True-Blue Transfer to ‘Pleasantville’ : Featurette on makeup and art direction, music video and storyboards are in DVD package.

New Line Home Video’s Platinum series continues to provide excellent, innovative DVD packages. Its new release of Gary Ross’ satire “Pleasantville” ($25) boasts a crisp, clear digital-to-digital wide-screen transfer and numerous extra goodies, including a 30-minute featurette on the special-effects makeup, film processing and the Oscar-nominated art direction; a music video starring Fiona Apple; a storyboard gallery; and even a display allowing viewers to adjust their TVs for the best possible color.

“Pleasantville” stars Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon as contemporary teenagers who find themselves magically transported to the black-and-white world of a 1950s sitcom, aptly titled “Pleasantville.” William H. Macy and Joan Allen play the perfect sitcom parents; “Andy Griffith Show” veteran Don Knotts is featured as a mysterious TV repairman.

The DVD includes two separate audio tracks: one with writer-director Ross and another with composer Randy Newman, who received an Oscar nomination for the score.

Ross, who cowrote the hits “Big” and “Dave,” marks his directorial debut with “Pleasantville.” Though he sometimes gets a bit too technical when he discusses the lighting and effects used in the movie, he offers insight into how he takes rather cheesy, simple stories and expands them into something much deeper--an exploration of emotions and psyches.

One funny tidbit he offers during the commentary deals with the sequence in which the firemen arrive to rescue a cat stuck in a tree. Ross staged the scene to resemble the historical shot of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

Besides excerpts of the score, Newman’s audio commentary offers glimpses of how he works--he won’t take a job if he has less than eight weeks to compose the score--and what it’s like going from being one’s own boss as a songwriter to working for the director as a film composer.

For those with DVD-ROM capability, the disc features a link to the Internet Movie Database and storyboards. Users can also read and print out the script.

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Steven Spielberg has made four World War II-themed movies, the first being the 1979 flop “1941,” just out on DVD from Universal ($35). The antic, frantic comedy is set in Los Angeles just a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when reports of a Japanese submarine off the coast causes a citywide panic. The film was generally dismissed--and for good reason--as being overblown, overproduced and overstocked with stars: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Murray Hamilton, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Treat Williams and Robert Stack.

This wide-screen edition features 28 minutes of restored, generally unfunny footage not included in the original release. Far more entertaining and amusing is the documentary “The Making of 1941,” which features candid interviews with Spielberg, screenwriters Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis and producer John Milius, as well as Spielberg’s home movies, behind-the-scenes footage, trailers, outtakes, storyboard and production photographs and original advertising material.

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Twenty years after his death, John Wayne is still one of the most popular movie actors, and his legions of fans will definitely want to add Artisan’s new John Wayne Collection to their Wayne library. The collection features DVD versions of three of the Duke’s best films ($25 each): 1949’s “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” for which he received his first best actor Oscar nomination; the 1950 John Ford western, “Rio Grande”; and Ford’s Oscar-winning 1952 romantic comedy, “The Quiet Man.”

Each DVD features the theatrical trailer and a well-researched “making of” documentary hosted by film historian Leonard Maltin. The featurettes also include clips from the films, interviews with Wayne’s eldest son, Michael, and several performers from the films. The pristine prints are breathtaking in the DVD format.

Also New: “The Pink Panther Collection” (MGM, $25 each): DVD editions of the classic Peter Sellers comedies--”The Pink Panther,” “A Shot in the Dark,” “The Pink Panther Strikes Again” and “Revenge of the Pink Panther”--include the theatrical trailer and are available in both wide-screen and pan-and-scan versions.