oojason said:

A Benn vs Eubank fight? Feels like it is 35 years ago…

I remember all those Benn vs Eubank bouts on ITV and the pre-match interviews and conferences. Then Sky swooped in and snapped up all the rights…

oojason said:

^ It is live on DAZN pay-per-view in the UK, where it costs £19.95. Eeek!

Ouch!

oojason said:
There are probably other ways to watch this for free…
 

Someone has very thoughtfully uploaded a copy onto YouTube.

oojason said:

‘Owner of UK’s only surviving DVD rental store says shop is booming 40 years later | SWNS’:-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoV-9eKrW_M - a 3 minute video at the SWNS youtube channel.
 

The blurb: 'The owner of the UK’s longest surviving DVD rental store is surprised that business is thriving - 40 years after they opened.

Colin Richards, 71, opened TVL Allstar Video in Haverhill, Suffolk, UK in 1984 and it originally started as a company that leased video tapes to other shops.

He then decided to start renting films and the store now has around 8,500 DVDs including Forrest Gump - which has been borrowed at least 2,000 times.’
 

Thanks for sharing this oojason. 😃

The availability of physical media remains an important resource on many fronts, despite the rise of VOD services. Just last month, Ofcom published a report detailing that four and a half million Brits lack Internet access and another 400,000 have broadband accounts but don’t (know how to?) use them.

Imagine how many of them have become cut off from new releases with the disappearance of DVDs and Blu-rays from supermarkets etc?

oojason said:

Now, the major Hollywood studios are beginning to release their latest movies for sale, directly to the public, sometimes only months after their theatrical release. The Oscar-winning drama Rain Man will hit the shops and the rental stores simultaneously, and will be available for purchase at a fraction of the price of a typical new release. Will the public snap it up? Barry Norman chats to retailers, video distributors, video rental stores and the general public to find out.

Ahhhhh Rain Man! My English teacher had that on VHS and offered to lend it to me as a reward if I completed and submitted my homework. I never did… Oh well. 😄

That’s a very interesting context as to why she owned what was presumably the sell-through release as that would’ve been the landmark period when home video releases became affordable in the UK. Prior to that, I remember the prices hovering around £70 and it’s incredible to reminisce that people actually forked out that amount of money for a film!

JadedSkywalker said:

If we could get a repair shop that knows how to fix VCR’s we could keep the retro VHS era in continuance.

Likewise with Beta, LD and the others.

Oh my goodness, oojason you’re a legend! Years have passed and I never expected to receive a reply about this request. I’ll have a look on MS. Perhaps at some point the HBO TESB broadcast will surface too - but it’ll likely be the same as the NBC one…

Cheers matey. 😃

matswat said:

I am a fan of SF movies and I bought T2 Terminator 2 Extreme Edition specially to check that high definition version of the movie and I was sad and crushed when I discovered that they used drm protected files and because of this they take away possibility to use/watch it. I post this information for other fans of SF and movies generally.

Necro time! 😄

Thanks matswat for this guide. I picked up the Canadian R1 Extreme DVD the other day (it’s worth having just for the booklet written by Van Ling) and I was curious about the HD content and how to extract it. For the benefit of others, I can confirm that FreeMe2 still works right up to Windows 11. Once the .WMV files were decrypted I used ASFBIN to append them all into one file that totals 7GB in size.

Initially I tried to do this with FFMPEG but it always lost the audio. Anyhow, here’s some grabs:

The aspect ratio has to be set manually in VLC, otherwise it expands the image vertically. This doesn’t happen with other media players. Speaking of VLC, here’s the codec details.

Better than 720p but not as a good as 1080p. It looks okay, I suppose and it’s nice to have the option to compare it to the other home video versions.

Thanks! @thephantomaton 😃

It’s nice to be able to compare this to the regular version(s).

You might want to remove the D/L link from your post and invite people to PM you for it instead…

CloakedDragon97 said:

Which release of the original RoboCop is the most accurate to the original version? The Criterion version looks more like a release print but the Arrow version looks completely different and was supervised by Paul Verhoeven. So is that version revisionist?

The Criterion release remains the only version to feature the 1.66:1 aspect ratio. There are people on here who like the 1.85:1 presentation but the framing has always felt jarring for me.

stwd4nder2 said:

Isn’t the TV cut available on one of the DVDs?

It’s Robocop and Weird Science which have the TV cuts included as extras on the Arrow Blu-rays.

Is it possible that I can receive a PM as well please? I recorded a UK TV airing of Looking for Mr Goodbar but that was 576i - however at least it’s in the OAR unlike the dodgy bootleg DVDs on eBay…

Moiisty said:

what would be higher quality, the tv boradcast if it was captured or Jap laserdisc?

The Jpn Laserdisc: provided that Laser Rot hasn’t ravaged the disc… It has Dolby Surround and even in NTSC, superior picture quality to a TV recording which would be in mono because the BBC didn’t begin unofficial, limited NICAM broadcasts till the following year and made on a VHS/BETA tape that might be worn out.

RossDaBoss said:

Are you sure the UK broadcast & Japanese LD has extra footage? IMDB doesn’t mention any alternate versions.

It’s possible - because extra footage does exist…

There are seven minutes of deleted scenes on the Blu-ray and the Jpn LD reportedly has a running time of 108 minutes:

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/24025/SF088-5099/Santa-Claus:-The-Movie

The US LD is listed as 104 minutes:

https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/09571/I5054/Santa-Claus:-The-Movie

yotsuya said:
The color timing is baked into the interpositive which then creates the internegatives (this is usually where subtitles are added, which is why the Star Wars GOUT is subtitle free because it was taken from a newer interpositive). The internegatives strike all the prints. so on a popular movie like Star Wars, the negative gets some heavy use as they have to make more interpositives.

If I’m understanding this correctly then it explains why C4 (UK) usually provide their own custom subtitles to their telecasted films instead of the theatrical subtitles, because they’ve received a copy of the interpositive and not the internegative?

yotsuya said:

Prior to home video release, we were subjected to edited versions on TV. 4 minutes was cut from each episode.

You’re referring to U.S. network TV?

In the UK, the BBC aired the episodes in their entirety - although they infamously refused to broadcast several episodes till the 90s due to concerns over their content.

yotsuya said:
the first time most people saw these (who had not collected the VHS or LD releases) was when the SciFi Channel aired the extended versions with commentary in 90 minutes slots.

Extended or just their original full length format?

I’ve recorded the recent Channel 4HD DVB-T2 airings of the Sequel Trilogy if anyone is interested in screengrabs and stats. 😃

BestArchivist15 said:

I am also wondering if anyone would happen to have a watermarkless version of the episode guest starring Chris Langham from Season 5.

Disney have pulled the episode because Langham is a convicted sex offender who was incarcerated for downloading and watching clips on multiple computers of little girls being raped. You want to preserve and share a pulled TV episode featuring a guest appearance of this man? Do you really not see that this is wrong?

I’m not sure what’s worse: the intent - or the justifications and mental gymnastics (probably whatabouttery citing Polanski) that are bound to ensue.

Mods: if you temp-ban me, fine - but this is messed up on so many levels.

Film4 (UK) aired ROTLA tonight and it was the Blu-ray version. Even taking into consideration that it has been downscaled to 576i and suffers from a mediocre bitrate (I don’t have access to Film4 HD), as others have already noted, this just looks horrible in terms of the garish colours that are present during many scenes and the orange skin tones that have been applied to Ford and numerous other actors.

Judging by what I’ve watched this evening, I’m glad that I heeded the warnings and avoided the Blu-ray release. Whilst I appreciate that there are members who enjoy seeing the film presented in this form, for me it’s simply unwatchable. I’ve got the DVD, the 2008 Lowry version that routinely aired on BBC One and BBC Three for many years and Litemakr’s brilliant 35mm transfer - I shall continue to enjoy those, particularly if the 4K release scheduled for next month turns out to be a disappointment.

Thanks again Litemakr for presenting this film as it was meant to be seen. 😃

My sister taught me when I was three. Being a typically annoying little brother, I was constantly interrupting her homework by inquiring as to what she was doing and what she was writing. Inevitably, she soon tired of this and in order to put an end to the inquisitive interruptions, she devoted a few hours every afternoon to teaching me the alphabet and within a matter of weeks I was reading and writing.

RUKUSBUILD3 said:

I have been hunting a set (from each country) for while now. I’ll be sure to preserve them once I obtain them 😃

I love this site! 😃

Thanks so much. Keep us posted with how you get on? 😄

Mike O said:

Apparently WB sent C&Ds to various sites selling them? I’m not sure how reliable the information is though.

It’s probably accurate but perhaps WB were mainly aggrieved about the commercial gain angle? Hopefully anything originating from here will fly under the radar because we’re not financially motivated. 😃

Mike O said:

I was hoping to find the TV cut of II, but it looks like the legal crackdown means that won’t be happening.

What legal crackdown is this?

Bluto said:

That brings back happy memories… I imprinted on the December 1988 ITV broadcast of TESB (the first film my family ever recorded on our new VCR) and only realised many years later that it had been slightly cut so the ads would fit (grrr).

We also received a new VCR that Xmas and similarly, I didn’t discover till the early 90s that ITV had truncated the film. Ironically, it was during the USA Network’s 1994 airing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPO7DZUIlXk

Bluto said:

One scene which surprised me when I eventually watched the official VHS tape was the end of a conversation on Hoth between C3PO and Leia, followed by a line from C3PO to R2D2, regarding whether Luke was alright.

Same here. 😃

Bluto said:
I think some witty remarks Han made about C3PO on the Falcon had also been cut in the TV broadcast.

Yes along with his witty remarks to Leia that he hasn’t “got time for anything else.”

I’d imagine that the 1994 and 1995 broadcasts were almost certainly full length because ITV had long discontinued the practice by then.

oojason said:

‘A day long remembered: Star Wars comes to television’

^ a 2016 article at the excellent Episode Nothing blog - with a few images and advert videos from the time.

It also chronicles the early US TV appearances - and also quotes from Lucasfilm seemingly not happy and also not wanting Star Wars to be on tv…
 

Thanks, that was a good read and I now understand why ITV routinely screened ANH during the 80s but didn’t air TESB till the very end of 1988. Speaking of which, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this forum, the 1988 ITV premiere of TESB was “edited to run in the time allotted” - with several scenes removed so that the film could fit their schedule. As Brits who were around during that period will be well aware, this was standard procedure for ITV, with numerous films being similarly hacked to pieces till the network eventually discovered the marvels of time compression.

From the comments section…

My folks got us a VCR at Christmas 1985. My first thought was ‘Star Wars is on at New Year’, which it was in STV-land.

Another date to add to the UK broadcast chronology. 😃

National DiscLord DP-800 VHD Player in action with snippets from TESB…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrNuD6u3IsI

VHD collection that includes Star Wars titles…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmSJS4MUFPE

Wow, everything gets released in Japan!

@oojason: good research with unearthing the photos for the JPN release. The inevitable insane question has to be posed - will someone track these down and preserve them? 😄

ThatPixarGuy said:

The original/current BD heavily screwed up the color timing and contrast, reminds me of The Matrix’s original BD in a way.

I assume they used the 2.1 transfer as a base, as the credits use the SM3 font rather than the original. Ironically, the 2007 Blu-Ray was way too “Blue.” These issues were fixed in the “Mastered in 4K” BD release in 2014, but only for that BD and the eventual 4K release. So the 2017 legacy collection uses the 2007 transfer, unfortunately.

Thanks for the info, that’s very interesting. 😃

I’ll have to keep an eye out for any FTA UK HDTV broadcasts and record them because it would almost certainly be the theatrical release.

oojason said:

1992

 

An advert for the 1992 Widescreen Collection on VHS:-

'Star Wars Trilogy The Widescreen Collection 1992 Promo Trailer:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Riipp7KLfO4 - a 3 minute video at the The1970Ghostrider youtube channel

 
 

Some images of the 1992 UK Star Wars Trilogy Special Widescreen Edition Box Set and also the tapes within:-

I own these and they also include this promo for the widescreen VHS releases of Die Hard and Alien - with comparisons to the P&S presentation. Incidentally it also mentions the widescreen Star Wars releases at the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1_IrYci3F8

That’s pretty exhaustive! Thanks for sharing. 😃