I wonder if sardonyx ever started on his ABC-TV project. I’m currently working on tinkering together a 720p Widescreen TMP SLV as well as cleaning up a slightly noisy 4:3 LD rip of SLV. I would love to find the TWOK ABC-TV cut to deinterlace and run some cleaning filters on after I kludge my way through the two SLVs. It can’t be found online in the normal places though. I’ve got a vhs copy of theatrical TWOK back home and I bet that between the two, a cleaned up, detelecined 4:3 ABC cut could be stitched together. I was planning to start working on 36-40 Flash Gordon after SLV but I’ve already got those sources lying around and and I’ve got Star Trek on the brain atm. I’ve been told it can be found on ms but I don’t have access to that place. Anybody 'round here know where one could hunt for that?
Ok I’ve gotten ahold of all the TWOK ABC cut materials I can find and I have been spending some time learning and practicing with avisynth. I’m going to be cleaning, deinterlacing, and running IVTC on the Theatrical 4:3 TWOK laserdisc capture and two separate captures of the actual TWOK ABC TV broadcasts. I’m going to get these materials as clean as I can possibly can and then use the best elements of each to stitch together a restored 4:3 ABC-TV version of TWOK.
None of these materials have the original commercials nor do I have knowledge of where and when the breaks were supposed to happen. I had an idea of something I’d like to do but I would need some help from folks who know better than I do about the commercials. I’ve read that The ABC TWOK broadcast took up a 3 hour time segment so that’s a start. If I could find out which points in the film the commercial breaks were supposed to happen I could spend some time researching and hunting down 1985 commercials (non-regional nation-wide commercials) that were broadcast on ABC and edit them into the film for a simulated non-regional ABC broadcast of the film.
Ideally I’d end up with a release that includes two edits of this restoration in one folder. One as just restoration of the ABC version of the film without commercials and a separate one with the commercials edited in to simulate a broadcast on ABC.