Another video documentary of one of the classic Universal monster movies by David J. Skal (author of "Hollywood Gothic") that appear on home-video collections, this one about "The Mummy" (1932) covers ground already covered in Skal's treatments of the other films. This includes the resurrection of such information as that Boris Karloff was a good guy and that Jack P. Pierce's makeup work was arduous. Not seen in the other ones, however, is a brief biographical sketch of Zita Johann, since she's only the lead actress in "The Mummy" and doesn't appear, like Karloff, in the Frankenstein films and, thus, in Skal's docs for them. We're told that in real life she was also into the occult and that she wasn't fond of director Karl Freund. There's no such biographical sketch of Freund, though, nor recollections from his accounts of the production; instead, we're told that he was fat, hard to work with, but good at camera stuff. I think they could've dug a bit deeper in their "unearthing" on that account.
Rudy Belmer hosts again, but doesn't add anything interesting, except to contradict himself, beginning the show by stating that "The Mummy was something radically different," only to later say that it "borrows significantly" from the 1931 "Dracula," which indeed it does, as film historian Paul M. Jensen discusses here in some detail. The best part of this doc is the juxtaposition of scenes from the two films, which underscores their similarities better than one can in writing, including in my IMDb review of "The Mummy." Another interesting thing here, which I didn't know and wish they had more information on, is that the script originally included reincarnated love scenes throughout history. As indicated by surviving publicity stills, these scenes are assumed to have been shot, but were obviously cut. As usual, the doc ends with a summary of subsequent Universal pictures of whatever monster is covered--in this case the 1940s Kharis mummy movies and the later Abbott and Costello parody. No mention is made of the mummy series by Hammer, and this doc must've been made before the 1999 "The Mummy" with Brendan Fraser, since it was also distributed by Universal, and the other docs by Skal have no qualms with advertising Universal's later productions, including frequent clips of the semi-fictional biopic of James Whale, "Gods and Monsters" (1998).
