They change certain characters' names.
King Nod becomes King Zod - Nod is just a nickname. Yes, Zod, like Terence Stamp in the Superman movies. General Zod.
...
Even in the final Calvert version, the narration says "Everyone called him King Nod," suggesting again that in Calvert's world this is just a nickname.
(Yet other characters can have names like Tack, Yumyum, Thief, Zigzag, One Eye etc ... why this one character was singled out for his name I have no idea.)
The witch is called the "Magja." Not sure on spelling, but it's a female version of "Magus", singular form of "Magi."
All this merits a huge "WTF?"
>> First off, a fully remastered/5.1 sound version of Blooper Bunny appears on the first Looney Tunes 4-disc set. It even has a Greg Ford commentary.
I knew that it was on one of the sets somewhere, but I don't have those sets and I'd never seen it before. It's great! =)
>>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.
LOL. Yep, that's the Miramax version. Well described.
>>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.
True enough. I actually cut a couple of things out of the fight sequence in my current cut. I'm thinking of cutting it down shorter, and that might mean cutting it out entirely. Who knows?
>>I decided to see if I could modulate some of the Kevin Dorsey overdubs to match the original One-Eye track.
I'm sure the original track was lowered. I only used Dorsey's dub in that one scene, because that scene didn't appear in full in the workprint, and I wanted to keep it complete with music, from the Princess version. It was weird to cut from the music-y Princess audio to the workprint audio.
I now have the original recordings of both lines from that one scene (with temp music on it - it would match the Princess audio well), so I am considering using the original voice. But I've gotten used to Dorsey's reading of that one scene!
>> 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.
The english accent comes out really thick in the new line from the Calvert work in progress. =) "Nonn shell ischype!"
It's weird to hear that after all these years.
>> 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.
No, they were still working on it. A few weeks passed before it was taken from Williams. I knew that before, but our friend has talked about it in his post above.
>> One other possibility is that what if some stuff was fully inked and painted already, but not photographed?
It's a possibility. I've kind of suspected that some stuff of Phido (in Phido's first scene), and other "too good to be Calvert" shots were inked by Williams. Who knows, though.
>> 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?
The DVD is not a great print. It's kind of "blown out" - the bright parts of the image, like Tack's face, get overexposed and lose detail. It's not scratchy though. I have no choice but to use it, but I think the colors are truer in the Princess version, which is also an ugly print. For example, One Eye is blue the first time you see him in the Princess cut, but red in the Arabian Knight disc.
Anyway.
>> 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.
That could be nice. There's not many clips, but there are some. There's also Goofy in that one where they're moving, with the piano. You can send them to me, and I'll cut them in when I'm making my DVD of Animating Art. I'm waiting on a better version from Eddie Bowers.
>> 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.
Nah, go ahead with it. At 320 x 240 nobody can tell the difference. Go ahead and show it, it'll be a good preview for it.
You can show the final version later.
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)
CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. That's his best movie work. Include it.
>> I don't know if I want to air the workprint, though.
Please don't. It's crap, and Chris Sobieniak's copy looks like the one I had years ago.
Princess and the Cobbler, again, would be much more fun than Arabian Knight. It's much rarer, it's fullscreen which will play well on your tiny little screens, it's still got all the stupid stuff (including one extra song) but you can watch it without slitting your wrists.
[quote] Does the 2nd workprint have better audio, at least?[/quote]
What, the Calvert work in progress?
There's not much audio that's useable, it's covered by wall to wall music, most of it hilariously recognizable. There are a few things I can use though.
This new copy of the Williams workprint seems to have pretty decent sound, apart from the witch scene and thereabouts where it has almost no sound at all. I'll see what I can do with it. It's certainly all gonna come in handy.