In one of the new featurettes found on The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Giftset (Paramount, $70 DVD, $125 Blu-ray), actor Alec Baldwin compares the first film in the trilogy to a drug. ''When it's on, you're gonna watch it whether you want to or not,'' he says.

The Godfather movies -- at least the first two -- are, in fact, insanely rewatchable. But no matter how many times you've seen them before, these newly restored editions are a revelation. The subject of a painstaking, frame-by-frame clean-up that brought the original, badly damaged negatives back to the way they were intended to be seen on opening day, the first two Godfathers have simply never looked better.

Home theater aficionados who crave shiny, glossy images will be disappointed, though. Cinematographer Gordon Willis made distinct choices during the filming of the movies -- choices that would inspire an entire generation of filmmakers -- that resulted in images that look alternately underlit or overlit. The new discs reproduce those choices faithfully, from the film grain that permeates the shadows in Don Corleone's office to the blown-out whites of Connie Corleone's wedding dress.

The DVDs look great, but the Blu-rays are even better, practically doubling the amount of fine detail in wide shots and revealing subtleties in close-ups that were too fuzzy to register in previous releases (right before the restaurant shooting of Sollozzo and McCluskey in Part I, you can see tics and emotions cross Al Pacino's face that were simply invisible before).

Careful color correction has also evened the golden sepia tones used through the first two pictures, which the disc producers have craftily extended to the Paramount Pictures logo preceding the films, so it, too, is bathed in the warm, honeyed light of a memory. The negatives for Part III had not deteriorated nearly as badly, so the film's presentation here isn't quite as eye-popping. But it is still good enough to make you want to sit through the movie again and give it another chance.

Director Francis Ford Coppola contributes commentary tracks for all three films (carried over from the trilogy's previous DVD release in 2001), and they are so packed with trivia and information it is impossible to stop listening once you start. Among his revelations: Some of the shots during the wedding sequence in Part I were actually filmed at night, because he only had three days to finish the entire scene or else risk having the studio take the production away from him; George Lucas directed some of the footage seen during the ''going to the mattresses'' montage; and the horse's head was real, which earned him the wrath of animal rights' groups when the film premiered in 1972.

This definitive release of the trilogy is accompanied by a definitive assortment of extras, running more than four hours in total. The 30-minute retrospective documentary The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't recounts the legendary making of the first film, in which Coppola was forced to battle Paramount executives over practically every creative choice he made, including the casting of Pacino and Marlon Brando, neither of whom met the studio's approval.

Steven Spielberg, William Friedkin, South Park's Trey Parker and Sopranos creator David Chase are among the famous folk who show up to talk about the movie. Spielberg admits he was dismayed the first time he saw The Godfather, because he felt he would never be able to make a movie anywhere near as good and seriously thought about quitting filmmaking. Chase admits he had a problem with the presence of Brando and James Caan in the film, because they weren't Italian, but learned to live with it.

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