Blu-ray: Dirty Dancing: 30th Anniversary Edition

STUDIO: Lionsgate | DIRECTOR: Emile Ardolino | CAST: Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze, Jerry Orbach, Cynthia Rhodes, Jack Weston, Kelly Bishop
RELEASE DATE: 2/7/17 | PRICE: DVD $9.19, Blu-ray/DVD Combo $9.49, Blu-ray/DVD Collector’s Edition $54.97
BONUSES: deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, cast interviews, music videos, filmmaker commentaries
SPECS: PG-13 | 101 min. | Drama-romance | 1.78:1 widescreen | DTS HD Master Audio 5.1/Dolby Digital 5.1 | English and Spanish with English subtitles

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie  | Audio  | Video | Overall

It’s hard to believe that Dirty Dancing—the teen dancing/coming-of-age movie that launched a million summer romances—turns 30 this year.  To mark the occasion, Lionsgate is releasing a 30th anniversary edition on DVD and Blu-Ray, chock full of extras and bonus materials that take you behind the scenes and into the making of the iconic classic–and more than just the ones that appeared on the previous anniversary releases!

Among the new materials are two featurettes containing never-before-released footage shot with star Patrick Swayze in 2006: a long-form interview titled “Patrick Swayze: In His Own Words,” and a shorter featurette containing outtakes of that interview, called “Patrick Swayze: Uncut.”  There’s a good deal of (probably inevitable) overlap between the two.  And while they don’t necessarily offer any groundbreaking insights into Dirty Dancing itself, taken together they’ll likely cement most viewers’ impression that Swayze was generally a good-hearted, down-to-earth kind of guy.  “Happy Birthday, Dirty Dancing” is a 40-minute featurette offering interviews with most of the surviving principals  and creatives of the original film—including Jennifer Grey, Kelly Bishop, Kenny Ortega, and writer/producer Eleanor Bergstein.

Also appearing among the featurette’s talking heads are a handful of the cast members—including Debra Messing, Bruce Greenwood, Tony Roberts, and Nicole Sherzinger—of an upcoming “musical reimagining” of Dirty Dancing scheduled to air in May 2017 on ABC.  Rehearsal footage of the dance numbers from the original film are juxtaposed against rehearsal footage from the remake—and if you’re one of those people who turned ashen upon realizing that one of the beloved films of your youth is now 30 years old, “Happy Birthday, Dirty Dancing” serves as a heartening reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and that true classics stay young forever.

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About Gwen

Gwen Cooper is a movie and TV lover and the author of Homer's Odyssey (no, not the one you're thinking of).