Elsewhere on these virtual pages, my colleague Kirby Holt will serve up the details on both the old and the new treasures in store for “Lady & the Tramp�? DVD buyers in another few weeks, but suffice it to say that the disc has a great deal that will make it a must-buy for any home entertainment library.

The heart of the opening night festivities in Hollywood was an industry-star studded panel of artists, actors and aficionados who opened the evening with a look at exactly what there is to howl about “Lady & the Tramp�? after all these years. The El Cap truly put on the dog (hey…trust me, I was not the first to make the pun) for this evening, and, I suspect in large part thanks to the wisdom of the great Howard Green, finally a proper host was selected to give the event a much more professional edge, and my friend and colleague, the recently Oscar Nominated animator and scholar John Canemaker, did the honors.

Canemaker, looking dapper as always and carrying just the right amount of Academy glow about him, took what has previously felt too much like a “town council�? meeting and bumped the program up to first class. The film maker welcomed special guests in the house, including the ubiquitous and always beautiful Alice Davis and Katherine Beaumont, as well as the daughter and granddaughter of the late Joe Grant, Carol Grubb and Diane Castrup (Carol was the inspiration for the baby born to Jim Dear and Darling.) There in spirit were Paul Carlson, the clean-up artist for the iconic spaghetti eating sequence, and Bill Justice who was home last night feeling a bit under the weather, but who was nevertheless well represented by his lovely wife Kim.

Canemaker then brought onto the stage Disney’s Director of Restoration Technology, Theo Gluck. He reminded us that cleaning and restoring this film was a painstaking process, considering that the original negative is actually a three color strip format – where the film is shot in black and white using a blue filter, red filter, and once again with a green filter which was developed to produce a magenta, cyan and yellow dye-soaked set of positive strips. These strips were exposed onto a single clear strip of film, very similar to how a color lithograph is printed, and the result was the final color master print. That’s 4.2 miles of film and over 339,000 feet of negative that Gluck and company went over by hand. Literally millions of bits of dust, dirt and debris removal to give today’s audience a cinematic experience that rivals what audiences saw in theatres when the film was first released.

What we were shown is a great deal more of the film, quite literally, as when it went into production in 1952 Cinemascope was not yet introduced. According to Gluck, Walt Disney had heard about the process and in early 1953, after Fox demonstrated the process for studios and exhibitors, he ordered tests done, and eventually okayed the film to be shot in this new wide-screen format. That was over a year into production. The catch was that Fox designated that Cinemascope films have magnetic sound, but most exhibitors had installed optical sound in their theatres which reads a jagged stripe to the left of each frame that is a visual representation of the recorded sound (think the “soundtrack�? who makes an appearance in “Fantasia�?.) Theatre owners protested the cost and requirements for magnetic sound, and Fox gave in. As a result, nearly all of the prints of “Lady and the Tramp�? that were struck had an optical sound track on them, thus cutting off some 10% of the left hand side of the frame. This is why until now very few people have ever actually seen the entire frame as it was shot. Hey, let’s face it, it’s hard not to get excited about seeing 10% more of a Disney classic animated feature! But Glick was just the opening act.