I just finished getting the torrent of both Thiefs (Miramax and workprint), as well as extras (Christmas Carol, commercials, I Drew Roger Rabbit, Animation Art, the making-of).
The Miramax version has a wall-to-wall voice track. They just couldn't let one second pass without someone yakking. The new music is distractingly overloud and drowns out the voices sometimes. It was shocking to see the jump cuts in several places where some of the coolest sequences were originally. All I can say is that it's a shame The Princess and the Cobbler isn't available in widescreen.
The shots not drawn by Richard Williams stand out like a sore thumb. I can't stand Robert Folk's score, either. I was annoyed that the ending clearly intended to have another really long zoom out, ending with the THE END and they covered it up with a freeze-frame (geez, this is THEATRICAL not saturday morning crap) and jump cut to it.
About the "added" shot... you know, I just don't think Williams would have had Tack toss Zig-Zag. That's out of character for both.
However, I was playing around with Vegas (the video editing program I have) and trying out some audio filters to enhance audio. I decided to see if I could modulate some of the Kevin Dorsey overdubs to match the original One-Eye track. Well, I will say that if you absolutely need audio from the Calvert mix, at least lower the pitch to be more gutteral. I tried to an extent, but the problem is that Dorsey didn't read the lines with an English accent like the original voice actor. As a result, the lower-pitched voice fits better, but the lack of an accent hurts.
Oh, and I found something really interesting... I think that the original actor's voice was actually slowed down or made to be a lower pitch. When I adjust the pitch to be higher, it sounds very natural. This makes sense because the workprint voice has a really demonic feel to it that does seem manipulated.
Also, one possibility why the Calvert workprint has stuff that was still in storyboard form in the 2nd workprint... it's possible that Williams had all the paper animation finished but never photographed them for a workprint. One other possibility is that what if some stuff was fully inked and painted already, but not photographed?
One thing that really bothers me, though... in the Miramax LD transfer (via torrent), there's an alarmingly high amount of print dirt and scratches. The DVD isn't this scarred I hope?
By the way, I'm willing to reconstruct "Animation Art" to an extent by replacing all of the clips from DVD versions. This way, we can get high quality shots of Dumbo, Pinocchio, Snow White, Fantasia, etc. It'll contrast a lot with the noisy non-clip stuff, but it'll at least do justice to the original animation.
As for GBS-TV airing... now that you have some new footage to work with, there's no question that the airing should wait until you can drop that stuff in.
Whenever it's ready to go, this would basically be the line-up for "An Evening with Richard Williams, The Thief, and The Cobbler"
1. The Commercials Reel (and I'm going to add the title sequences to Casino Royale, The Return of the Pink Panther, and The Pink Panther Strikes Again)
2. A Christmas Carol
3. Animation Art (a reconstruction with clips restored)
4. I Drew Roger Rabbit
5. Who Framed Roger Rabbit trailer
6. The Thief Who Never Gave Up
7. Arabian Knight (in all its mediocre glory)
8. The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut
I don't know if I want to air the workprint, though. The marathon as it is now will be nearly 5 1/2 hours, so adding the workprint would raise it to 7. Showing Arabian Knight and the Recobbled Cut back to back would be more effective, IMO since the workprint and recobbled cut would be pretty similar.
I'm working a commercial bump that'll air on GBS-TV until we have the RW marathon. Once I finish editing it, I'll post it here.