Blue Underground: Fire and Ice (1983) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Blue Underground

American born animator and film director Ralph Bakshi, best known for making the first X rated cartoon feature with an adaptation of Robert Crumb’s comic strip Fritz the Cat, is no stranger to The Movie Sleuth.  Covered in a three-film piece by Michelle Kisner here as well as interviewed by Dana Culling, Bakshi’s work while still controversial for the subject matter, adult leanings and eventual reliance on the rotoscoping technique nevertheless remains vital to the animation film world as an evolving artist with shifting styles and thematic interests.  Initially working in the urban subgenre beginning with Fritz the Cat up through Heavy Traffic and the still highly controversial Coonskin, Bakshi in the late 1970s made a stark shift towards the fantasy subgenre with Wizards before mounting an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings just a year later. 
 
Entrenched in medieval imagery with mythical creatures including elves, trolls and fairies, Bakshi saw some of his greatest commercial and critical successes with his foray into fantasy.  Although he’d briefly return to the adult oriented stuff in the early 1980s with American Pop and Hey Good Lookin’, Bakshi redirected his attention back to fantasy and particularly the writing of Conan the Barbarian comic book authors Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas and the illustrations of Frank Frazetta in the 1983 epic film Fire and Ice.  The brainchild of Bakshi and Frazetta largely using the rotoscoping process featuring numerous original artists who would later feature on projects like Dinotopia and Aeon Flux, it was a whirlwind of dark fantasy imagination spoken of the same breath as The Black Cauldron while touching on the more adult scopophilic scantily clad imagery of Heavy Metal in perhaps the hardest PG rated animated film since Watership Down.

 
The swashbuckler story is familiar to countless Bakshi fans: in the land of Firekeep, Princess Teegra and her palace come under inverse fire from the Ice Kingdom, a fortress of encroaching icebergs and snow threatening to diffuse their city.  Spearheaded by the evil witch Juliana and her sadistic superpower wielding son Nekron, their hunt forces the bikini-clad Teegra through dark swamplands and forests with bloodthirsty wolves and dragons though the feisty heroine is no damsel in distress fighting and taking down adversaries twice her size.  Her journey for survival crosses paths with Larn, a Conan-like hero she soon takes a liking to, and Darkwolf a mysterious masked warrior with a personal axe to grind with the nefarious Nekron.

 
Though well received by critics upon its 1983 theatrical release through 20^th Century Fox, the $10 million meeting-of-the-minds of two of the fantasy world’s greatest visual purveyors was not a commercial success.  Taking in somewhere around $860,000 or so, it eventually found its way to home video on laserdisc, Betamax, VHS and the CED format within the same year before eventually resurfacing as a public domain title in GoodTimes Home Video circa 1988.  Around 2005, however, filmmaker Bill Lustig and his newly formed boutique label Blue Underground sought to reverse the damage of neglect and disrespect time and tide labored upon the production with a newly digitally remastered DVD set in 2005.  Three years later, it also received a Blu-ray bump replete with a 7.1 surround sound remix offered in both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. 

 
Which brings us now circa 2026 to what is very plainly the most complete and definitive home video release edition of the film yet issued to the consumer public with what appears to be a 3-disc limited edition 4K/BD steelbook replete with a full CD soundtrack album.  Housed in a translucent plastic slipcover featuring exterior art covering the steelbook design, it comes with a special QR code linking users to exclusive Frank Frazetta artwork (or pinups, let’s be honest).  This time around, the audio has received a full-blown Dolby Atmos remix which sounds immersive and full though to the mixers credit it seems original foley effects were rechanneled rather than rerecorded/replaced.

Available exclusively on MVD Entertainment’s very own webstore MVDShop in limited quantities, this is the Bakshi gift disciples of the animator will be salivating over.  A spectacular release on every front and a delightful creative shift for the ordinarily risque off-color provocateur, the new deluxe edition of Fire and Ice like the inception of the film itself a terrific collaboration between two of the home video industry’s biggest independent boutique releasing powerhouses.  One of the very best Blue Underground disc releases of 2026!

--Andrew Kotwicki