Today my wife found the new FotR special extended edition DVD at BJ's wholesale club. It's not supposed to be released until Tuesday, but they had it up, and she bought it, and we watched it tonight.
It is not just additional scenes: it is a lot of additional shots interspersed in existing scenes. So they had to rerecord a lot of the score to fix the length, and do a lot more to get it to work, and it looks great.
I was happy to see some of the additional footage, such as Galadriel talking about her ring and giving the gifts to the fellowship. All told, it was over 30 minutes of extra footage, including 5-6 new scenes. The running length is now over 3 hours, 45 minutes. However, that's including 20 additional minutes of credits, showing nothing but names of charter members of the LotR fan club. Heh.
The DTS 5.1 was cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet. Someday I need to get me a digital TV so the picture looks as good.
