Talk:Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Albums, an attempt at building a useful resource on recordings from a variety of genres. If you would like to participate, visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

[edit] Laugh.com record label/DWARF reissues.

I've been meaning to do some more updates to all of the Firesign Theatre articles I've worked on, so now that there's a misunderstanding here, I'll get started on that. - Laugh.com does have their own record label.

Laugh.com is an online comedy record store. Their primary business is liscensing and selling CDs that are reissued on the Laugh.com record label.

How their record label works is like this:

• An artist or group has an album that was recorded sometime in the past and has gone out of print.
• Laugh.com locates the owner of the copyright and master tapes for that album and buys a liscense to reissue that album from them.
• Laugh.com then reissues that album on the Laugh.com record label.

This is similar to how Mobile Fidelity also releases materials on their record label. - A big problem with discussing the reissues of DWARF is that it has been re-released on CD more frequently than any of the other albums by The Firesign Theatre. That's why I put the phrase "It has been re-released on CD at least twice" into my original re-write of the article. The last time that I had done any significant research on this particular album, I actually found that it has probably been reissued on CD at least 4 times, possibly 5. I'm now sure that it's at least 5 times. In my original re-write of the article I only included the Mobile Fidelity and Laugh.com reissues because they are the ones that I own copies of. I was aware of the Sony/Legacy reissue but didn't include it because I couldn't verify that information as easily as I could the Laugh.com and Mobile Fidelity information. Another reissue that I knew of at the time is on Acadia Records, but I've heard some mixed things about the Acadia release including that it's reissue is not very good (I've heard that it was mastered from an LP - a scratchy LP at that). I've also heard that Acadia is now out of business. I have no way of verifying either of those statements, though. - I also question the validity of the 1983 date for the CK-30102 reissue of DWARF. The first spoken word comedy album released on CD was actually THE THREE FACES OF AL in 1984. I don't believe that a reissue of DWARF existed before the 1987 Mobile Fidelity reissue and I can't find a listing for a 1983 reissue in the Firesign Theatre discography at the Firesign FAQ, which is pretty accurate up until it stopped being maintained in 1997. What I can find is that there is an out of print issue listed on Amazon.com from 2001 that was issued on CBS/EPIC, so I'm going to change the 1983 date to 2001. (And I won't comment on the fact that the CBS/Epic release was just 2 months before the Sony/Legacy release - record companies have done dumber thing than that in the past.)

Oh, and if you order this album from laugh.com, you shouldn't get the Sony/Legacy reissue - you should get the one with the "Laugh.com" logo on the cover and the "Laugh.com" label on the disc. If you want the Sony edition, you should probably try Amazon. I believe that the Acadia issue is "Out of Print" and I'm sure that the Mobile Fidelity issue is as well.

Will1410 03:33, 4 June 2006 (UTC)