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Shout! Factory has released a 40th anniversary steelbook edition of "Rock 'N' Roll High School". Here is the official press release:

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Los Angeles, CA – Gabba hey! It’s been 40 years since we first saw Riff Randall and the Ramones take the halls of Rock ’N’ Roll High School. To celebrate this punk rock anniversary Shout! Factory is releasing Rock ‘N’ Roll High School (40th Anniversary Edition Steelbook). Special features include a new 4K scan from the original camera negative, and a new feature-length documentary titled “Class Of ’79: 40 Years Of Rock ‘N’ Roll High School” – featuring Interviews with director/story writer Allan Arkush, co-director/story writer Joe Dante, actress P.J. Soles, screenwriter Richard Whitley, screenwriter Russ Dvonch, cinematographer Dean Cundey, editor Larry Bock, and more.

With explosive musical performances from the Ramones, the outrageous candor of teenage angst and nostalgic reverie of a counterculture rock movement,...

In the late 1970s, Roger Corman was looking to produce a high school-themed movie. Knowing that one of his young directing proteges had a bent for music, the head of New World Pictures had an idea. As Allan Arkush remembers Corman telling him: “I’ve been thinking, since ‘Grease’ and ‘Saturday Night Fever’ are hits, why don’t you put music in it and we’ll call it ‘Disco High’?”

Fortunately, as “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” took shape, cooler heads prevailed … and nothing could be cooler than the Ramones, then, in 1979, or now, even after most of the band members have passed on. It was 40 years ago this week that the film had its New York City opening, which was part of a very, very staggered release pattern for a low-budget project that came to stand in the upper ranks of almost everyone’s list of essential music movies.

Release Date: May 4 Director: Allan Arkush Writers: Richard Whitley, Russ Dvonch, Joseph McBride Cinematographer: Dean Cundey Starring: P.J. Soles, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard Studio/Run Time: Shout! Factory, 84 min. Producer Roger Corman’s Rock ’N’ Roll High School is a teenage lobotomy. It’s an overcaffeinated parable about punk rebellion and the seething drive to maintain one’s countercultural ethos against a long-ingrained totalitarianism that, in 2010, appears approximately as dangerous as a pre-sectionals pep rally. You get where Corman, the B-movie emperor, is going with the whole punk-inflames-the-youth thing somewhere around the 12-second mark, but why bother suppressing such...