Oh cool! Happy to see Zombie pop up somewhere. I still wish he hadn’t disappeared from the site.
Never use imdb for tech specs. They are notoriously wrong or inaccurate especially for sound.
Most of the time you have to go by era produced and credits on end titles or original posters and the like.
Generally mono for most films before the late 70’s. Stereo and multichannel mixes existed for large format films and roadshow engagements.
Dolby Stereo matrix would get used Post Star Wars on most standard releases unless they cheaped out and stayed mono.
Where did you get a picture of that 1935 TCF Logo Positive?
Glad someone noticed!! That’s actually a photo I asked a projectionist buddy of mine to snap when he last ran a print of Grapes of Wrath. This was right around the time of the Disney buyout.
I added The Spy Who loved me Laserdisc, Dr No Laserdisc, and Goldfinger Laserdisc from the Japan remastered series to my collection. I also had recently purchased from russia with love from the same series. Only Spy who loved me has its Obi and original seal.
Not sure if you did a video on those Captain Solo.
I also picked up the Man with the Golden Gun first issue for the double gatefold, its beautiful.
I’m working on a video for the letterbox Japanese series. Just trying to finish making all the comparisons first.
The original Johnston McCulley Zorro stories. I’m on Volume 5 of the bold venture press reprints and need to get the last one volume 6. Absolutely magical and the birth of all superhero storytelling. I never thought these would ever be fully collected like this.
I’m also making my through all the Batman novels and am currently reading Inferno.
Well that being said it does look amazing and is the best release on home video so far. It was actually the first Blu-ray I ever purchased long before I even had a Blu-ray player. The criterion LD also has an excellent transfer with the lovely exclusive extras but the modern restoration techniques on the Blu-ray really vaults ahead on vintage Technicolor. I cannot wait to see what this would look like in 4K!
Oh gosh yes the Flynn films are all time greats and the more you dig into his filmography the more you find unheralded gems outside the action swashbucklers and films with Curtiz.
Arguably his films with Walsh and Keighley are as rewarding and films like They Died With Their Boots On and Rocky Mountain are essential.
If I’m going official physical releases it’s usually the Fox SWE Laserdiscs-standard for ESB and ROTJ and the very hard to find Technidisc for SW. The latter is still sadly the best physical release of Star Wars in something resembling its original form period.
Sometimes I watch my JSC copy of SW and sometimes I get nostalgic and put on the Definitive Collection or SE boxsets. I grew up with the Faces and SE VHS tapes so seeing those in their best form on LD plus in the boxsets it took me years to acquire somewhat balances out that they’re not exactly the best way to watch the OT.
If I go to our wonderful Jedi utility belt of magic and am not looking at the modern achievements I watch the Puggo Grande Trilogy series of 16mm captures with mono audio.
There’s no reason. Really there isn’t. So many cult and genre films have special editions and new scans from boutique and even studio labels now that it’s ridiculous when classic titles cannot get the same treatment.
Almost any label would give anything to do a release. I’m sure if Arrow, Indicator, MOC or even Criterion made a deal for a limited print run that was only the theatrical editions it would sell out in a nanosecond and prove us right after all these years.
It’s just simply getting the powers that be convinced.
It could be as simple as this, particularly if the licensee wasn’t allowed to make new extras:
That’s it. That’s all it takes. So really all it needs is the right person to say yes or care to even hear the pitch.
If it was Arrow or Indicator the boxset would have original art, every scrap of extras they could possibly get and be packed in a handsome slipbox like most of their sets at an affordable price. Arrow is now stepping into UHD so they could do it for both formats.
For example, the 1980 Flash Gordon (which I adore) is finally getting a new 4K restored transfer after years of the curummy old Blu-ray which made me always watch my Laserdisc copy instead. The full UK boxset release is 5 discs loaded with extras and a UHD version. All releases will have the original 2.0 Dolby Stereo and the 5.1 remix losslessly encoded. Arrow is doing a big SE release in the USA also in 4K UHD. This is because Studio Canal is doing catalog 4K restorations and actually releasing them to disc consistently unlike most. So now the film made because of SW’s success will have a better and more feature laden big release than the film that inspired it.
You know I ever could finish the old X-wing games due to the extreme difficulty and trying to learn the controls. Back in the day as a kid we didn’t have a super high end pc and in years since they were a pain to try and get running. Now that they’re workable again I may try to finish all of them but must confess I’ll probably go back to Rogue Squadron.
It’d be nice if they could make a proper fun flight combat game again.
As for the Arcade1Up cab it’s amazing they got the atari controller pretty close to original. But if I’m going to put money into a replica I’d rather just build a muticade and buy an Atari controller to somehow hook up for those games.
I did just before COVID get to try out a sitdown original machine for the first time in years…and to be honest despite the immersion aspect and stereo sound vastly prefer the standup for playing. The screen is more clearly visible and you can get a better score on the standup. However the dark plastic enclosure and stereo sound of the sitdown really still block off the outside world until you release the seat isn’t quite comfy and you’ve had to get down in the the seat and will have to get back up out of it again.
I’ve only gotten to play ESB in person like once. You don’t see them around so I never get to practice outside of MAME. Sometimes you see the accursedly hard ROTJ machine though.
I can’t remember how the idea first got in my head but it may have been the ROTJ novelization.
When young Obi-Wan is getting trying to resist the memory wipe in The Hidden Past he tries to hold onto specific memories one of which is his brother’s name being Owen.
Very true…but of course…Yesterday Was a Lie…Coming Soon to DVD!
This is an interesting photo. I can see Lucas and Kurtz center-right, and someone’s fiddling with a projector in the back, so maybe they’re showing some dailies or a version of the cut or something like that?
People at projector: George said he wanted to show everyone the old Flash Gordon serials to go over something.
Other person realized that mistakenly they were given not Flash Gordon but Flesh Gordon…
Once again this thread and all these photos really warm my heart. One can almost feel the lips curling of all the British crew in the candids who didn’t believe in the film they were working on.
If not dealing with ebay scalpers:
US SWE trilogy should go for $15-30. JSCs are typically $25 and up per film. The definitive box can go for crazy money these days and is hard to find complete rot free. The Faces single film discs are the same master but on much better pressings-however they are CLV and have all the problems of the DC master.
Unfortunately SW LD prices are crazy these days. Most sellers jack up the price no matter which copy. In fact recently someone posted the original pan n scan time compressed LD for like $1,500 or something!
As a kid I always thought Owen was intended to be Ben’s brother and it’s teased in several books or other works too.
Most of this same slate is what has turned up at drive ins here in the US. Theaters here keep getting shut down state by state but when locations or drive ins are open it seems to be a handful of DCPs showing mainstream titles.
I haven’t seen Indy or SW included though. Mostly it’s Jaws, Jurassic Park, John Hughes titles, BTTF aka mostly Universal.
Thanks for the vote of confidence. Sorry if I got you started down a rabbit hole, but it’s pure fun and surprising what you wind up learning…after being surrounded by tons of LDs…
I made an in depth video runthrough of main editions but the easiest cost effective recommendation are the USA Fox special widescreen editions for the trilogy-and especially look for the Technidisc pressing of ANH.
How does one take something that looked perfectly fine as a DVD extra and make it worse?
This happens all the time and is a reason why I sometimes hang onto to otherwise outclassed DVDs. Usually they don’t take the time to convert, re-encode and worry about legacy extras and just shove them on without thought. Thus on a lot of BDs what once looked fine are filled with aliasing, noise, compression artifacts or in the worst case scenario look like low quality youtube uploads which is what happened on some Kino Blu-rays. 9 times out of 10 extras look better on DVD. It’s only the specialty labels that care to rebuild things in 1080p or present them in 1080i upconverts and preserve quality of the original standard def materials-companies like Arrow, Criterion, Indicator, Eureka.
This is so confusing. I hadn’t realized Disney did a 2018 reissue with new mixes after Sony did the big LP boxset which was from the album versions. I never got the Sony release and now regret it I suppose.
The video indicates that there’s a new remaster and restoration of the complete film scores…but the 2018 disney cds with the same art have the same old track listings as the LPs and no bonuses. And this video is from this year…
This has just made me grin like an idiot and say to myself: Wow, maybe this will get back to Organa Major. Many wonderful images of things I’ve either never seen or from entirely different angles or takes. Scrolling through makes one realize again just how important the human factor was, how the nuts and bolts glued together rough hewn qualities are what made SW so special.
If interested tonight’s stream will be on Sergio Leone:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CjDymSvqJEA&feature=youtu.be
LFL wanted to test the waters of DVD just like Disney did at first. Many labels weren’t as willing to just jump in at the forefront and release a number of crappy early discs that were little more than LD ports. They also wanted to maximize profits and figure out the DVD market. Thus you had to wait until 2001 to get the DVD SE of TPM and could only get a VHS copy in the US for almost three years. I’m surprised they didn’t let it come out on LD but the format was pretty much cut off here before TPM would have debuted. Looking at lddb specs the last US Fox LD was Entrapment in late November 1999. The Japanese TPM from Fox came out in January 2000 so it just barely missed a USA LD release.
The first major DVDs readily available to consumers from studios at entry price points weren’t really hitting until 1997 particularly the first waves of Warner snapper case titles.
They were wanting to do more work on the OT and that eventually became making the new masters, handing them to Lowry crap digital and then over-processing the life out of them and making the new changes in mixes. This likely took some time after beating around the bush for so long and is why they finally came out in Sept. 2004. The peak of the DVD booms was really around 2005 so they timed it perfectly. And of course not telling anyone it was another version suckered us all into buying it and getting home to start the hours of horror…
I’m sure Fox would have been more than happy to have gotten the 97 SE out on DVD perhaps with a slightly spiffed up master of the LD versions from the later Japanese releases say around 2002. That would have given us a much better source to work from and a higher quality official 97SE release but nooooooo…it can’t ever be easy.
TPM and AOTC are up on capsaholic:
https://caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=5419
https://caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=5420
They did not change the teal infusion on AOTC. Darn. The caps show everything as just a whole lot darker. That could be the capturing software though.
It does seem like they did indeed finally ditch the Lowry POS master as a source. Anything and I mean ANYTHING that company ever touched is atrocious in all sorts of ways.
While everything so far seems to indicate that this is the Reliance 4K stuff we’ve been discussing back and forth it also appears to perhaps be the final LFL led SE master where they inserted even Maclunkey before handing over the reins. So I’m a bit torn now. I was avoiding these like the plague and have no use for the 19SE or the frozen grain and other tomfoolery that shows they have no desire to properly care about proper film presentation-and yet this is so much better than anything we’ve officially gotten visually since…well since the 97SE LD release actually.
Darn it i’m not going to let them dangle the bloody carrot at me…the fact that the BD.com review is harsh says something-they’re almost NEVER harsh when they should be and the audio “reviews” are more of a joke since there only generalities for the most part.
But the Prequels are all kinds of ugly. ROTS seems ok and they will never be all that nice to look at. I’ve heard AOTC supposedly gets rid of the teal color shift of the BD which would be great.
But TPM is APPALLING. Sure the main source is a roughly 2K filmout of everything done long ago but to take that and rescan for the 3D release and hit 100% with overzealous DNR and processing then bring it to 1080p and then upped to 2K and then uprez that to 4K…it’s hideous. And all they had to do was present the source untouched and it would at least look ok for what it was. they seem to go nuts with over-processing the image in each format. The LD is bad, the DVD is bad, the BD is bad and now the 4K polishes every aspect of a visual turd.
Those who have picked these up, what do you think of the sound mixes? The prequels have always had great audio but TPM has never sounded as good as the LD audio to my ears and I still think they started tinkering on AOTS/ROTS audio on the 2011 discs.
I would hope the OT at least now sounds better than the 2011 mixes but reports seem to indicate it is still the base 2011 mix with those changes still intact.
Haha…it’s the Bonds for me.
VHS for all 20 original series films, some extra tapes in rare letterboxed VHS form, collector’s boxset sealed, TND VHS boxset, some in the 1992 collector’s edition line, some in the original VHS line.
Letterboxed USA LDs for 1-18, corrected LALD pressing, 1.33 discs for DN/FRWL/GF/TMWTGG, some of the original time compressed pan n scan LDs, Connery collection boxsets 1 and 2, Goldfigner and Thunderball CAV boxsets, THX final release LDs for Dr. No/FRWL/GF/TB/TSWLM/Moonraker, Criterion CAVs for DN/FRWL/GF. DTS LDs for Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies.
Japanese letterboxed LDs for 1-18. Evergreen and Pan n scan early Japanese discs for some as well.
On DVD I have the whole SE run in the three boxes, the UE line in the initial four volume boxes, and for the original THX DVD line I have TSWLM.
Blu-ray: I have the Bond 50 set.
Most overall is probably GF and TB
Goldfinger:
VHS x2
Laserdisc x6: 1.33 disc, Criterion CAV, Connery collection, THX CAV boxset, THX final LD, Japanese LD
SE DVD, UE DVD
Blu-ray
Thunderball:
VHS x3
LD: pan n scan US, Japanese evergreen, Connery collection, THX CAV set, THX clv ac3, Japanese widescreen
SE DVD, UE DVD
Blu-ray
Or it may be Dr. No or FRWL since I have many other assorted tapes of the early films plus extra LD copies. I’ll have to tally them up.
I’d also include:
Casino Royale '67: pan n scan LD, letterbox LD, original DVD, Blu-ray
Never Say Never Again: letterboxed LD, first DVD, CE DVD, Blu-ray
