Yes, folks, CMGF of originaltrilogy.com came through with another fantastic release! This time restoring Fantasia in HD using the blu ray footage as a basis and adding back Fantasound, Deems Taylor’s voice, and the censored Pastoral symphony scenes.

Some might still prefer the early 90s master that the laserdisc and early 2000s Australian DVD use as opposed to the more modern Disney “retouching” (and those restorations will never be replaced), but if someone wants some blu ray quality footage of a restored Fantasia for their HD TV, this option is finally here thanks to him!

Here is his write up, and I quote:

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-This version of Fantasia is the Blu Ray footage, but with the 2 patched laserdisc tracks that were used in previous releases (1990 Fantasound and mono mix) and the Censored scenes added back. Some remarks on it:

-For the Sunflower segments, Thunderbean’s 35mm release has been used. If anyone wants to clean them up so they’d fit better into the digitally restored Blu Ray footage, this can make a V2.

-The video of the shorter intros does not exist on the Blu Ray, so it was sourced from the Australian PAL DVD.

-A scene from the opening is missing on the laserdisc version, so it didn’t sync with the Blu Ray footage. For the Fantasound mix, I had a stereo mag soundtrack of the opening. For the mono mix, I used Thunderbean’s optical mono to replace the partial missing audio from the Laserdisc mono track.

-The audio and video in this release sync a bit differently than in previous releases. This is not an editing mistake - since this is a Blu Ray based version, I used the Blu Ray as a syncing reference rather than the Laserdisc. It made the whole thing more difficult, but it has been done accurately.

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