Clear Your Schedules: The MAC AND ME Collector’s Edition Arrives Next Week

People of Earth,

It has come to my attention that we are standing at the dawn of a new age. An age of wonders. An age of pure spectacle. An age where a movie like Stewart Raffill's Mac and Me will finally be available in glorious hi-definition.

One hates to get personal on the site, but what choice do I have? Those who know me know that I have a deep and abiding love for ill-advised cinema. Differentiating between a movie which is simply "terrible" and one which is "ill-advised" is, admittedly, tricky, and not something I would recommend to the novice. Films we might file within the Ill-Advised genre include the Garbage Pail Kids Movie (a film based on a series of grotesque trading cards, featuring content far too sinister for the same audience that collected those cards), or - to cite a few more recent examples - last year's The Mummy ("Hey, what if we rebooted the Universal Monsters as an Avengers-style team of badasses?") and Colin Trevorrow's The Book of Henry (a weepy family dramedy that truly believed audiences would respond to a film wherein the main kid gets killed off halfway through, and his mother is then compelled to assassinate the pedophile who lives next door in order to heal). In short, films of the Ill-Advised genre demand a deeply ill-advised starting point.

Stewart Raffill's Mac and Me is a classic of this genre. In this case, you've got a movie that was funded by the McDonald's corporation, which decided it'd like to horn in on the overwhelming success of 1982's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial by making an E.T. of their very own. To do this, they ripped off Spielberg's seminal film beat by beat, and then had Raffill cram as many McDonald's product-placement shots into his film as humanly possible. The results are truly staggering.

In recent years, Mac and Me has experienced a resurgence in popularity, much of it stoked along by a long-running joke that's played out whenever Paul Rudd appears as a guest on Conan O'Brien's talk shows. This bit has been going on for years, as evidenced by the clip below, and kills every time.

The sudden demand for Mac and Me based content probably explains why Shout Factory saw fit to rerelease the film as a Collector's Edition Blu-ray, which I am thrilled to announce will be available for purchase as of next Tuesday, August 7th. Here are the special features you can look forward to on said disc:

• NEW Audio Commentary With Director/Co-Writer Stewart Raffill And Film Historian Marc Edward Heuck
• NEW "That Little Mac In The Sky" – An Interview With Stewart Raffill
• NEW "Down To Earth" – An Interview With Songwriter Allee Willis
• Original Trailers
• TV Spots
• Still Gallery

Obviously, the new commentary by Raffill is the real draw here, but don't sleep on that Still Gallery: you know that thing's gonna be chock full of outstanding moments and unforgettable memories. Let's also not ignore that interview with songwriter Allee Willis, who we're sure was thrilled to sit down and talk about this strange little footnote in her career. 

The world is filled with anger and suffering, but still: good things happen. The arrival of Mac and Me on Collector's Edition Blu-ray is one of them, and I'd encourage anyone with an interest in Ill-Advised Cinema to order a copy. If nothing else, you'll have that breakdance sequence in crystal clear hi-def, and will be free to relive the magic over and over again in the privacy of your own home, forever, until the inevitable 4K restoration of Mac and Me arrives.

Respectfully,

Scott Wampler

News Editor, Birth.Movies.Death.