errodkey

Thanks for the info! Hopefully I’ll get to see the contents of the eye-bleeding table at some point.

Although a preservation of the series would be good, I’m primarily interested in creating a sort of Despecialised Edition of the series, to the degree that such is possible. Editing is a part of my livelihood, so I should have the skillset, it’s mostly time and materials which are in short supply.

I already owned the first set of DVDs and have just purchased the second and third sets as per fanediting standards. Where material is identical between DVD and broadcast, I can use the DVD materials.

For the bookends, it currently looks like the French Dubs are the best quality available (They seem to be PAL DVD resolution, though it may be upscaled) although the burned-in logo in the upper right and the title cards will present a challenge.

I have VHS taped off TV of about a dozen episodes, with variable quality, which mostly will serve as reference for original titles, etc.

I’m still in the gathering materials phase, and am open to all suggestions and any materials. My current plan (if you can call it that) is to begin with an episode which requires minimal edits, e.g. Attack of the Hawkmen, and then work on reediting Season 1. I suppose at that point I might need to figure out how the distribution side of things works…that’s a black art to me at the moment. If I end up with these things for my personal enjoyment, that’s great, but there are a lot of people out there (on this thread, for starters) who want to see the original series in the highest quality available.

I’m not averse to the Japanese Laserdiscs as a source, (especially for audio to pair with the French dubs) or as a preservation but it doesn’t look like it’s the complete series, besides which the burned in subtitles aren’t particularly helpful.

I’m gathering materials for this edit–the French dubs are a good starting point, and obviously the DVDs will supply the highest quality available when footage/audio are not reedited. However, if people have additional materials, I’d be interested. Good quality audio of the whole broadcast series would be great.

Especially of interest are reference/source materials for some of the reedited portions that the French dubs don’t provide:

• Travels with Father original edit.
• Phantom Train of Doom original edit (I might have this on VHS somewhere)
• Hollywood Follies original edit (I might have this on VHS somewhere, too)
• Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye

The Wikipedia article claims that there are no changes on these later TV movies, but I’ve found some minor changes from the broadcast version of Attack of the Hawkmen to the DVD release, so I’d like to be able to double check.

Gotta disagree with you about the re-edits. The chronological ordering makes the shift in tone between episodes like "The Phantom Train of Doom," "Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life," and "Attack of the Hawkmen" quite jarring.

I wouldn't have as huge a problem with the reordering, or with the removal of old Indy (whom I happen to like, thank you very much!) if the episodes themselves weren't so mangled in the obsessive-compulsive desire to have 22 2-hour episodes, instead of the 9 2-hour episodes and 26 1-hour episodes that were originally broadcast.

I would classify the entire first re-edited DVD set as unwatchably bad. The new titles look like someone experimenting with iMovie. Corey Carrier, bless him, makes the voice-over for the first episode sound like a school writing assignment read aloud by one of the child actors in a Peanuts TV special. The awkward episode joiners are terribly painful, as actors struggle to remember the characters they played four years earlier, and Corey Carrier struggles to look prepubescent.

The second DVD set isn't as bad, because most of the episodes were two-parters to begin with, but a lot of it still feels like someone fan-edited it to death to try and remove something that was integral to the original script/edit. (e.g. Oganga, the Giver and Taker of Life's iMovie effect intro to get around the lack of voiceover. It kinda works, but it's also...kinda terrible.) Other episodes, like "Verdun, September 1916" lose their meaning when mashed into a second, unrelated episode. I haven't seen enough of the third DVD set to 

I guess what it boils down to is that the series as broadcast was stylistically very early-90s stylistically--cheesy bits with old Indy meeting bad child actors and all--and I'd rather have it all of a piece than suffer through some of the worst George Lucas reshoots committed to film. Besides, Old Indy provides (or in some cases, refuses to provide) the moral to the episodes he bookends, and I would argue, his storytelling provides the central moral of the series: Listen to your elders, because the crazy ol' bat with an eyepatch probably has some amazing stories to tell.

nafroe said:

I love this movie!!!!!!!  I recall the original teaser trailer for the original film... it was quickly recalled...  If I remember correctly, a helicopter gets stuck in a giant web in between the WTC towers.  That teaser would be cool to see in full 1080p.

 Looks like that was the original teaser for Spiderman 1 in 2002: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dptChW7PNDY

This sounds like a great idea...any status updates on the project now?

Haven't done anything about it, preservation or fanedit-wise, but here are two channels that have footage from the original edits:

www.youtube.com/user/jennymalmsbury/

www.youtube.com/user/StooTV

StooTV seems to have the better source. Perhaps we should contact him?

Judging from this review, they didn't crop it, but instead went Stretch-o-rama(!):

http://news.google.co.uk/newspapers?id=7OxjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=v5UDAAAAIBAJ&dq=fantasia%20superscope&pg=2127%2C4278836 

A great little review, and the final paragraph of the review could easily refer to Star Wars, or Pan and Scan releases, 3-D-ification, etc....

Hi folks, first time posting after years of lurking.

I would be interested in working on this project, either as a straight preservation of the best copies available, or as a redaction edit of the higher quality DVD release into the original episode edits. I have a few of the episodes in bad quality, so to complete any more than just those episodes would require a copy of someone's original edit masters. Alternatively, if we want to parcel out the episodes, I can start on the ones I have and see what I get.

There were some clips on Youtube a while back with the George Hall bookends material in decent quality...If they are any better quality than what we have currently, we could check that, too.