SlashMan

I received a PayPal payment notification today and was confused, so I had to work backwards to find myself here.

Disappointed to say the least. But to address the OP directly, it’s nothing personal: I’ve been in situations where I’ve been stalked and harassed online by people wanting to gain access to something I mentioned I owned in passing. I’m aware that continuously harping on it won’t change anyone’s mind (and makes things less likely to happen in the future). Keep focusing on you.

But if I understand correctly, it sounds like some people have received a copy? With the burden now shifting to those randomly chosen few, I might as well state my continued interest in receiving a copy, and they can take my donation instead.

This was one of those projects that could really only flourish in an online community. People use Star Wars as their standard for when the most culturally significant versions of a film become unavailable, but something Toy Story is a lot more complex when it comes to how and why the original version has been lost since the analog era. To 99% of audiences out there, the Blu-ray or DVD re-renderings of the film are adequate. But as someone who’s bought all the versions, an original film print would have been the best representation of the original film, bar none. The next best thing in my collection is a Laserdisc rip that I color corrected. I even found a theater bootleg for nostalgia’s sake.

The journey goes on, as I believe this is too niche of an issue for the studio to take notice of. One far out hope is for a boutique label to maybe include it as a bonus feature. WALL-E was picked up by Criterion, after all. I’d easily buy into an overpriced swag boxset if it were an exclusive.

Thanks for the update, just donated. I’d like to help get the word out, but I also don’t know how much publicity is too much before the mouse takes notice.

Super excited about this. Count me in for donating (might I suggest Toy Story on Genesis for streaming?) Thank you for sharing with the community as well.

TristAndShout64 said:

Not to shill my own post, but you guys will definitely want to see this: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Toy-Story-on-35mm-Exciting-news/id/103540

Shilling is warranted. Congratulations and good luck with this.

Hi, I’ve just found out that an original 35mm print of Toy Story has ended up in collector’s hands and is being sold on eBay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/185700414684

Interesting for sure, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about scanning and restoring a film like this. I wonder if there’s enough interest in the community for such a project. The condition is generally good, except it seems to have shifted pink a little from the pictures.

I just stumbled across this thread, and it’s never dawned on me that the film master represented a unique version of the film. My only gripe previously was with the few changes made by the re-rendered version of the film in 2010. To which I will re-iterate: the worst part is the new Disney logo that clips out part of the original film. Then there’s little animation errors. One that I found on my own is that they swapped out the textures for Janie so her dress will randomly change colors in one scene (another example of color grading as well):


And it’s also a different experience when the models are in such crisp high resolution as they’ve never been before, but the textures are now noticeably low res. That one’s a little more of a nitpick, though.

Originally, I just wanted to see the original theatrical render of the film on Blu-Ray. The original resolution was just a touch more than DVD could handle, and we never got a Blu-Ray release of that original version before it was replaced by the re-render. If I’m correct, the Toy Story 10th Anniversary DVD from 2005 is the best presentation of the original render. Which is why I think it’d probably make the best basis of a complete color grading overhaul since it wouldn’t have those aforementioned issues with the re-render and it would be closer in resolution.

On a related note, the new-ish UHD release of Toy Story in 4K has a notably different grading. To my eyes, it looks closer to the film version, but that might just be me.
https://highdefdiscnews.com/2019/06/06/toy-story-4k-uhd-blu-ray-review/