Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Toy Shop (1928)

The Toy Shop (1928), a Technicolor short film from Tiffany-Stahl with a synchronized music and sound effects track, features Josef Swickard and child actress Virginia Marshall.

This short Technicolor film, is presented from a good to very-good color 35mm source print that of similar quality to other surviving Technicolor films, and that is that some scenes have extremely dark shadows and image detail is blurry and color slightly smeary. There are some vertical scratches throughout the film and splices at the end.

The RCA Photophone soundtrack is consistent with other tracks of the time, good with some pops, crackles, and dynamic distortion.

The print was supplied by the Library of Moving Images and the transfer sports a persistent LMI logo in white type in the lower right-hand corner. Since the video sources on a DVD are usually protected against unauthorized copying by digital encryption scheme, the logo identifying LMI’s prints are unnecessary and are annoyingly intrusive. Source print credits after the end of the films and in the disc’s packaging should be enough promotion to suit LMI — the logos do not belong in the video transfers.

We certainly welcome the future efforts of this new home video company — especially if they will be bringing more generally-unknown, quality silent era films to the home video market. We recommend this disc.

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This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .