OK, all, without getting into the politics, I'm admitting here that the character alteration idea was a pretty terrible one, for many reasons. I do still think a cropped version of the final preservation would be nice to have though, and I'd like to use this thread just to see if anyone out there is willing and able to produce such a version.
poita said:
I think a modern human being can watch Fantasia and understand it is a product of its time, and anyone that can't, well the edited version exists from Disney.
Whitewashing these scenes now seems far more offensive to me than watching it with the scenes intact.
My 5 year old would not understand something like that.
I do agree with you though that whitewashing would be, in and of itself, still pretty offensive when taken in the broadest context. Cropping probably would make better sense in that regard.
I'd just really like to be able to watch this new and improved copy of the film with my kid, in a way that we can all just sit back and enjoy it. We can always pop in the Blu-ray, of course, which I suppose it what we'll have to do.
titanic said:
So, there's really no way of correcting this without any controversy (unless you delete the whole character as Disney did)
I see your point, and I do think that would be a good course of action too. Just wondering if a character swap might be a better option, to keep the overall scenes intact.
To clarify, these are scenes that Disney themselves actually edited out of the film in the 1960s, due to their racist nature. This was a good thing, although they didn't do a very good job of it, essentially just cropping (and deleting?) certain frames to remove the offensive characters.
So poita's work, among other things, is restoring those original controversial scenes, and my aim here is to simply redo what Disney themselves did in the 1960s, but just to do a better job of it, instead of just chopping the thing up.
In any event, I just think it would be a shame for a fully restored Fantasia, in all its glory, to be marred by these few unfortunate scenes.
poita said:
A warning to everyone (mostly Americans) that some may find the deleted Fantasia scenes offensive or uncomfortable, if so, please have that discussion in a separate thread, I'd like to keep this about the preservation, not the politics.
Official PC thread this way: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Fantasia-PC/topic/18222/
Major kudos BTW to poita for putting this project together!
At the risk of pulling a Lucas, I wonder if any artists interested poita’s Fantasia project might be inclined to doctor a few (thousand) frames, to create a cleaner PC version of the controversial scenes Disney hacked up in the 1960s, at least as an optional, non-cringe-inducing alternative to poita’s 100% faithful preservation (which, of course, is a perfectly legitimate and rather awesome contribution to cinema history).
The idea would be to convert all the offensive characters into more neutral characters, taking as few liberties as possible in order to preserve as much of the original footage as possible. This would probably involve changing skin tones, some hair styles and some facial features.
Just tossing this idea out there to see if it sticks. I hate to bring politics into the forums, but I, for one, would greatly prefer to watch a slightly-unfaithful copy like this with my family and friends.