I was wondering, if there’s ever been discussion of Shout/Alternaversal going back and where there are now better, HD sources for the movies, inserting the new prints in retroactively to old episodes.
A lot of us probably remember there was a Mistie effectively doing that online, creating “Cinema Editions”, before being shut down.
It’s a time consuming process, and probably not cheap, but I’m curious if discussion ever took place.
Obviously you can’t go back and change the aspect ratio, you have to stick with what Best Brains had to go by, but the picture itself can be cleaned up.
Probably might not make sense to do with every episode, but certainly specific titles.
With the holiday season, I thought of “Santa Claus Conquers The Martians” and “Santa Claus” as options just to gauge interest.[poll type=regular results=always chartType=bar]
Yes
Yes- but not every episode really needs to be done
Hmmm…as someone that grew up subjected to the whims of over-the-air TV reception, I feel considerable nostalgia when it comes to watching bad movies with less than pristine video and audio.
It’s an interesting thought, I had no idea someone had already attempted it. Doing it well would be quite an ordeal – accounting for the entrance/exit sequences when the theater hatch is open, and working around the silhouettes. Even then you’d end up with a sharp HD movie with fuzzy low-def stuff all around it.
Personally, I’m content with them as they are. I’m told there are now algorithms that can upscale old content so well that it’s indistinguishable from native HD content, but I’d have to see that to believe it. If true, that would probably be the way to go, since the host segments would also get improved, and it could be applied to all the episodes.
I get why they legally had to shut down garyinmotion, who was making the cinema versions, but it’s too bad it had to happen. Those were serious labors of love created by a superfan. And to my knowledge he wasn’t profiting off them at all. But with a project like that, only a matter of time before you have to stop. I think it would have been cool if they were able to hire him instead, pull the episodes from YT, and start selling the remasters. Just legitimize the project and make sure content owners get paid, and gary could have kept doing the lord’s work.
And personally, I’d love a quality remaster of some of the old episodes, both host segments and film prints. Would be extra cool if they did something on the gizmoplex that let you swap between the remastered and the original versions, sort of like how some remastered games do.
Wow, how can three people be so wrong?
I think the ‘when’ of the show’s creation as well as the nature of what resources could be got at the time are unsung heroes of the show. They add an element of appreciation and understanding at least for me, being in the ‘wheelhouse’ of the target audience when the show first aired.
As others have pointed out, the show plays to that at times; at others, improved prints etc don’t quite seem to sync with the take on it all.
A great question to think over, and I’m sure there are some episodes where this could be done with no apparent effect.
But no.
I can see trying to fix issues caused by them being on super old tapes that probably lived in an attic for a few years. But once they’re to the point where it’s like watching the original broadcast, it’s not obvious why the process should continue.
I understand the sentiment, but the original run was all meant to be viewed on old tube TVs. People now are rolling with 1080 or 4k TVs… I think it makes sense to clean things up and make them look better with a modern setup.
Vinegar Syndrome has built an entire niche devoted to cleaning up (and sometimes recovering otherwise lost) old movies. For the first time, the movies are actually worse than they look!
The Mads just riffed the restored version of Manos this week. Trace said that they wouldn’t have been so hard on it back in the day if they had access to a better print.
I’d say leave them mostly alone, but I would vote to fix the sound in “Killer Shrews.”
Some of the movies that have been riffed, Manos being a big example, suffered from poor prints. Without the bad prints the movies wouldn’t have been as bad so they may not have been riffed.
That said, the quality of the silhouettes varied greatly over the seasons. If there was a way to fix that I wouldn’t mind.
To speak in mostly business terms, I think it would be something that would only be attempted if they felt that there was a market for it in syndication that doesn’t exist for the original versions. For example, if some channel said they’d pay a lot more for new HD widescreen versions of some episodes, then if it made financial sense, it would for sure be explored. But aside from that? I think the focus is very much more on making new episodes than making the originals something they weren’t before. It’s a matter of resources and I just don’t think it would make any sense for Alternaversal or Shout to invest in that because the past episodes, while very much informing the present and the future of the franchise, aren’t what will propel it all forward.
Corrected now!
