three best friends who do everything together...and I mean everything. They always spend time with each other and even take their yearly vacations together. This year, the boys are suffering their own personal versions of a mid-life crisis, and the need to get away from it all and sort out their lives is great. Stern and Kirby have found the perfect way to both solve their problems and sooth their souls: take Crystal on a "great outdoors" vacation to become a cowboy on an actual cattle drive! But life on the trail, however temporary, isn't always what they expected, and the guys find themselves in a number of hysterical, and occasionally dangerous, situations. Also starring is Helen Slater, Patricia Wetting and Jack Palance (terrific as the hard-as-nails trail boss). City Slickers isn't a perfect film, but its near nonstop barrage of hysterical Crystal dialogue and its "feel good" atmosphere make the film an absolutely entertaining outing. And let's not forget the neat, animated opening credits...

Now we get to the laserdisc edition of City Slickers. If there were an award for the worst disc transfer of the year, City Slickers would surely be among the top contenders. You may find this hard to believer, but the crappy image quality of the transfer usually looks worse that what you might expect from a videotape! The focus is soft and the image blurry, and I was tempted to put on 3-D glasses to see if that might improve what was onscreen. The colors are absolutely dreadful, with fleshtones and everything else taking on a heavy orange tinge; this, in turn, manages to add a fair amount of video noise to the picture as well. The brighter scenes look a bit better than anything else, and much of side two comes across as slightly better looking than side one (if only because most of it was set in bright sunlight), but even these don't come close to looking accurate. The CX-encoded digital Dolby surround stereo soundtrack was fine. City Slickers was pressed at Pioneer and has not been chapter-encoded.

As a film, City Slickers is a fun experience, but no one should have to subject themselves to a laserdisc that looks as pathetic as this. There's simply no excuse for New Line Home Video and distributor Columbia TriStar Home Video to have allowed this transfer to be released, and one can only hope that they'll release a true laser-quality version of City Slickers at some future point.*

*Editor's Note: New Line did reissue the film on laserdisc a couple years back (1995?) in a brand new, letterboxed, THX approved edition. Although I haven't seen that disc, I've been told that it is very nice indeed.