Was the Laurel and Hardy before 1986 syndicated? The
beginning sequence included Ollie having a round saw blade
fall on his head and ended with Ollie going "hmmmph".

The money duplicating machine was a sequence I seen often,
and it was either from the movie A Haunting We Will Go, or
a clip from that, or an earlier version of the same thing.

I remember disliking the 1986 new-fangled Laurel and Hardy Show,
for some reason, I may have noticed the added music.

Walter Traprock wrote:

Walter Traprock wrote:

That opening was attached to the beginnings of at least some of the Hal
Roach L&H films as aired on Channel 32 in Chicago in 1982. It wasn't on
every one, either it had not been added to every film or else Channel
32 cut it off most of them. It did appear on the Video Treasures VHS
series, at the beginning of each tape.

Walter Traprock wrote:

That sounds like the opening that TV stations used when they were
distributed by Janus Films in the early 1980's. I think it was also
included on one of the VHS video releases (possibly Video Treasures).

thebobster wrote:

Yes, that was also on Video Treasures VHS Laurel & Hardy releases, AND
when "The Laurel & Hardy Show" aired over WOR-TV New York in the '80s,
it was also part of that. I remember seeing both half-hour versions of
the show that showed shorts, and longer versions (either an hour and a
half or two hours; can't remember), that showed features with shorts
added to fill the remaining time. The show that aired in New York had
all the Roach sound material except March of the Wooden Soldiers, The
Devil's Brother and Bonnie Scotland. It also showed the Hardy-solo
Zenobia, and the non-Roach Flying Deuces and Utopia.

Walter Traprock wrote:

Yes. In Detroit, during 1984 - 1985 they showed the Laurel and Hardy
show with that "intro" clip you described (which had snippets of L&H
walking into a board two men were carrying, Ollie slapping a bunch of
sticks out of Stan's hands, and the buzzsaw falling on Ollie's head and
the "Umph!" at the end. The half hour show was shown on Channel 50
between Midnight and 12:30.. they would show two shorts during this
half hour period.. some were edited down shorts, and others were shorts
that were "created"; culled from full length features. I remember one
"short" in particular was the "Paddington" routine from "A Chump at
Oxford", repackaged as a short feature called "Alter Ego".

We should compile a list of these "created shorts" in thier entirety.

Hal Erickson wrote:

Hal Erickson wrote:

These are the abridgments Channel 32 aired in 1982. They didn't show
the others. They showed the abridgments mixed in with the shorts, in a
rough alphabetical order. "Gypsy Guardian" and "What Next" were the
titles used. For "Do It Yourself," that one short had the "Block-Heads"
titles with a white on black "Do It Yourself" title where it originally
said "Block-Heads." The rest either had the few seconds of a silent
title, or no title at all.

Shark wrote:

No, but I remember WPWR Channel 60 running it all the time back then.

mlanoue@yahoo.com wrote:

Yeah, they did, and I noticed back then that their version had splices
in the same exact spots as my two VHS versions, from Goodtimes and
Congress Video!