session musicians who contributed to the soundtrack. Crewe invited the New York-based group The Glitterhouse, whom he knew through his production work, to provide vocals for the songs. He reflected on the soundtrack in his autobiography, saying that it "clearly needed to have a fun and futuristic approach to it, with sixties-music sensibility". Release Barbarella opened in New York on 11 October 1968 and earned $2.5 million in North American theaters that year. It was the second-most-popular film in general release in the United Kingdom in 1968, after The Jungle Book. The film was shown in Paris that month, and was released in Italy on 18 October. It was released on 25 October throughout France, where it was distributed by Paramount. Barbarella received a "condemned" rating from the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which called the film a "sick, heavy-handed fantasy with nudity and graphic representations of sadism" and criticized the Production Code Administration for approving it. Following the success of Star Wars, Paramount theatrically re-released the film in 1977; for this release, which was referred to in promotional materials as Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, the scenes of nudity were removed. Home media Despite frequently using the Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy title and promotional art, home media releases of the film have been of the uncut 1968 version rather than the edited 1977 version. In 1994, the film's LaserDisc presented it in widescreen for the first time on home video. Reviewing this release for Video Watchdog, Tim Lucas noted that the film was presented with an incorrect aspect ratio of 2.47:1, resulting in the cropping of visual information that was present in the earlier pan and scan VHS releases, but noted that "many of Claude Renoir's "psychedelia" images work on video only in this widescreen setting". Barbarella was released on DVD on 22 June 1999, and on Blu-ray in July 2012, with the 1968 theatrical trailer the disc's only bonus feature. According to Charles Taylor of The New York Times, home media releases of the film before the Blu-ray version were "murky". Chris Nashawaty (Entertainment Weekly), Sean Axmaker (Video Librarian) and Glenn Erickson (DVD Talk) called Barbarella Blu-ray transfer "breathtaking", "superb-looking" and "really good", respectively. Reception Contemporary Some contemporary publications reported that the film's first scenes were enjoyable, but its quality declined thereafter. According to Wendy Michener's review in The Globe and Mail, after the striptease scene