TServo2049

Diamond? You’re serious? I had no idea Diamond ever did anything SP! This blows my mind as much as the time I found an early Goodtimes copy of Alice Sweet Alice that was SP (and probably weighed as much as a half-dozen ordinary LP-mode GT tapes combined).

I just assumed you found the Anchor Bay SP version, the fact that it was from DEC just amazes me…

So weird, I’d have assumed all Eastman prints were LPP by 1984.

I would never share PMs on a forum; I think most of us share the same view.

The Beech release is the only one with the original THE END title card. But it was unauthorized (not legitimately public domain, since the U.S. copyright never actually expired), and comes from a really beat-up 16mm print. You can see it on TheH-Man’s YouTube clip of the original end card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIXrXMiKyJY

(There were also Beech releases of the other two Walter Reade titles, but they also looked poor. Though again, they retained the original end titles. Son even ended with the Reade logo.)

I can’t tell if that’s a full spool, or a partial spool.

Another cool thing to find would be an SP copy of Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster. This may be impossible; the film spent the 90s sub-licensed to GoodTimes, who released exclusively in LP mode. The only chance would be to hunt for possible SP versions of the earlier Video Treasures issue, or the Canadian HGV release which had the same box art style as the Anchor Bay releases. (I am assuming HGV had Canadian distribution deals with both GoodTimes and StarMaker/Anchor Bay.) But I have no idea if either were even issued in SP, and as with many dual-format releases the only way to know for sure may be to look at the cassette itself. (Makes me wish I hadn’t recorded over my SP recording off AMC…)

The tapes would be hi-fi, but the films themselves would still be mono, because that’s how they were mixed. (No Godzilla film had an English dub in stereo until Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II. In fact, I’m not sure if any Japanese film ever had an English dub mixed in stereo, U.S. or “international”, until the Streamline dub of Akira!)

But yes, a PCM capture would be perfect, I would think.

RU.08 said:

poita said:

We only have the full 1933 King Kong because of a 35mm print found in Argentina, so you never know what you may find.

I never knew that, that’s awesome! Out of question- did they even bother to keep film negatives back then, or did they burn them to retrieve the silver nitrate?

RKO kept the negative - but they cut it to satisfy the Production Code for the 1938 re-release. (As per usual for the time, the cuts were made directly to the negative. I guess the negative trims could have been melted down to retrieve the silver, or possibly just thrown out. After all, at the time it would have been easy to assume that the MPAA was never going to allow them to exhibit the uncut version again, so they wouldn’t have had much incentive to keep them.) All the highest-generation positive and dupe negative elements were made off of the already cut negative.

However, they did indeed eventually destroy the negative; in a 1989 American Cinematographer article, the then-director of Turner’s film archives made an educated guess that it because it was worn out from printing too many copies off of it - in his words, “Kong was a victim of its own success.” (I’m not sure if nitrate film was still in use at the time, so I don’t know if it was melted down to retrieve the silver during its destruction. I suppose it’s possible, but it likely wasn’t the primary reason for its destruction.)

That open matte shot is interesting. I had no idea those flames were superimposed.

Just to clarify, that VHS clip is actually a recording from a TV airing on German network SAT.1, it’s not a commercial VHS release. More precisely, it’s a bootleg Polish dub (“rychlodabing” is apparently the term) done on top of a recording of a SAT.1 airing (in the Polish “lektor” method of a single male voice reading over the original audio). The video quality does look like the tape has been copied a few generations - at least one to get the Polish dialogue on top of the German recording, possibly a generation between the SAT.1 off-air recording and the tape that got to the Polish dubbers, probably more after the Polish dub because these were (I assume) distributed by people giving a copy of their copy to someone else.

Looks to have the same low contrast and boosted gamma as a lot of transfers of that vintage. It’s a major shock seeing 80s video transfers again now, especially knowing that at one time, this is what these movies “looked like” to kids born in the 80s (of which I was on the tail end).

As I said, try for a Burbank SP release if you can’t find an Anchor Bay - according to Toho Kingdom, the AB VHS was a direct port of the Burbank, down to having their logo at the start. (Burbank was apparently a subsidiary of Video Treasures, something I did not know until today.)

I could have sworn the IMAX version I saw looked like the Blu-Ray. Maybe it really didn’t, I dunno…

Is it the same DVD screener copy I salvaged off Usenet, with the periodic “Property of Warner Bros.” message? Or is it something different?

I remember that being brought up before, people said the trailer footage looked more like the previous transfers than the actual Blu-Ray.

Correct me if I’n wrong, but wasn’t the Blu-Ray release delayed at one point? Could this be what they were going to look like, and the regrade came later? And wasn’t there a new 35mm around 2010-11 that looked sort of like the BD in some ways, but with better color or something?

Oh I see, he joined fanres.

I hope he gets the prints.

That just goes to his Facebook.

What prints on auction? I don’t see any on eBay.

I thought it was only the (cropped) Super 8 digest that was based off the 70mm. How did that turn into his mute Super 8 feature print being derived from 70mm?

Extremely interesting!

Another thing I noticed: On the Dolby Surround clip, when the audio is collapsed to mono the Alien cue goes from faint to almost completely inaudible. I was listening on my iPhone speaker, couldn't hear it, plugged in my headphones and then I could hear it.

The surround information is carried in the two channels inverse to each other, so the fact that it essentially disappears in a mono fold-down seems to indicate that when the track is properly decoded, the Alien music would have only been heard in the surrounds (similar to the DVD?)

I thought the 25th anniversary transfer did have the yellow skateboard wheels, despite its other issues. It was the 2003 DVD/DTV/"DCP" master that had them pink.

Awesome, then that's the SP set. It ends in 22 hours (though since it's a Buy It Now and not an auction, it COULD get relisted). Anybody wanna buy it?

Toho Kingdom has a picture of the Anchor Bay Megalon tape, there is no R&G Video logo on the back, so I'm presuming it is NOT the uncut video master New World licensed at the same time as Gigan and Mechagodzilla, but chose not to release due to the market already being flooded with inferior-quality unlicensed copies. They claim it is the same edited version, and that it starts with a logo for Burbank Video?!

Their scan of the Burbank box says "Duplicated in SP Mode" on the back (unlike some copies I'm finding on eBay, which have smaller tape spools and no such message on the back of the box). If the Anchor Bay version was indeed recycled from the Burbank release, maybe it'd be easier to track down an SP Burbank copy.

Here's a Burbank copy the seller claims to be SP:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Godzilla-vs-Megalon-VHS-SP-Mode-/351514390348

And I compared that auction to another auction - the tapes in the other auction definitely have smaller tape spools. I do think that the auction you just posted is the SP versions - even though they DON'T have a slapped-on SP mode sticker on the back. Jetrell, what do you think?

Anchor Bay did put out SP versions IIRC, but apparently they had to be "special ordered" (by the retailers)? I have found tapes (not these ones) from Video Treasures/Starmaker/Anchor Bay that have a "Duplicated in SP Mode" sticker on the back.

The version of the Jurassic Park scan that was released is a quick-and-dirty rough version. I believe the LUT was set to adjust black levels to pure black. The digital video codecs we use still have a narrower dynamic range than film (even at 0-255), and film doesn't actually project black as absolutely pure black (even, I assume, on stuff like IB Tech and silver retention that I've heard have deeper blacks than other prints). So it probably wasn't that dark in theaters. Or at least, you could probably see what was going on better than in those images.

PDB, DoomBot, are either of you here? I know this thread isn't about the JP preservation, but can you weigh in? Is there lost shadow detail compared to the flat scan?

Wow. I had almost forgotten how the Pixar movies looked on film. (Though you introduced a weird posterization effect on Buzz's face.)

They may have ignored them so that they could use uninterrupted picture/sound from The Menagerie without cutting back and forth between the Menagerie picture/sound and the B&W Cage picture/sound in the space of a few seconds.

For the color restoration, my suspicions are that there is no color negative for those parts. (Or maybe they WERE lazy - for example, even in the modern restorations, they don't seem to want to do the effort to put Malachi Throne's Keeper dialogue back in and still use the higher-quality Menagerie audio surrounding it. I know it can be done.)