I watched Hamlet (1996) [94996] again recently.
(Brief review. Branagh and direction superb, Jacobi, Christie, Briers all excellent. Dialogue and delivery has never been clearer or easier to follow on film. International cast often surprising, but mostly successful. Ill-judged and badly out of place rapier-throwing and chandelier-swinging moments in the final duel scene. LD (DADC USA) rather subject to rot.)

However, what intrigued me was that LDDB seems to show that whereas this version is 242 minutes long, there appears to be an abridged version too that was released on at least two laserdiscs:
Hamlet (1996) [ERA-67-97] (Hong Kong, NTSC, 127 minutes) and
Hamlet (1996) [LD 66033] (France, PAL, 121 minutes).

The 121m one is, I presume, the same version as the 127m one with the difference accounted for by the film-to-PAL speed up phenomenon.

There are a few references online to Branagh putting together an abridged version in late 1996, but these two LDs are the only references to it on disc that I can find. Has anyone here seen the shorter version and have any recollection what Branagh cut out? Or are these two LD releases cut for foreign language release specially?

Does the short version appear as an option on any of the DVD or BD releases perhaps?

I bought this disc new back in the day, mostly because I thought my wife would watch it. She didn't care and it sat for a few years. Probably around 1998, I decided I should just sell it. The buyer from CL or eBay was concerned about rot, EVEN back then.
It forced me to watch the disc. I slogged through it, but by the end, I got into the speech and the story.

The disc had no signs of rot. I didn't see a single speck or rot.

In other news, this buyer had very specific instructions about shipping. He required the disc with sleeves removed from the covers to prevent the discs from busting through the covers during shipping.

This LD is a boxed set, so there are no covers to bust through. Those instructions are therefore a bit odd in this particular case, but removing the inner sleeves from their jackets for shipping is quite common and good practice.

I've read since my post that the short version had little to do with Mr Branagh at all and was originally knocked-up for in-flight use. Still only a little shorter than Olivier's film version (Hamlet #296 (1948) [CC1448L]) though!