After speaking with the director Kevin Lima about the sound mix it was confirmed that Goofy Movie was indeed originally mixed and presented theatrically in select theaters in Dolby 5.1. An anonymous source - who shall remain anonymous - was able to provide me with the discrete 5.1 music and effects only track (used for dubbing other languages) in late January. That 5.1 mix is very clearly NOT an upmix with plenty of discrete activity in all channels. The rear channels are mostly mono but do have some stereo activity. Specifically I noticed stereo separation during the vacation montage sequence when bats come out of a cave and during the roller coaster shot plus when Powerline makes his stage entrance.
Even though I had completed the new mix, armed with this new source I preserved my work and then scrapped my original mix.
The primary issue with using the new source was that the vocals are obviously missing. I went through the original lossless laserdisc track and used the upmixed Center channel which removes all directional activity and then added it back into the 5.1 mix as the new center whenever dialog was occurring. When no dialog was active I was able to default/switch back to the 5.1 music and effects track. There are a few select times that vocals come solely from Left and right (during the musical numbers On the Open Road and After Today) plus there were some scenes with directional left/right pans (secretary in chair offscreen, goofy being bumped offscreen by Pete in department store, scene where Bigfoot chases max and goofy into the side/rear channels.)
I was careful to swap in my previous remix into those specific instances to blend it back and of course I had to Time align the entire master and eq. My discrete overhead and rear surround effects were redone with the stronger separated elements.
The musical numbers did contain the original Center vocals for the Powerline numbers so whenever Powerline sings I didn’t have to change out the center unless someone was speaking over his singing.
It was mixed with 4 overhead channels plus 7.1 base for the final output and rendered in lossless 12 channel and then encoded into DTS X with compatible 7.1 and 5.1 downmixes.
Due to the nature of overlaying a center channel at times, for playback on a stereo 2.0 system with no discrete center the original theatrical 2.0 lossless mix will offers the better experience, but for those with a discrete 5.1 or higher system the new mix rocks.It will be sent to Kevin for notes within the next few weeks.
Does that mean we might finally be able to see the full thing for ourselves soon?