With jazz and baseball, the Broadway musical is one of the greatest American contributions to entertainment. And Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein are in the gold circle of contributors.

Twentieth Century Fox acknowledges that with three new two-disc sets of the movie adaptations of their most beloved and most revived plays, conveniently spanning three decades: "State Fair — 60th Anniversary Edition," "Oklahoma! — 50th Anniversary Edition" and "The Sound of Music: 40th Anniversary Edition."

All of these previously have been available on DVD individually, and as part of "The Rodgers and Hammerstein Collection." The best of them, by a wide margin, is 1955's "Oklahoma!" directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Gordon MacRae as the cowboy Curly and Shirley Jones as the plucky Laurey.

"Oklahoma!" was filmed in its entirety twice: once in a 70mm process named TODD-AO for special road-show engagements, then again in CinemaScope for theaters without 70mm projection systems.

The previous DVD was mastered from the TODD-AO version, but it was not anamorphic. Disc 2 is an anamorphic transfer, but the picture quality has greatly suffered. It's grainy enough to look, in some instances, blurred. The two TODD-AO shorts, included as extras and carried over from the original release, suffer the same fate.

By contrast, the Cinemascope transfer on Disc 1 is superior, as is the new 5.0 Dolby Sound mix. It's also the version most of us are familiar with, having watched it on television for years.

The new "Sound of Music" looks and sounds the same — excellent — as the previous release. But the extras have been greatly enhanced by Julie Andrews' involvement. She introduces the movie on Disc 1, and contributes to a new commentary track that also inserts observations from others in the cast and crew, including Christopher Plummer, that have clearly been culled from interviews over the years.

The gem of the set is a new documentary called "A Few of My Favorite Things," in which Andrews shares her memories about the making of the film. Also interviewed is director Robert Wise, who died earlier this year.

"The Sound of Music" often gets accused of being too sentimental by fans of "Oklahoma!" But the real corn is reserved for "State Fair," in which the rural Frake family takes off for the Iowa State Fair, where various events change the course of everyone's life, especially the apple-cheeked Margy (Jeanne Crain), who catches the eye and heart of a Des Moines Register reporter (Dana Andrews) on assignment. The score contains some great songs, including a ballad that would become a jazz favorite, "It Might As Well Be Spring."

Disc 2 of the set contains the first DVD release of the 1962 remake, with the bland Pat Boone and a little-too-vivacious Ann-Margret in the roles played by Andrews and Crain, and if anything, is sappier than the original. It looks good, though, and has been remixed into 4.0 Dolby to resemble the stereo mix it had in theaters. Boone does a gee-whiz commentary, and extras include a pilot for a proposed TV series.

NEW RELEASES YAWNERS

Recent theatrical films released this week are weak. The animated "Madagascar" (DreamWorks), with Chris Rock providing the voice of a Central Park Zoo zebra who makes a run for it and ends up in the title country with some of his pals, was a box-office hit, but only very young children could tolerate it more than once.

"Happy Endings" (Lion's Gate), an ensemble comedy about sex and love from director Don Roos ("The Opposite of Sex"), could charitably be called disappointing.

The New Orleans-set thriller "The Skeleton Key" (Universal), with Kate Hudson in some deep voodoo, could charitably be called supernatural silliness.