Heh maybe the ‘blue oil lamps’ will become the new ‘orange Nazi flags’.
A few things: we often hear appeals to Spielberg’s decision in recent home video releases as being authoritative because something along the lines of “he’s the director and he would know”. That just isn’t true. The Steven Spielberg in 1981 who was making decisions about the film is the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not modern Spielberg. Especially when we pretty much know that 2012 Spielberg approved the WOWOW and then within a very short time period approved the markedly different Blu-Ray revisionism, it’s clear that the man’s modern stamp is not given with the same preservationist ideology that a lot of people on these boards have.
We have a revisionist version in the Blu-Ray and a slightly better revisionist version in the WOWOW. Let’s get this one as close to the way it looked in theaters based on the evidence we have at the moment. The only argument against this current grading that still seems possibly viable after this 35mm copy’s upload is if films of the era were purposefully graded cooler with the understanding that an orange projection bulb would essentially “correct” the colors by the actual projection process? I’ve been hearing this proposed for years in debates about the color of Raiders: do we know that this was an actual practice as a fact? I’ve not yet seen any corroboration for it, but it does sound reasonable enough.
As far as the question of, if the current 35mm coloring we have is accurate to what the film appeared as when projected, why might 1981 Spielberg have wanted parts of it to be pushed so whitish blue in timing that the oil lamps aren’t orange anymore? It’s hard to say. One thing we should bear in mind though is that we are looking at it with our perceptions after the fact after decades of watching it on home video and perceiving Marion’s dive as being sort of a warm, toasty oasis in the middle of a tundra. Maybe '81 Spielberg wanted the interior to feel cold to remind us of the distinctiveness of the chilly Nepalese locale for this sequence as opposed to the deserts and jungles of the rest of the movie. Then maybe later when they were starting to prepare the movie for home release he decided that it was just too out of kind and had it adjusted? I don’t know. It’s definitely interesting to think about.
So far we had that one link to a foreign dubbed early VHS version that had a blue tint similar to the 35mm…has anyone had a chance to check the early US VHS release that had the Temple of Doom teaser on it to see how the scene is graded there? I’m kicking myself because I passed up on picking up a copy I saw recently because my girlfriend was complaining that I already have too many copies of Raiders.