Technology Helps Find Highlights

Musicals that weren’t so hot the first time around don’t get any better when viewed in the crisp light of laser discs. But generally, you can take advantage of the laser’s chapter search features to grab interesting numbers and scenes.

In the case of 1978’s “The Wiz,” a new letterboxed release from MCA Universal Home Video ($40), just zoom a few stops into Michael Jackson’s first appearance as the Scarecrow, then Nipsey Russell’s as the Tin Man and the surprising Ted Ross as the Lion. The film comes alive when they’re on the screen, especially Jackson. But no need to dally over poor Diana Ross as Dorothy, one of the most unfortunate casting choices of the decade in this film version of the black musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” She almost brings the best numbers--”Ease on Down the Road” and “A Brand New Day”--to a crashing halt.

A curiosity is the early cornfield number in which Scarecrow Jackson is taunted by four blackbirds who speak the kind of dialect for which the animated crows in “Dumbo” got taken to task. Why that sequence raised concerns and this one didn’t is a mystery.

The 1961 film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song,” set in San Francisco with a cast featuring Miyoshi Umeki, Nancy Kwan and Juanita Hall, also seems to have come out of a strange time capsule. The entire cast, including extras, is Asian-American but they play late-1950s American stereotypes: the womanizing swinger; the nice stripper who is really a good girl; the young, handsome student who can’t decide which girl he wants; a Jewish-mother-influenced aunt; a sweet girl next door who wants the boy who doesn’t even know she exists. And they’re all singing the kind of apple-pie songs that wouldn’t be out of place in Oklahoma or Maine. There is no attempt to create any specific cultural identity. It’s an odd juxtaposition.

MCA Universal Home Video released “Flower Drum Song” ($40) last year, though, surprisingly, not letterboxed. It almost fits in the TV format, but dance sequences set in San Francisco’s Chinatown streets and Kwan’s visually clever “I Enjoy Being a Girl” number seem claustrophobic.

An MGM/UA double bill of two early Judy Garland musicals, the 1938 “Everybody Sing” and the 1940 “Little Nellie Kelly” ($45), both in black and white, show a tentative, young and still girlishly plump Garland just starting out. Where was Mickey Rooney when she needed him?

Garland, who delighted audiences then and now as Dorothy in the original “Wizard of Oz,” is featured in “Everybody Sing” with Billie Burke, “Oz’s” Good Witch Glinda. And in one of her few film appearances, Fanny Brice outdoes Barbra Streisand with her patented Jewish stereotypes and gives us a glimpse of radio’s Baby Snooks.

“Little Nellie Kelly” features a George M. Cohan score and George (later a California senator) Murphy in a musical overflowing with Irish homilies.

The original trailers come with all four musicals. Surprisingly, the “Flower Drum Song” trailer is letterboxed (why wasn’t the film?).