SilverWook said:
Wouldn't some of the deleted scenes from TBC be too scary for Disney to put on a "family friendly" video release? There's a cel or two around of the Horned King's henchmen dissolving at the touch of the Cauldron Born that are a little gruesome.
Point well taken.
This online petition stuff does nothing, IMO. The people working at Universal today probably have no idea there were scenes deleted from the film, or would have no idea where the footage might be.
And as I said before, this is all assuming that the footage still exists - there's a good chance it was thrown out some time in the last 25 years, whether intentionally or not.
Someone should contact Don Bluth about the scenes - if he were to ask Universal, maybe something would come out of it.
Disney themselves couldn't locate the finished footage that was cut from Robin Hood or The Black Cauldron when they were putting together the extras for their respective DVD releases, so I'm understandably pessimistic that Universal will ever dig up the deleted scenes from The Land Before Time...
It's no problem. I can send you my copy once I get it - all you have to do is send it back once you have it ripped.
If you want to own your own copy, you can also set up your own account on DVDoutlet. It's not difficult, they accept major credit cards. Just click the icon for English and you will see all signup forms and stuff in English instead of Dutch. (For checkout, they don't give payment options in English, but just select the first option, DocData Payments.)
And if you want your own copy and don't want to go through that trouble, you can still PayPal me $25 and I'll buy a second copy for you. No biggie.
Feel free to PM me and let me know which option you'd rather take.
I went ahead and ordered it, it did come to $24.45. Much more sensible than 60 bucks.
As I said before, I would be happy to donate my copy to the project once it arrives, as long as I can get it back once it's ripped.
Neverending Story UPDATE:
Earlier today, I found this on Amazon UK.
From the description, I thought it could be the Dutch release, so I contacted the seller, and he just mailed me back to confirm that it is.
The upside of buying it this way is that you can use Amazon UK with an Amazon US account. The downside is that it costs almost 2 1/2 times as much as ordering from DVDoutlet.nl (running the exchange rates, about $60 USD vs. about $24.50 USD).
Actually, DVDoutlet.nl isn't that hard to sign up for. I'm going to buy a copy for myself, and I would be glad to send it to you for your project, provided I get it back once it's been ripped.
I am glad you guys want to do a project with the Dutch Blu of The Neverending Story.
While I've seen a cam-rip excerpt of a Derann digest which suggests that the Warner transfer may not be as far from the original theatrical timing as everyone has assumed (e.g., the Ivory Tower scene does have a golden/dusk cast), they still went too far with the color pushing, contrast-boosting and black-crushing. The aforementioned Ivory Tower scene does have visible hues besides gold and amber in the Derann, which are completely graded out in the US BD.
I think it would be great to take the Dutch BD and adjust the color to something to match the Derann. At this point we only have that Vimeo clip to go off of, which looks a little dark and may look more "LPP yellow" than you'd see if you were actually in the room watching the projection. Maybe someday an actual print will surface somewhere...
A pity that no full-size caps seem to exist of the theatrical cut. All I could find was a 4.3GB 720p MKV downconversion (there are torrents of HDTV-sourced MKVs for all 10 floating around on the public trackers).
I have long maintained that HDTV rips need to be preserved. With all the color regrading and DNR madness going on, they are often a valuable resource.
I found a 1.33:1 trailer that appeared on some Thorn-EMI UK tapes back in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0zAejKt-wo
It looks to have extra space at the top and bottom than the modern releases, but less on the sides. Compare this widescreen copy of the same trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji-LqBskNyE
So I stand corrected, it probably was 1.66:1. The only question that remains is if the LD has a 1.66:1 framing that contains all info shown in both the 4x3 and 16x9 transfers.
Would any of the 1.33:1 releases have been open-matte, rather than cropped? I know quite a few animated films were shot at 1.33 and then matted.
The video description says the HBO airing started with an EMI logo instead of a Universal logo. EMI was the film's distributor in the UK, So could the sound mix from the HBO airing possibly have also been used for the UK theatrical release?
I know HBO sometimes received, and sometimes even commissioned, alternate transfers. (For example: They were unhappy with the pan-and-scan in the official transfer of Supergirl, so they paid for TriStar to make a new transfer for them.)
And actually, if the HBO print came from EMI, perhaps this track could be on the original, pre-cert UK video release from Thorn-EMI? Just a thought...
(I'm thinking back to the original UK VHS of The Muppet Movie, which not only had extra scenes, but also an entirely different sound mix, one which seems to my hear to have superior clarity and fidelity to the standard mix!)
I'm downloading the first Deposit ISO right now, so don't take it down just yet. :)
Very interesting. Little bit sneaky, agreed?
The good looking color stills could have been single-frame color correction tests, not excerpts from color-corrected footage. They may have been corrected in Photoshop just to see how much color info could be extracted from the image in the actual transfer. That's a much more plausible scenario than "hoax".
If it were a hoax, explain the Cloud City scene that was just posted. I've been following this from the start, I was on the old private blog, I saw the behind-the-scenes footage (including monitor playback of footage from the final reels, with the same color fidelity as those stills), and this is definitely legit.
Even in flat/Super 35 films, VFX shots would be cropped (at least in the post-Star Wars era). Since they were generally shot in VistaVision, which had a negative ratio of 1.50:1, they would be reduced to 4-perf with hard-matting, at anywhere from 1.66:1 to 1.85:1. For Super 35 films, the VFX would generally be framed with the intent of being vertically cropped to 2.35:1 for the anamorphic release prints. No matter how much additional vertical info might have shown up on the full-screen home video transfers, they would always be missing info on the sides.
(Not sure how much additional vertical info would show up on VFX shots in Super 35 films. Someone would have to compare the full-screen/widescreen versions of something like T2 or Star Trek VI.)
Side note: I've seen one film (or possibly a trailer?) that a letterboxed shot which was hard-matted in the camera, and actually had lens flaring which bled over into the black space! I wish I could remember what that movie was...
Rescuers Down Under doesn't come from the CAPS files. It comes from an interpositive, like all the previous transfers. I believe it's the only CAPS-era film to have never been released remastered from the original computer files.
The only place you can see a direct-digital transfer is the excerpt in Waking Sleeping Beauty - not sure why, if they were making a digital-to-digital of that scene for Don Hahn, they didn't do the whole film. Perhaps they probably didn't see financial incentive in it, due to its lukewarm reputation and the fact that it's just the second half of a double-feature release.
If everyone who pledged money just kicks in $10 more, it'll cover the remaining $150.
I'm throwing in another $10.
The laserdisc preservation is looking great so far, but I also like the idea of regrading the Blu-ray. Your attempt at regraining even looks pretty good (at least in still form)/
There is also an HDTV master of Balto which has aired on HDNet and a couple other places.
Even if it's better than the DVD, the brightness/contrast on the BD release still sucks IMO. To me, every post-2002 release destroys the wonderful light/shadow compositions I remember. Stuff like Belle in the West Wing, or the night scenes at the end (on the DVD/BD releases, night skies have too much "blue" and not enough "black").
At least the LD version resembles the theatrical color timing.
Wow, you can make out the TV scanlines on Leia! I remember when some people thought that level of detail was only visible in the SE recomposite, but nope...
I hope this will also eventually answer the scanline/dot-matrix questions for Empire...
The Snow White 35mm listing seems to have been taken down.
That shot with the bluebird is perplexing - that's the kind of ghosting you'd see if you took a photo of the film being projected. But this looks like a scan of a frame.
Someone should get that Lion King 16mm. It looks amazing, and what's the chance a 35mm will ever surface?
(Hopefully, someday a 16mm of BATB surfaces - I haven't seen the actual theatrical timing outside of VHS/LD since 1991...)
Just to give a (relatively) short summation:
It sounds to me that the stereo and mono mixes are the same person, just different takes. Rinzler's book says that sound mixer Derek Ball went to Fraser's house to do ADR, so I am convinced that both mixes are her.
Fraser has a British accent, so I'd guess that during shooting she either used her normal voice. Even if she did put on an accent, Lucas clearly wasn't satisfied, and dispatched Ball to loop Fraser's lines with the familiar American accent.
When the Dolby Stereo/70mm mixes were assembled, Lucas/Burtt/whoever selected one out of the multiple takes for each line. Later, when the mono was done, they changed their mind and picked different takes for every line. (I could go on and on about how Lucas and/or Burtt kept swapping out ADR over the years, but I won't.)
As to "tell Uncle"/"tell your uncle", the shooting script says "tell Owen", so perhaps that's what was said on set, and Lucas changed the line for the ADR script. "Tell Uncle" could have been Burtt trying to get the ADR to sync better with the footage.
Perhaps her lips could be more clearly read on a theater screen, but since it's nearly impossible to read them from that distance on a TV, maybe Matthew Wood thought "screw it" and went back to "Tell your uncle."
livserge said:
Anyone here notice any strange audio glitches with the 1985 Laserdisc track on the 2.5? Like very faint repetitions of sound in some scenes? Like the scene with Luke & Ben on the Falcon. When Ben replies "That's good, you've taken your first step into a larger world." After he says world, you then hear the word again very faintly. Like world--orld. There's other examples too but that one really sticks out for me. Just wonder if anyone else noticed.
If I had to guess, this is probably an artifact called "print-through" that occurs on magnetic tape.
I have heard print-through in many older movies/TV shows/records/etc. - it's most prominent in quiet parts, and especially noticeable through headphones. And once you hear it, you can never un-hear it...:)
There is no video release with "...a dangerous mission for a woman" (other accounts say it was "for a girl"), and to my knowledge no print has ever surfaced with the line.
In fact, it's been somewhat of a point of contention whether the line was ever longer than it is now. On an animation forum back when the 2006 movie box set came out, someone claimed to have seen a print with the line at a George Eastman House screening in 1978. But Fleischer historian Ray Pointer doubted that the line ever existed at all, and asserted that no print has ever turned up with any such extended line.
(I seem to recall that Pointer discussed it again on the late, great Animation Show Forums, but since the entire forum was shut down several years back, and not all of it was archived by WaybackMachine, that thread seems to be lost to the ages.)
Yes, there's an abrupt fade-out, but Pointer said he could not detect an audible soundtrack edit, so it could have just been a sloppy fade that was there originally. For all we know, "for a woman/girl" could be a complete myth, like Luke missing his first grappling hook swing, or the shot of Anthony Hopkins' scalpel actually cutting into Ray Liotta's brain in Hannibal.
We will probably never know the answer.
The Amazon VHS is actually a NOVA documentary about the making of the King Kong segment from the IMAX film. It's not the actual IMAX film itself. :(