Broom Kid said:
That Patreon post just reeks of B.H’s brand of B.S. It’s pretty clear through the way he’s writing that he “found out about this” the same way everyone else did - via the initial leaks that first happened on the YouTube. Someone musta shot him those details on the low (of course they did, rule #1 of having a secret is telling someone you’re not supposed to).
Everything else in that post is… I don’t know that he’s just making stuff up whole-cloth, but he’s definitely embellishing a great deal on what happened and when it happened. I think he’s simply betting that nobody who is paying him money to talk about home video in 2025 is going to either know, or be in a position to know, that he’s fluffing himself, LOL.
But the big tell is that he seems to have no real idea what the timeline on this was, and keeps talking about it like it’s way more recent than it really was. The whole bit about him tying all this together in his mind (a regular Pepe Silvia here) upon hearing about the BFI screening is the giveaway. He seems to legit believe that screening and this restoration (which began YEARS AGO) are inexorably linked, and that the former is key to the latter.
He’s laying out a line of bull for people who value the idea of being an insider so much they’re willing to pay him a monthly fee to feel like they have a friend in the industry (he takes care to spell out how connected he is, don’t he). He doesn’t know any more than anyone that’s been keyed into this leak from the beginning. But there’s worth in convincing people he does, so he’s going to do that.
I’ll give him this, he’s done a really good job at parlaying being “the face” of DVD collecting in its heyday into an ongoing hustle all the way into the UHD era. He’s ridden the decline of physical media as well as any of his peers ever did. But if you gotta dedicate 3-4 paragraphs to reminding people that you know people, it’s doing the opposite of what you want it to do. These aren’t the days where bonus feature teasers got Hall-H panels by themselves, and it hasn’t been that for a decade.
Thank you, it’s always good to clear up doubts and expose the lies others spread to get attention. Because let’s think about it, Disney must have a very complete record of how the films looked. They have their own interpositives, some more degraded than others, which was the reason they went back to the OCN in 1994 to make the Special Edition. But some must be in good enough condition to retain the color, like a Technicolor copy straight from the OCN, such as George’s private copy. Or perhaps they don’t have to go that far; they could use the separation masters or the YCM masters and scan them as a reference file. Just because Disney allowed the BFI screening doesn’t mean they were interested in that copy. Lucasfilm will have more copies of the film in color in their vault, even if they’re generations removed from the negative, and they’ll only use the color from those copies as a reference to colorize the highest quality material, which is the OCN. But they don’t depend on collectors who own rare copies for million-dollar projects because they already have all the material that we here would sell our souls to own.
