The Little Engine That Could was a joint production of Siriol Productions (formerly The Dave Edwards Studio) and Kalato Studios, co-financed by Universal Studios (under its MCA Home Video arm) and S4C in Wales; released on VHS on November 22, 1991. It was based on the popular children’s book of the same name by Watty Piper, and the adaption took inspiration from the 1976 reissue with illustrations by Ruth Sanderson.
With its surprisingly nuanced direction, familiar casting and beautiful music, it was deemed a cult classic for children in the early 90s, as direct-to-video media was becoming a mainstay on the market. The film even holds up for adults, whose fandom of the already popular Thomas & Friends series also grew a fondness of how the film greatly expanded the original story with a steady pace and an inspiring moral of determination and not letting doubters get the best of you.
As technology progressed in digital media, however, for a long time, the film never sought a release on DVD or Blu-ray other than VHS (or the most rare video format, LaserDisc). And the only time it would gain a digital release was on streaming services such as Amazon and Peacock. However, the transfer there suffered from occasional aliasing, rainbow-checkered chroma noise, and dot crawl, as it was directly encoded from a telecined analog video source in some form.
While it would take nothing short of a miracle to do a rescan of an existing 16/35mm print (which is extremely unlikely for Universal to ever rediscover the original film reels for an official native restoration), one method I think we’ll undergo a remaster of the LaserDisc source, is using the ESRGAN-based image upscaling GUI “Cupscale” with proprietary models to enhance the details and linework based on the original film cels released not too long ago.
But before this project proceeds any further, to any LaserDisc collector of classic Universal titles, I’m adding the requirement of a digitized capture of the LaserDisc source, restored with AviSynth’s QTGMC deinterlacer and proprietary filters to clean up dust and scratches, as well as reducing dot crawl and aliasing. The analog audio as well should be captured in a lossless FLAC format for further adjustments on its tone pitch from NTSC to PAL, as it was originally premiered in the UK and Wales. All of which be packaged in an Internet Archive or Google Drive upload.
We’ll soon be up to date on the topic in a few weeks (or months) when the upscaling tests proceed after obtaining the LaserDisc rip, and leave a constructive reply if you wish to support this project.
