By Peter Covino

Entertainment Editor

You are most definitely  going to need a bigger stocking.

If you love DVDs and Blu-rays, ‘tis the season to start buying and shopping.

If you are just looking for bargains, check out places like Wal-Mart or Big Lots!, where a DVD (and sometimes some pretty good ones) can be found for as little as $3.

But this week we are talking about new releases, the DVDs I would like to find in my stocking (if I didn’t already have a copy).

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment leads the pack this week with some outstanding DVD /Blu-ray debuts including a combo pack featuring Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 for the first time ever on Blu-ray.

But the Disney treasures go even deeper with some DVDs for the real Disney fan, Walking Sleeping Beauty and Walt and El Grupo.

HBO Home Entertainment also has that holiday glow with the release of a Blu-ray gift set for the complete Deadwood series as well as a nice little family film, A Dog Year.

And some new classic titles just released by Warner Bros. include the Blu-ray debut of the Charles Laughton/Clark Gable version of Mutiny of the Bounty as well as the Warner Archive titles Your Cheatin’ Heart (the Hank Williams story with George  Hamilton) and the 1960s “adult” comedy, Boys Night Out (with Kim Novak, Tony Randall and James Garner).

Finally, for fans of the Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro Meet the Parents franchise comedies, Universal Studios Home Entertainment has the Blu-ray debuts of Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers. The Blu-rays coincide with the  Dec. 22 theatrical release of the newest film in the series, Little Fockers.

For family viewing, it doesn’t get much better than the Fantasia duo. The original Fantasia (1940) was one of Walt’s favorite films, though it was not a box office success, and left the Walt Disney company in dire financial straits. Subsequent releases have made it one of the most popular Disney titles of all time.

This beautifully restored version is probably the closest to the original 124-minute release and includes some previously omitted narration as well as the pre and post-intermission scenes that were part of the original presentation. I’ve noticed some chatter on-line from diehard fans who say they won’t buy this newest version because a scene involving some black centaurs have been “censored” in an attempt to be politically correct, but I don’t think that is a good enough reason not to make the purchase.

In addition of one the greatest animation achievement of all time in Blu-ray, the four-disc set also includes the animated short Destino, an animated collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali, originally planned back in the 1940s, but only completed by Disney animators a few years ago.

Destino is actually included as a bonus with the Fantasia 2000 disc.

Space just doesn’t allow the room for all the platitudes Fantasia deserves. But the classical combination (Bach, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky etc.) with animation is timeless and seems only more remarkable some 70 years after its initial release.

Likewise, Fantasia 2000 is also a joy to watch in Blu-ray.  The film, now ten years old, fulfilled Walt’s dream of Fantasia being a concert film with a changing repertoire. Watching both films in one sitting is bound to induce too much of a relaxed state, plus with all of the included bonuses, you can easily kill almost an entire Saturday, but if you are going to vegetate, it is a great way to be a head of lettuce.

If you love the mystique and magic behind Disney, two new documentaries are bound to inspire.

I was left both spellbound and a bit sad and melancholy by Walt and El Grupo, a film created by the Walt Disney Family Foundation, exploring a very strange time in Disney history. In 1941, Walt and a team of animators (dubbed El Grupo) were sent on a semi-secret mission to South America to spread American goodwill to the continent as the Nazis were taking over Europe.

The U.S. government funded the trip and guaranteed production costs for some subsequent films made after the trip.

It is amazing there is so much film  legacy from the trip, as well as photos. The archive stuff has been mixed with new footage by director Theodore Thomas, son of legendary Disney animator Frank Thomas, who was part of El Grupo.

There is lots of candid stuff here and a South American musical soundtrack that is also riveting.

The DVD also includes the animated  bonus  Saludos Amigos, one of the two films produced following the trip. The Three Caballeros was the other.

Equally compelling for Disney fans is the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty.

This is a frank, behind-the-scenes look at the renaissance of Disney animation between 1984-94. It also is a close look at the struggle between the personalities involved including Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy E. Disney.

Along the way, we also get to meet a very young John Lasseter (Pixar) and Tim Burton.

A great companion piece to “El Grupo” it also will leave you wistful, for a time that also is already gone and never will be equalled. This was Disney’s second golden era of animation, with the features Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. But all of the principle figures have moved on or are dead.

There are several nice bonuses  here as well, including some behind the scenes tours of the animation studio in its various stages of  doom and  success.

Still one more Disney film to include here before moving on: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010).

This is an uneven throwback to the Disney live-action films of the 1960s and 70s, with better special effects of course. Nicolas Cage is the master wizard here, one of the chosen from Merlin himself. For centuries he has been searching for the one, a wizard for the millennium, who can save the world from the usual evil forces. The chosen one is a nerdy young guy named Dave, played by Jay Baruchel. I like Baruchel. He is probably best known for his small roles in Almost Famous and Billion Dollar Baby, but shares equal screen time with Cage. It’s an odd role for the young actor who seems to be channeling both Jerry Lewis and Dustin Hoffman at the same time. And it works, for the most part.

The film is more of a mixed-bag, but some scenes and effects work quite well indeed, especially in this Blu-ray version. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice will probably never be classic stuff, but there is enough here to make it an enjoyable family film.

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The wistful melancholia of this weeks DVDs continues with Deadwood, the HBO series that ran for three seasons.

This is a great series, one of the best HBO has ever produced. And I guess that is where the wistfulness sets in. It probably ended maybe one season to soon at least. There was still so much to explore in the lives and western tradition of Deadwood, South Dakota.

This is another Blu-ray debut from HBO for the series, very nicely packaged in book-like fashion.

The 13-disc set includes all 36 episodes and lots of bonuses, including a 13th disc with creator/writer/executive producer David Milch, who speculates on the “what if” aspect of the show, if it had gone on for one more season. He narrates on the abandoned set of the series, talking about previous episodes and where characters would have gone if the series had continued.

It is doubtful if the Wild West has ever been more real than it has been in Deadwood, a show noted for its realism and real characters that actually walked the streets of Deadwood when it was a mining camp in the 1870s.  

The famous real characters of Deadwood included Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, but the strength of the show was in the camp’s real founders and leaders Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen,  Sol Star,  Wyatt Earp, E. B. Farnum, Charlie Utter, and George Hearst.

Deadwood’s cast members include:  Timothy Olyphant, Ian McShane, Molly Parker, Jim Beaver, W. Earl Brown, Dayton Callie, Kim Dickens, Brad Dourif, Anna Gunn, John Hawkes, Jeffrey Jones, Paula Malcomson, Leon Rippy, William Sanderson, Robin Weigert, Sean Bridgers, Titus Welliver, Brent Sexton, Bree Seanna Wall and Powers Boothe.

If Deadwood was realistic in its original run, the gunfights and Old West are right in your living room in Blu-ray.

HBO does  not skimp in the bonus content. The already mentioned bonus disc contains four hours of additional material for Deadwood fans including: “The Meaning of Endings” – creator David Milch’s discussion on what would have happened had the series continued. “The Real Deadwood: Out of the Ashes” – a behind-the-scenes historical featurette on the wildest town in the West “Q&A with Cast and Creative Team (a panel discussion filmed at The Paley Center for Media with creator David Milch, executive producer Gregg Fienberg, and actors John Hawkes, Anna Gunn, Paula Malcomson, Powers Booth, Robin Weigert, Molly Parker, Timothy Olyphant and Iand McShane “Deadwood 360 Tour” – a tour of the detailed and realistic sets and town streets created for Deadwood.

There is more original stuff from HBO with A Dog Year, first broadcast on the network in 2009.

Great for dog lovers, A Dog Year, based on a book of the same name, follows the middle-age crisis of a guy (Jeff Bridges) just a few shades darker than normal, already has two dogs, when he adds a spastic border collie rescue dog to his family.

At times this looks like a Disney movie — Devon the devil dog, knows how to open the refrigerator door (as well as jump on nearly ceiling-high cabinets) to get at food.

But Devon will win you over, and A Dog Year features yet another outstanding performance by Bridges.

Not as weepy as My Dog Skip, but still with sentimentality, the film also stars Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) as Bridges’ college-age daughter and Lois Smith (True Blood) as a dog trainer who helps both Devon and Bridges get on with their lives. Bridges received an Emmy nomination for outstanding lead actor in a miniseries or movie for his performance.

A Dog Year has a Dec. 7 release date.

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Ahoy maties, there be floggings ahead.

One of the great films of the 1930s, the Charles Laughton/Clark Gable version of Mutiny on the Bounty has arrived in port on Blu-ray. While black and white films, and particularly vintage films such as Bounty, are not going to “pop out” on your big HD screen, this is not a wide-screen production, but the whole Blu-ray process means a complete restoration for a film. So Mutiny on the Bounty (Warner Bros.) has never looked better.

This is one to own if you like ship-board 1780s adventure with Laughton unforgettable as the pretty much downright despicable Captain Bligh (he even has a dead man flogged). Gable is Fletcher Christian, the number two on board, who takes months and months of abuse (the crew suffers far worse) before he finally decides enough is enough and Bligh and his supporters are given their walking papers on water.  Both men received best actor Oscar nominees, and the film won best film of 1935.

The Blu-ray is attractively packaged in a “digi-book” with lots of great information and photos from the film. Bonus features include a newsreel from the time period Pitcairn Island Today, theatrical trailers and an Academy Awards newsreel.

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There are always plenty of new releases from the Warner Archive Collection. The made-to-order online DVDS (some can be downloaded) are no frills, but affordably priced and include many titles never offered on DVD before.

This week’s films include Your Cheatin’ Heart, featuring George Hamilton in a great performance as Hank Williams. I don’t know how fictionalized this 1964 movie is, and it definitely drags in places, but Hamilton makes it all worth it. Hank Williams, Jr. actually does the singing of many Williams classics. Susan Oliver plays Williams wife and Red Buttons his best friend and band mate.

Also new is Boys Night Out, a film more noteworthy for its cast than story, but this must have been very adult in 1962. Tony Randall and friends are happily married and bored. Their other buddy is played by James Garner. They convince him to get a pad for the four of them in New York City so can play around after work. They even want him to find one woman to satisfy all of their urges. Enter Kim Novak. She agrees to live at their bachelor pad, but she is secretly working on a paper for her sociology class on behavior of suburban working males.

It is all harmless fun. This is 1962, after all. Novak and Garner fall in love and the expected complications ensue.

Warner Archive Collection DVDs are available at www.warnerarchive.com.

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Flash forward 40 years-plus and the domestic comedy is alive and well in the form of Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, both making their Blu-ray debuts this week (Universal Studios Home Entertainment).

These immensely popular comedies feature Ben Stiller as Greg Focker and Robert DeNiro as his soon-to-be father-in-law (in the first film) with the comedy mishaps continuing in the sequel.

DeNiro plays an intimidating ex-CIA guy in both films. He dislikes his future son-in-law in the first film. And things don’t get much better for the newlyweds in the second film when DeNiro meets the Fockers, Stiller’s parents, played by Barbara Streisand and Dustin Hoffman.

There are lots of Blu-ray bonuses including feature commentaries, deleted scenes, bloopers, outtakes, mini features, feature commentary  and Universal’s BD-Live and pocket Blu extras, which allow online access for more features with a network-connected Blu-ray player.

Fans of the series will also like the $10 movie cash offer to see Little Fockers included in both DVDs, for the upcoming Little Fockers film, in theaters Dec. 22.