Back when D23 was going on in August I attended a small panel about the restoration of disney films during which they showed a couple clips of a BEAUTIFUL scan of Song of the South intermingled in the presentation. Of course very quickly everyone gasped at seeing it and got excited, at which point the guy explained that they aren’t restoring it or releasing it, but that the studio wanted an archival scan. This frustrated me to all hell because the couple clips they showed had very minimal damage and would be a very fast, easy cleanup and the colors were gorgeous. The insistence of Disney to not release this film is baffling. It would take maybe a couple of months to get it to a presentable point and would be easy profit for Disney and they STILL have no interest in a release because (to quote the presenter): “We don’t make the decisions of what gets restored and released. Corporate makes those decisions based on what they think people will buy. Sad, and there are many things I would love to restore, but it is a business after all.”
Does that mean, Disney has digitally archival scans of their movies… all of them, without any of the alterations they did? You mean they could easily release proper remasters of their movies, with grain and film quality if they wanted, easily? Does this mean they have kept archival digital raw scans of almost every movie they do? Does this mean there’s a slight possibility that the clean, raw film like quality of these films are all not lost, and preserved?
I don’t know about ALL of them, but they’re at least starting that process. We don’t know exactly how many films they have scanned in high quality and resolution, but we know of at least the recent blu ray releases, song of the south, and a new scan of Bambi, as clips from both SOTS and Bambi were shown at that presentation.