Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
1952 · 74 min · Comedy · Science Fiction · Horror
Two young entertainers, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, fall out of a plane and wake up on a South Pacific island, where Dr. Zabor keeps a laboratory and a chimpanzee named Ramona. When Zabor tries a serum on Duke, Duke becomes the gorilla of the title. Directed by William Beaudine, with Bela…
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
We describe films like this for archives and filmmakers: see what audio description costs and audio description for independent films.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 137 MB rather than 531 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-19. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- 252 described cues across a 74 minute 25 second runtime, filling 15 minutes 29 seconds of gaps between dialogue -- 20.8 percent of the film -- at 151 words per minute.
- Figures measured from the shipped sidecar and the shipped master.
- The original soundtrack was repaired from the Archive copy: folded to balanced mono, rumble and hiss filtered, loudness matched to -16 LUFS. No picture restoration on this pass.
- Described track flagged default and visual_impaired, with the original audio kept as a separate selectable stream.
- Captioned verbatim: 774 cues, every spoken word kept.
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
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