Magic trip : Ken Kesey's search for a kool place
(DVD) 

Based on the words and recordings of Ken Kesey.

Special features: Commentary with directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood [optional audio feature]; Deleted scenes (18 min.); Ken Kesey's first 'trip' [audio feature] (51 min.); HDNet: A look at Magic trip (5 min.); Also from Magnolia [previews] (10 min.).

Editor, Alison Ellwood ; original music, David Kahne ; audio restoration, Don Fleming ; design and animated sequences by Imaginary Forces ; research, Salimah El-Amin ; transcripts, Richard Dworkin.

Ken Kesey (Swashbuckler), the Merry Bank of Pranksters including Ken Babbs (Intrepid Traveler), Neal Cassady (Sir Speed limit), Paula Sundsten (Slime Queen AKA Gretchen Fetchen), Jane Burton (Generally Famished), Kathy Casamo (Stark Naked), George Walker (Hardly Visible), Steve Lambrecht (Zonker), and Further (as the Bus); with appearances by Mike Hagen, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Chloe Scott, Faye Kesey, Roy Seburn, Zane Kesey, Jerry Garcia; interviewer, Stanley Tucci; original Prankster audio transcripts performed by Jim Meskimen, Andrea Cirie, Karen Gilliam, Kathleen McInerney.

In 1964, author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, set out on a cross-country bus trip from California to New York to visit the World's Fair. They also decided to record it, with several 16 mm movie cameras and audio tape. Compiled from more than 40 hours of footage shot during the journey, it was the magical mystery tour--fueled by both the countercultural sentiments of the time and lots of LSD--that became legend. The participants were not beatniks, not-yet-hippies, but a group of preppy-looking partygoers, outfitted in red, white, and blue, whose traveling bacchanal zigzagged across the country. In those more relaxed times, the Pranksters encountered only sporadic harassment, as they spread low-key mayhem in Phoenix, New Orleans, Houston, and the Millbrook, N.Y. estate where Timothy Leary held court. The film record of this famous bohemian lark is uneven, befitting an unsteady (if borderline revolutionary) group in a time of widespread cultural upheaval.

Footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters documents their LSD-fueled cross-country road trip to the New York World's Fair.

DVD; Region 1, NTSC; Dolby Digital 5.1; widescreen presentation, 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

In English with optional subtitles in Spanish; closed-captioned.