The Firesign Theatre: Back from the Shadows (2001)
Review by HTQ4
Film:
DVD:

Starring, Written & Directed by Phil Austin, David Ossman, Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor

Features:

• Who Am Us, Anyway?: a montage of interviews with The Firesign Theatre
• Discography
  
• Biographies
  
• Chronology
  
• Digital Photo Scrapbook
  

Anamorphic: No.

My Advice: Borrow It.

This DVD is an audiovisual treatment of The Firesign Theatre's 1993 25th Anniversary tour.  In case you don't know, The Firesign Theatre is a group of men who perform sketch comedy for the radio; just like the radio programs of old, like The Shadow, Inner Sanctum, or The Lone Ranger.  On its own the source material is priceless and, since the audio CD is out of print, it's a really the only easy way to obtain the material without hunting through the bins at your local rare used CD store.  This disc contains such classics as "Nick Danger," "Still Waiting for the Electrician (or Someone Like Him)," and "Don't Crush That Dwarf (Hand Me the Pliers)."  The sketches are absolutely sick, clever, and shameless.  I guess this is why these guys have been around doing this same thing for twenty-five plus years.

Don't even pick up this DVD if you are wanting to see these guys performing this material live on stage.  I regret to report you won't be satisfied.  The main menu is broken up into three sections:  an Video Chapter, a Audio Chapter, and an Interactive Chapter.  Naturally, I chose video content first.  After all, it is a DVD, right?  Well, what I got was the Who Am Us, Anyway? collection of interviews.  Which, if it had been presented in a somewhat coherent manner, would have been very interesting.  Unfortunately, it was not.  It is simply each of the four guys telling their own story of how they came to be The Firesign Theatre (including how they got their name, which I did find to be quite interesting), but it is broken up in such a way to make it virtually impossible to follow through in any sane manner. 

So, I went on to the audio content.  What I got almost made my jaw drop open.  It is nothing more than the audio CD.  Verbatim. And that's it. At first, I thought this kind of neat, but the more I thought about the concept the more it pissed me off.  I found myself looking around my living room, picking up magazines, picking my toenails; anything but paying attention to content on the disc.  While you are listening to this DVD, the only stuff you are given to look at are a collection of still pictures of them performing this stuff live.  This is even more frustrating because, I could hear the audience roaring with laughter at what was happening on stage, but I was unable to share in most of it.  If you have the stills of the live performance, why in the world don't you have a video of it? I understand the thing would have been filmed almost a decade ago, but grainy home video footage is better than nothing, people.

Then I went on to the interactive material.  Let me make this short and sweet:  I had already ostensibly been through the biographies and the chronology when I watched the series of interviews from before. Then, the discography simply provided me with a list of all their recordings to date. Then further, the digital photo scrapbook showed me pictures from their past and more pictures of the guys performing this stuff live which pissed me off even more than before because I wasn't in on the performance. 

The reason I am so pissed is even though this material is written and directed for the radio (designed to take full advantage of the listener's imagination), it is really funny to watch four guys perform all the sound effects, voices for all the characters, and narrate the stuff that can only be told that way. But apparently, this is not to be.

So, unless you are just an incredibly huge fan of these guys and want to own this just to get the audio content, this DVD is not the way that their material should have been recorded for posterity.