I’m absolutely obsessed with it. For me it’s driven purely from childhood nostalgia. In particular, Macintosh games. I want, and want others to have that warm excitement of nostalgia when they re-discover something forgotten.
I am am an amateur recordist, I absolutely love to bootleg concerts and gigs and things, as in: make my own recordings of live music and so on. I have shared everything in the appropriate places, also. I believe it is an essential artistic expression: to record the nature of the world around you for the future.
So, I do it a bit.
I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.
On one side, the dominant consumer society we live in is extremely busy churning through anything that can be sold as a product and then thrown away so that the new can replace them. Buildings go up as quickly as they come down, and we digitize books just to destroy them in pursuit of productivity gains we may or may not ever get. And of course, conflicts and war continue to destroy priceless artefacts, like they've always done.
On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).
This reminds me I have some film that I need to get digitized and uploaded to IA. From what I can tell they are clips from concerts in the Chicago area in the 1980s. And I think this proves GPs point, because to be honest I personally have no interest in live music, but when I found those in a can at a thrift store for $20, you bet your ass I bought them to be preserved and not turned into someone's ill-advised art project (or something equally destructive). When I see something that I know /someone/ will value I will always do what I can to save it from destruction/the trash/someone who doesn't know the value.
Kinda related, but I hate how the big studios go after old videogames and try to take them down. It looks like, in the future, this era will be called the "digital dark ages", not because all the stuff got lost to bitrot, but because all the stuff became illegal to own so that the studios could sell the new stuff again and again.
Agreed, and it was already like this in the 2000's (when I got involved in the abandonware scene). I remember the owner of Home of the Underdogs getting constantly in battles with takedown notices for games she only intended to preserve. Not piracy in the sense of "losing tons of money", nobody but enthusiasts cared about these games anymore.
The home-computer world is especially interesting for old games. If something made it to a Nintendo or Sega console, it's probably very well-preserved, but I'd be surprised if even 1% of all video games made were released on consoles.
There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.
It should be. There are lots of good ideas of modifying copyrights so that its not the automatic 70 year after life of author (or what every it is now).
>unfathomable number of games that were released
One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.
I played a bunch of random shareware games on our family's Apple IIgs and I'd love to find some of those again, but I was so young I can't really remember much other than like some visual images and vibes.
I would like to take this opportunity to pitch an old favourite of mine - Blast Doors (1996) by Freds Friends. Aka "The Nuclear Family Feud". Basically it's a 3D version of Artillery with some elevation physics, and a fun theme around nuclear weapons being fully legalized for home defence. So you're a bunch of grouchy neighbours in your mobile nuclear bunkers, firing off various warheads at eachother and saying quippy 90s things. It has a very distinct style and wry, absurdist sense of humor - and for a long time was available on the website of one of the developers (which was also delightfully 90s).
Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.
There are projects like eXoDOS that are attempting to provide a complete DOS archive. They are currently at version 6 that weighs in at just under 700GB. But they seem to be finding new stuff all the time, thus the versioning of the archive.
There's a book of BASIC software I have. I'd like to publish the programs online. I've tried to contact the author, but he's dead. I tried to contact the publisher, but they were acquired. I tried to contact the acquiring publisher, but they went out of business 20 years ago. The trail is cold there, and I imagine it's nearly impossible to figure out who owns the rights now.
Archive.org is full of copyrighted software without known authors. I know it because i'v found a lot of Pocket PC & Palm software from studios/companies that don't even exist anymore.
Someone else mentioned archive.org, check to see if they have a copy of it already - if not, you can always send it to them. They've got a full archival copy of all Nintendo 64 games (and others) so they seem to have some kind of legal protections / exemptions.
They're relying on the DMCA liability shield by allowing user uploaded files and removing them upon request by a the copyright holder - and then someone else uploads the same file.
> There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.
On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).
On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.
You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.
Nevermind the Commodore etc. who are preserved as abandonware. Remember FLASH games? They are mostly gone already. Even if you still have a copy, they can't be run anymore. There were some efforts made, but last I checked plenty of FLASH games still didn't work flawlessly.
Flashpoint Archive now has around 200K flash games that can be downloaded and ran locally. Im sure this is nothing compared to what used to exist but basically anything of note is in there
What do you use to run them locally? FLASH doesn't exist anymore and all the emulators do not properly work. I've got an archive of FLASH games myself, but I cannot play them anymore.
Flash Player in the browser doesn't exist anymore. There's still the standalone Flash Player that game with Adobe Flash/Animate, and it works fine. It doesn't depend on browser compatibility, since it runs on its own.
A Flash game I made a million years ago actually works in Ruffle now. It's really quite bad so I don't really want to prominently display it on my blog, but I might hide it somewhere as easter egg.
Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.
I end up being drawn into and wasting time on a flash video site [1] at least once a year and there's always at least a bunch of animations not working properly. But it has gotten better over the years.
Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Copyright law is about finding a balance between, on one side, incentivizing creators via granting them a legal monopoly on publishing, and on the other side, the philosophical notion of freedom of speech, which would allow anyone to republish, remix, and repurpose any preexisting work. The original formulation of this legal monopoly was that it was supposed to be short enough that it would expire well within the average person's lifetime, a notion which has long been gutted via regulatory capture.
> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
A fun way to frame the copyright lifetime absurdity is to point out that in a few years there will be books published on the 1900s that will be copyright protected until the 2100s.
Even GOG has some oddities were the available copy is not the original experience.
My recent experience of trying to play the original Mafia game.
Booting it up a GoG copy, I found that there was no music while driving (a core memory of my original play through).
This music has been removed...
This also affected small radios you'd find playing music, they now dead.
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
This happens because the original publisher signed a deal for the commercial music with a limited time.
So when that time expired, any further releases had to remove the music.
Another example of how copyright makes preservation difficult.
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.
Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?
> People who have a legal copy of the game can preserve that copy until copyright expires.
No, that's the point. Only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.
I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.
> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.
All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.
So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
>A game needs to be played in order to be preserved
Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
>I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights.
My opinion boils down to:
* Preservation does not justify piracy
* Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.
That kind of works with smaller players (a random thai TV channel dinging people incorrectly is probably going to get some sort of time-out, and even if not, going to court against a smaller player like that is probably within the realm of possibility), but the big players have too much leverage. If Sony gets threatened with even minor punishments, they can simply say 'Fine. But then you have to remove all videos featuring gameplay from Sony Interactive Entertainment's games, or else we'll sue you for copyright infringement'. Even that example is fairly narrow and something that Sony is clearly allowed to do within the current bounds of copyright. They could go full nuclear and demand anything even vaguely related to Sony and its cultural hoard be taken of Youtube, and Youtube would have to comply, if nothing else, while the fight in court goes on.
Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.
The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.
We did try to reform copyright; that's what the DCMA was about. While I'm not a lawyer, my understanding is that if a rights holder alleges that a video infringes their rights, Google passes that on,and the creator of the video responds that it is fair use, Google is then immune to any liability per the DCMA (it would be a matter between the two parties). What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
The DMCA is absolutely not copyright reform. It was brought to us by the same mindset that brought us the Bono act. It's a bad piece of legislation that should have been replaced 20 years ago.
> What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
Because the DMCA and copyright in general proved to be a massive hindrance in actually having Youtube be workable, so they made their own system which functionally bypasses it, by giving in to the corps. The corps can either misuse the DMCA and make life hell for Youtube, or they can get in on the system with Youtube and make some cash on the side. There is no middle ground where the DMCA isn't misused, Youtube gets to exist and the corps don't get paid.
There is zero practical difference between owning a game they don't allow you to play and not owning it. Thus if taking steps to make it playable is illegal, then the equivalent to ownership is illegal.
I hate how they are stopping the physical releases.
I guess I do understand it from the business perspective - I never buy a physical release myself - but ... 20 years later, it will be impossible to get these games.
Some time in the next 20 years, pirates will be able to download the game from the e-shop server and create a fake e-shop server where everything is free.
I've been signed up a few months at a time over the years. It has tons of independent movies from the US/UK/France but also from lesser exposed countries (think Danish, Greek, Thai, Polish, Norwegian…). It's mostly films released recently or in the last 20 years. It also has some older classics (Memories of Murder, Carrie, Dogma, Obsession, Carlito's Way…) but there aren't that many and they're often only there temporarily.
It's worth doing the 30 days trial. I sign up for a month or two whenever I feel like the library has at least 10 films I'd want to watch.
I am quite happy to give Mubi my money each month, even if I don't use it a _huge_ amount. I have seen some great films on the platform, and I really do want to see them be successful.
Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?
Something other replies haven’t mentioned yet is that you can use a VPN on it. A service like Disney+ for example will not let you in at all with a VPN active but no problem with Mubi. You get a pretty nice selection with that.
> Of particular note is the “remux” community, dedicated to seamlessly stitching together the best video and audio streams from different releases without any generational loss of quality.
That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
I don't read it that way. If you start using words like container and encoding, I feel you have to describe what those words mean and I suspect the writer probably felt that level of detail might have caused the article to drift away from the point. I have personal experience of accidentally going into too much detail when describing remuxes to non technical friends, and had later opted to describing almost exactly as the author did, because that description I think conveys the purpose pretty well.
Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
>Remux is not a community, it's a tag that pirate release groups uses to indicate that a release contains exact copies of the original video and audio streams present on the disc.
There is a community insofar as there is a relatively small group of people who sink their time into producing high quality remuxes, and this group talks to each other (on IRC and elsewhere).
>GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
As I corrected on a child comment to the GP, this is not correct. It is not convention either. A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources. Simply combining tracks from different sources isn't a hybrid remux, it's just baseline good practice.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, adding audio tracks to a video track that weren't produced together often requires editing. If not for sample rate reasons, content reasons, like extra space for additional video space at the beginning or ending most basically. It seems like in any instances like that, which I would count as "nominal," it would be appropriate to identify those as "modified from" which would seemingly place you squarely into "hybrid" space within the taxonomy of this comment thread.
The muxer can apply a timestamp offset to a track, so while the audio stream remains untouched it starts at some offset relative to the start of the video stream.
Agree once you're compensating for drift by scaling the audio track you've pushed yourself out of remux territory, but again these aren't hard and fast rules (evidenced by the disagreement over terminology).
Right. There is some degree of transformation which is normal or necessary. For example, if one of {video, audio} is 24fps and the other is 23.976fps, the video will have its frame rate adjusted to match the audio. For basic video/audio mismatches you may need to trim audio, insert null audio, or add a mkv container delay.
These things are normally detailed in release notes. People write pretty detailed notes laying out exactly what they did.
> A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources.
This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in. All streams must be untouched in a remux, and a hybrid remux is a release with untouched streams from multiple sources (there are also hybrids which are not remuxes).
What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
>This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in.
Probably. Not all places allow hybrid remuxes.
I promise you that I have these definitions correct as they are most commonly used, since I am actually involved in this space.
The word "Hybrid" has been used in the way you describe, most notably by FRaMeSTOR, but I would say that everyone else has coalesced on what I described and would call my definition the standard one. It's also how the "Hybrid" edition label is used on PTP.
>What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
No I'm not. I stand by what I said. As an example you can look at Bridge.to.Terabithia.2007.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.TrueHD.5.1-BLURANiUM.mkv For the sake of those reading, I will copy from the release notes:
>GER has hardcoded translated movie title which is not present in other transfers so hybrid was needed to restore the original picture. Hybrid was done with USA disc since audio from same disc was used. GER video was retimed to 23.976 FPS, trimmed on valid IDR frames and merged with MKVToolnix.
In this case, two Blu-ray video streams were spliced together.
There's nothing wrong with the definition you quoted. I would say it's entirely accurate (except perhaps that it neglects subtitles, which can end up being a substantial amount of work if you choose to put the effort into it).
>What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
No. While the "hybrid" term has been used this way, the standard definition now is for remuxes where a single stream has been created by stitching together streams from two different sources. For example, a video from source A has generally better picture quality, but has some glitch or issue that requires patching in a segment from source B to create a hybrid video stream. Doing this for the main video without re-encoding is very difficult/unlikely to work because video codecs are very hard to work with in this way (you'd have to have two sources encoded with the same codec, the same encoding settings, you have to slice things at a clean GOP boundary in both sources, etc), so most commonly hybrid remuxes refer to the Dolby Vision layer.
Source: I happen to be involved in this community.
I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconci soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.
There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.
It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.
And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.
Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0]
It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from the show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
> It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
And on top of all that, sales were not what they hoped, and with that we lost any chance of an official remaster of DS9 or Voyager, since the same work would have to be done as for TNG.
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
It's funny too, how they all pat themselves on the backs at the awards ceremonies and talk about the artistry and vision, but they clearly don't give a shit about it.
That isn't really true. It's different people involved - the artists really do care about the art, but they are joined at the hip to business people who don't care at all and just want to make more money.
>It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
One thing to note, is that the library of congress has the power to create the exceptions to the DMCA. The EFF lobbies for expansion of the exact powers the article is advocating for.
https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca-rulemaking
Interesting they chose The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, probably because of the 60th anniversary?
They didn't mention that probably the Mondo release of that film is the 'best' one? Someone else did a good version count of all releases: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/id/136114
Curious what the upcoming DCP release is sourced on
house opened my eyes to this problem. trying to reconstruct a version with the video resolution of the bluray but the original soundtrack of the dvd turned out to be a deep rabbit hole.
One of the more annoying parts of this to me is that, surely, a high quality version of the original must exist somewhere in the archives of the publisher, right? And if not that, surely the original footage must still be there, so one can recreate the edit frame by frame, as was done with TNG?
The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.
It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.
yea it makes me wish for some kind of highly organized underground structured content network where people serious about archiving could share their private collections without being accused of piracy - I've sunk some thought towards one here: https://github.com/gfody/p2p/blob/main/essays/roots-network....
considering how the frontier labs have become the ultimate pirates and gotten away with it I wonder if "the people" would be able to do the same
I hate the way film and music pirates gatekeep everything. There are private trackers for games and software but they don't try to keep any content exclusive, you get faster downloads without random bad quality uploads and malware cluttering the site in exchange for keeping a good ratio.
It depends on what you care about. The Kino Lorber has good color choices, but far too much contrast: dark areas (including the characters) are pitch black; and you can't see the clouds in the skies.
You're right, now that you mention it. I want a version that combines the Arrow contrast with the Lorber colours. How strange that they still didn't get it right.
Hm, Dark Knight is a top one. Interstellar was amazing until the end with the black hole unraveling the plot, but I blocked that out and only remembered the rest until I rewatched recently. Dunkirk was good but kinda slow plot-wise. What I'm getting is his films are exceptional in a lot of ways like audio/visual but don't necessarily have good plots, which idk if that's even his fault. Those didn't have jumpy timelines, though.
Interstellar's plot is about messing with universe time, but the movie isn't jumping around points in story time. There's just the astronaut and Earth storylines with a little crossover, and each mostly moves forwards only.
It's been too long since I watched Inception, just for some reason only remember the first half of the movie being good. I was in middle school at the time, so... I'll rewatch it.
There's a lot of problems, but the main one is that it just is a pile of arbitrary rules that all the characters just constantly explain to one another.
Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.
There are a lot of movies where the world-building is better than the actual plot. Harry Potter 1 for example. Or TV shows where the pilot and first few episodes have actual plot before it becomes filler.
maybe you shouldn't be making comments on movies.
it's like talking about war and peace and you are like who is tolstoy. maybe just keep your mouth shut
> The movie is bad cause nobody can tell what is going on, or they can but it's a chore without reward. "3 weeks earlier" kind of crap every 30 seconds in the movie. Even the big plot twist is, "this scene with Einstein that you thought happened early in the timeline actually happened at the end, wow." But maybe it can be fixed.
This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.
I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.
My working theory to this point is that he made the movies he had to make then, as he got increasingly successful, he gradually transitioned (back?) to making movies he wanted to make. Which, as it turns out, I'm less enamored with then his post-big break efforts. Oh well.
Back in 1987, my parents had purchased a 4-head VHS recorder, and I rented another device from Video Library, and I set my mind to the monumental task of editing the entire run of Married… with Children into a single tape containing only scenes with Kelly [Christina Applegate] and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams
You jest but I know someone made a copy of all “The Hobbit” films spliced together, but removed all the made up portions. And removed all the Legolas bits, since he wasn’t even in the book. I think the total run time was something like 4 hours 15 minutes.
When it was first announced that Peter Jackson's film of The Hobbit was going to be split into two parts, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense. There's a LOT of material in that short book, because of how sparse Tolkien was being with description. Makes sense that Jackson would have trouble fitting it into a single 2.5-hour movie."
When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."
My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).
Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.
So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.
P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.
Having played the video game, yeah that's how the level went, and it kinda sucked.[1] It's a looping circular river (physics be damned), and I recall having to do many loops before I got 100%, since moving targets are hard to hit with a gamepad.
I highly suspect someone has already made a fan edit of Oppenheimer like you've described. I searched for a few moments and found 3 already and one already describes re-cutting it in chronological order, among many other changes. Always surprises me how much effort and passion people put into fan edits. It's a facinating scene in itself with how many edits exist out there.
I wondered this and then checked and saw they're not on Mubi (at least in the UK - I hadn't realised until someone mentioned VPNs that Mubi might have different catalogues internationally, but of course they will...)
I liked The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the post-dub voice of Wallach when he was much older, did not quite fit into the movie anymore; it felt strange compared to his voice when he was younger.
As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).
"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
There was also Luke looking up at the space battle and "Treadwell" the droid, which would have played just before all of the Biggs scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDPZfPe5F-w (a cleaner version is shown in How Star Wars was saved in the edit)
It doesn't affect the specific point in question here, but it's probably best to treat the RocketJump video with caution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=olqVGz6mOVE .
Yeah I knew someone would point out the controversy. Unfortunately the only other version of the clip I could find was some super grainy version, but I hadn't seen that rebuttal. Amazing.
I also remembered that scene and the early Jabba the Hutt scene from the novelisation. And because I knew them from the book, I initially loved it when the Special Editions added them back. Until I realised they don't really work. Well, Biggs does, but Jabba becomes much less terrifying from having Han talk to him like that and even walking over his tail. Jabba being just a feared name works so much better.
Yes!! I remember reading this book at the library as a kid, and for years afterwards I wondered if I had just hallucinated the whole thing.
I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.
Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.
If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!
It's pretty funny, he took something that was very much a product of its time and beloved in large part for that reasons, and slowly turned it into something even hardcore fans want nothing to do with.
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.
Massively profitable afaik, up until the last of the new trilogy which underperformed (still made ~$300mil box office using standard metrics). Andor I agree was the first Star Wars property I'd call genuinely excellent, after 'The Empire Strikes Back', but obviously that's hugely dictated by my personal taste.
On the other hand there are signs of the brand wearing thin in places, Mandalorian vs. Grogu was a critical and commercial flop (assuming the usual 2x budget for marketing, if it was more for marketing then it might have been significantly worse than just breaking even).
The trend is really clear though, and it's not going in the right direction for Disney. Obviously they have the resources to reverse that, but the question is if they have the vision and the will.
Hahah your comment put a mental image in my head of Mando fighting Baby Yoda.
We watched it yesterday at home and it was… a strange movie. It looked like it was shot on the same stage they use for the show, the budget seemed far lower than other Star Wars movies, and the story was confusing and rambling in a way my children had a lot of difficulty following. I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.
The (believable) rumor is that it was originally scripted as ~5 episodes of the show when management said "We looked at our release schedule and yeah, make it a theatrical release". It's ironic, so much of what's going on now is taking movies (Cape Fear for example) and stretching them in 8-10 episode seasons; it's interesting to see someone try and fail at the opposite maneuver.
If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.
Scopes in real life, linked to film industry are interesting even more.
Marc Bernays Randolph, cofounder and first CEO of Netlifx is nephew of Edward Bernays who is nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward developed propaganda in 30s in US, later, after Goebbels did same, renamed to public relations. Nowadays, we have Netflix doing same.
I hated Moana 2 but I didn't know about the context. Thanks for that, that now explains it. It's a pity because I much prefer Moana to Frozen but I have no plans to show my kid Moana 2.
Another part of the story a lot of people don't know is apparently Lucas's cut of the original Star Wars was horrible, so his wife came in and redid everything and that's the version that went to theaters. And she was the editor on the remaining two of the original trilogy as well.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
I know it's a meme at this point, but being an "idea person" is legitimately a thing. But there is also being self-aware enough to recognize what your strengths are and when you should call in reinforcements, as it were, to fill in where there's a need. Seems there's a spectrum where people fall in how readily they will recognize this and Lucas falls more towards the reluctant side perhaps.
On a similar vein, Gene Roddenberry was pretty similar with Star Trek. He had a pretty big universe imagined, got the scaffolding in for it, but all the best works under the name of Star Trek were made by other people. Anything Gene Roddenberry was directly involved in as a script writer (see: many episodes of the original and first two seasons of The Next Generation) are generally the weakest and worst parts of Star Trek.
Yeah, also I think part of that was Gene wanted to portray a more optimistic vision of the future as a principled thing, which I get, but that also made Classic and TNG feel a bit superficial and low stakes a lot of the time. DS9 is personally my favorite series, mostly because of the age I was when it came out, but also because I liked that they shifted it to be a bit less idealistic.
I watched it when it was originally on in the 90's. As the show got more serialized it was like a cliff hanger or huge event every few weeks. Then we got a great 10 episode arc to end the series.
Yeah it's aged phenomenally well, and makes more modern Star Treks so frustratingly awful. The Visitor is arguably one of the best episodes of any Star Trek ever, Past Tense was basically prophetic. And so many of the episodes are extremely insightful on human nature - For the Uniform where good can so easily become evil - In the Pale Moonlight being of a similar nature, and so many more.
One of the things I'm most looking forward to is watching the series with my kids when they're old enough.
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Unrelated but the TNG episode Tapestry also deserves a mention. [1] Wtf happened to media. Writers used to actually understand people, now everything is so trite.
I still think TNG was the best, but DS9 was good too. In hindsight though, it seems like it was good to have someone like Roddenberry doggedly insisting upon his positive vision for the future. The modern Star Trek series, where there's nobody pushing for the utopian vision any more, are kind of depressing and not really in line with the idea that humanity will eventually be able to improve itself and leave behind the pettiness that holds us back today.
Yeah, I think that's fair. IMO DS9 got the balance right because it's a bit more gritty than TNG, accepts more complexity and ambiguity, but still holds up those ideals as something worth striving for even against severe difficulties.
I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.
Yeah same, there was the one that was both "in the past" (taking place before TNG I believe) but thanks to mushroom magic they had instant teleportation and then timey-wimey stuff so it was also a hypermodern show. The melodrama was just grating on me after a while.
Then there was Picard which actually showed some promise but I couldn't find myself caring about the new characters they tried to introduce on top of the layers of nostalgia. I heard it got a soft reboot or new writers for season 3 but I have no idea, I haven't heard anything about it.
Voyager was still good but that was the last show I actually watched on the regular.
Roddenberry specifically wasn't needed, Rick Berman was able to learn from his vision and maintain it. After Roddenberry died, Berman was able to maintain TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise all with the Star Trek ideals that Roddenberry always fought to maintain when he was alive. Even as Deep Space Nine and Enterprise had to seemingly throw the ideals out the window temporarily, with the Dominion and Xindi arcs, just to better demonstrate why they were so badly needed in the first place.
Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.
This is oft-repeated mythology that became popular on reddit; it's part of the campaign of feminist revisionism that's commonplace over there regardless of whether it matches reality or not. They constantly try to argue that it must have been a case of a man getting credit for work a woman did, even when the woman concerned made no such claim or even received appropriate credit.
I think it's justifiable to call out her contribution. She was an excellent editor without Star Wars, her work includes American Graffiti and Taxi Driver. I consider her a part of what makes the original trilogy great but I don't think it diminishes Lucas' contribution.
> I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great.
The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input as there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.
A lot of fanstastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.
One huge addition that she created entirely in the edit is the "ticking clock" during the final battle. Originally there was no count down to the Death Star destroying the base. Imagine how much tension would be lost without that.
Luckily, it seems like they are all being undone for the 50th next year. Most of them, anyway. We'll have to wait to see the release to be sure, but it's a definite improvement. Maybe the definitive version, finally.
I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.
[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]
I have the original trilogy's original version on VHS still, and just recently watched them. I would say they hold up very well and weren't really in need of any post release changes or updates. The effects look great today compared to some other movies that actually came out later, probably because Star Wars used more practical effects vs some early Sci-Fi CGI that ended up not aging as well.
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
> It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004
I don't begrudge any director the freedom to go back and revise their work to more perfectly realize their creative vision. The problem is when they try to erase the original released version of an historically significant film by making it completely unavailable. George had no issue accepting the accolades and billions of dollars from the original trilogy. It's fine to later release his 'perfect vision' but in today's digital media era, there's zero reason or justification to make the originals unavailable. Be proud of what your younger self made and let fans decide which they version they want to watch.
I'm not just being post-hoc selective here. I think original theatrical releases of classics should remain available even in cases like Blade Runner where the OG theatrical release is a widely-hated, critically panned abomination made by a clueless executive producer without the involvement of the director, writer or main star and released over their strong objections. It is objectively awful and by far the worst release of the film - but I still believe even that miserable train wreck should remain available forever (perhaps with appropriate warning labels :-), even if only as a cautionary tale to future clueless executive producers).
Since you brought up Blade Runner (and I agree with all your points, by the way) I'm deeply offended by how the Final Cut decided to add all these wonderful improvements yet Ridley Scott agreed to completely mess up the color grading. What's up with the new greenish tint? Did he think it would make Blade Runner look more modern or what?
Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).
I've heard that Ridley was busy shooting another film when the Final Cut was in production so he wasn't that involved personally. Most of the improvements were pre-approved in bullet point form, meaning the editor probably did much of what we both like about it in advance and Ridley was there in person only to supervise the color grade and to sign-off on changes.
Personally, when it comes to revisiting revered classics many years later, I think directors (even good ones) should focus on correcting obvious technical errors like matte lines in effects, muffled audio or the proverbial boom mike at the edge of a shot. They need to resist the urge to make non-technical stylistic changes like color grading or noise reduction (looking at you James Cameron). Things like adding back cut shots or recutting scenes to change pacing need to be carefully considered and only done when the original cut was obviously in error or not what the director intended at the time - perhaps due to not having time/budget to reshoot, overdub or being overruled by the studio or producer.
When a film has become a classic, and is of historic importance, it should be respected as an artifact of its time and a snapshot of a director's abilities, style and tastes at that point in their development. They should be thankful for the opportunity and stick to making it what their original intent was then, not what they'd do if they made it now. Otherwise, they're quickly on a slippery slope toward a strange stylistic hybrid between then and now.
James Cameron's Aliens "Directors Cut" is an example of a mixed bag. Fixing the VFX matte lines is a definite plus but the excessive noise reduction sucks all the texture out of the image. Adding back the lengthy sequence at the beginning of the film showing Newt and her family encountering the Aliens on the mining colony removes much of the suspense and mystery, making the film worse IMHO. Cameron cut that scene after test screenings for good reason which makes the addition feel like it was motivated by the studio's desire to market the Director's Cut with "X Minutes of New Footage!".
The same is true of the entire ~20 min French colonist digression in the Apocalypse Now Director's Cut. It's mildly interesting from an historical point of view but it brings the entire movie to a grinding WTF halt. It's a clear example of putting a mistake back into a film that should never have been in the script in the first place. The 'Newt's Family' scene in Aliens is just unnecessary but it was probably hard to know that until seeing a rough cut.
This opinion rubs me the wrong way. I don't think you meant it like this, but it really feels like when someone creates something, they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.
Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.
Society grants you the right to enforce what we call intellectual property. Enforcing that concept is rather new, and some of humanities biggest cultural works predate it.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
I don't see why it matters to the argument if the original creator is alive.
I also don't believe the creator has a special obligation to make things available. But I generally agree with the GP, once something is released and widely popular, society now shares some ownership. There should be some way to access it, at least as part of the historical record.
It's not the creator's responsibility to facilitate that, but they also shouldn't be able to hinder it.
Authors, painters, musicians (and at some points in my life I've considered myself among them) can have a lot of intent in creating something, and a lot of intent later to alter something, but at no point do I believe an artist owns their art once released/sold, outside of IP laws. What I mean is George Lucas has the legal right to only release the shitty remastered versions, but he certainly can't dictate they're better.
The whole concept of "death of the author" is about how regardless how a writer meant something to be interpreted, if another interpretation gets more traction, and is more coherent, it's hard to argue it's wrong.
I’m not implying that Lucas gets to decide which cut is best, just that it’s his right to decide what “Star Wars” actually refers to.
What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.
Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.
IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.
I get your point, but also on the other hand, art is subjective, and people subjectively appreciate older / imperfect versions of things. Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made. But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back - it gets added artificially to modern films, added as filters to video games, and video encoding has special features to support it without affecting compression negatively too much.
Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587
But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing.
At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.
I could not agree more emphatically with your points on CRTs, OLEDs, etc. So permit me to quibble on this one statement :-)
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during processing the film. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for texture, gamma response, color sensitivity
I could not agree more emphatically with your points on CRTs, OLEDs, etc. So permit me to quibble on this one statement :-)
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during processing the film. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for their unique texture, gamma curve, color sensitivity, etc as an expressive choice. It's no different than a painter intentionally using different canvas textures, brush bristles and pigment viscosity as part of their expressive palatte. In this form, the unique textures of different film stocks are often referred to as 'image structure' (a less pejorative term than 'grain' which is often construed negatively).
> But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back
Artists hate any limitations on their vision, whether technical, financial or societal. They want maximum expressive freedom yet also grudingly concede pushing against limitations often elevates their work to new heights. When film grain was a limitation they struggled against, they hated it. When grain is an artistic element giving their image texture, they want in their toolbox.
To be clear, not all chemical, optical or technical limitations from the past are missed. No VFX artists are pining for the black matte outlines from misregistered optical printing or generational mismatch in multi-pass composites. :-) It's whether it's an artistically useful expressive tool. Interestingly, in the late B&W era as optics, lighting instruments and film sensitivity improved, there was a trend among cinematographers to banish depth of field forever as an unfortunate historical limitation of the past. Of course, that was obviously a brief over-reaction to finally tasting freedom from a long-resented shackle and DoF (or the lack of it) is an invaluable compositional tool in the hands of a master (https://creativecow.net/depth-of-field-gregg-toland-citizen-...).
I suspect we could share several enjoyable beers discussing the edge cases; the historical limitations: which of them can arguably have some expressive merit and which have no real redeeming qualities outside retro callbacks and nostalgia (anamophic lens flares being a good candidate: https://theasc.com/article/star-trek-into-darkness/).
I see why people think this, but it is also anti-social. Once you've introduced art to the public market, two things happen:
- people form a relationship with and an emotional response to the art
- they give you money for the art
Now, the latter gets into questions like Sony or Steam removing games or films which people have previously purchased. A consumer rights question. People tend to feel they have been treated like a sucker when the publisher does this.
The former you are effectively rescinding the emotional relationship with the art. A much more complicated question. This can certainly be pathological - see kpop and the idol industry. But I don't think it's unfair to say that insisting that the art relationship should be totally unilateral and you owe the audience nothing, is going to anger the audience.
Since at least 1100 CE, even artists have disagreed with you. "The Moving Hand writes, and having written, moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall remove half a line of it."
You don't own art that has been released to the public, anymore than you own a car or pizza that you sold.
> they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
I was expressing a wish or, perhaps an ideal, not an obligation. I don't think there's any implied ethical, moral or legal duty on a creator to do what their patrons or fans want. As an amatuer filmmaker who's also worked in the industry creating technology for cinematic storytelling, I'm as pro-creator as can be.
And, full-disclosure, my feelings about Star Wars are 'complicated'. In 1977 I'd just become a teenager when I saw Star Wars at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It not only rocked my world, it made me want to be a filmmaker and changed the course of my life. Turns out I was better at software than filmmaking. Fortunately, as film became digital, my interests collided :-).
Decades later my software was used extensively to make several Star Wars films including hundreds of shots in Phantom Menace. I was at the ranch many times during production and was back at the Chinese theater for the premiere of TPM - almost exactly 22 years to the day after my life was changed in that theater. Prior to the premiere I'd only seen storyboards and individual shots so, going in, my expectations were as sky-high as any fan. But, like many hardcore fans, I felt let down by Phantom Menace. Did George owe fans the film they wanted him to make? Nope, not at all. He made the film he wanted to make. Even though I was disappointed by TPM, it hasn't changed how much I respect George. He's still a remarkable filmmaker.
Wait until you see how often Tolkien edited The Lord of the Rings. Most of it was name and print corrections, but still. You would think you’d fix it all after one or two reprints.
> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
As someone who is also into <thing> but maybe not other <thing>, it's really great to sometimes delve into the deep world of <thing> for an hour or so to broaden ones perspective and get a general feel for what other people choose to spend their consciousness budget on.
Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.
This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.
More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels (and newsletters) in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.
Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.
Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.
In other words: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" [1]
"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."
I have had a lot of things just kind of _happen_ by virtue of writing blogs and publishing software. These things all have very strange second lives that exist beyond your own initial conception of them that is consistently surprising.
I was watching lawrence of arabia recently, and was thinking about similar stuff.
There's a few scenes (scenes around the: "my name is for my friends" and the echoey canyon in particular) where lawrence looks almost like a photorealistic game character.
I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play.
- Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle.
- Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail
I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.
If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.
one of my projects on the backlog is to figure out how to combine the dvd copies and the bluray copies of the x-files so that I can have 4:3 episode in hd. especially in the first couple of seasons they crop a lot of stuff to fit it into widescreen, I'm waiting until AI gets good enough that I can using the dvd quality original fill in and upscale the cropped part of the hd episodes.
I will say this again, and again, and again: thanks to piracy, I got to watch many amazing movies, especially those that came out before the 2000s. Eventually I bought lots of DVDs and Blu-Rays, CDs( heck I even rediscovered my music in taste).
I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 88.8 ms ] threadVery smooth way of using your torrenting skills on your CV.
I'm not one of those people. :D But I do know one; he's a professional librarian.
So, I do it a bit.
I think this ethos can be applied in many ways and with different media; preservationism is a high value objective. The future needs it, kinda.
That's cool.
> The future needs it, kinda.
Agreed but we seem to be in the minority seeing that most people nowadays seem to be speed running to make Asimov's Foundation into a documentary.
On the other side, when you consider objective metrics, I don't think humanity ever spent so much effort and resources into preserving the past as today. Archaeology was basically invented less than 250 years ago, and now it's everywhere and continuously expanding. A lot of places are now not even allowed to change, museums are plentiful and overflowing, and the internet created a completely new world of human creation that we are increasingly trying to preserve (IA etc).
It's a mixed picture.
There's an unfathomable number of games that were released on the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and most famously DOS that were made by one or two people, self-published, and have now completely fallen into obscurity to a point where it's not 100% clear who owns the copyright and who to give money even if you wanted to, which has led to the "probably-illegal-but-not-really-enforced" term of "Abandonware".
I honestly kind of think that Abandonware should be codified into law in the same way that trademarks are; if you're not actively giving me a legitimate way to buy your game then I don't think it should be illegal for me to get it illegitimately.
>unfathomable number of games that were released
One of the problems is that there are too many and hard to find curate to separate the good from the meh.
Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.
If you're reading this Fred, I loved Blast Doors and love it still. https://archive.org/details/BLASTSE2_ZIP
It's not ideal but it's better than losing it.
Mostly unrelated but if you are looking for this "effervescence" in modern times, don't hesitate to take a look at Pico8 games and Ich.io.
On Pico 8, everything is free (except the one time pico 8 licence).
On Itch.io I bought a ridiculous 400 games pack for a few dollars a few years back.
You have to dig a little but I found more gems in both those libraries than I expected.
Ruffle is getting good enough where I think we might be properly archive all the Flash stuff.
[1] https://z0r.de/7194
Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?
> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.
Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).
The original game might be stopping people. It's not like games have a good track record of continuing to work for decades. DRM of all kinds poses a huge problem in this regard, but so does garden variety technological change. The GOG preservation team has quite a few videos about deeply technical work they needed to do to make e.g. Prince of Persia run properly on modern PCs. Sure I can just pirate a copy for PS2 and run it with PCSX2, but thats “piracy" (even though I still have a working original disc!).
So, no: there's a lot stopping people, especially copyright law, from keeping around working copies of their games.
> copyright expires
Not in your lifetime. 70 years after death if the author brings us out into centuries. Books written 60 years before my kids were born won't be out if copyright until they are in their 40s, for example.
It really took away from the game experience
I ended up scratching out my original CD copy of the game, installing version 1.0 of the game. It had all the music and better visuals
The patches removed visual features for performance, not GoG's fault here, not sure why GoG hosts an inferior version, its quite a downgrade. The music removal I do not understand.
(This all was particually obvious in an early mission, where you have to beat up some parked cars with baseball bats, the patched version show minimal dents and zero scratches, and the radio sitting in the corner make no sound. This completely changes in the V1.0 copy, so much more atmosphere)
I mean, it's obvious: copyright seeks to create a mechanism to compensate creators by creating scarcity. They succeeded.
It turns out archiving those creations effectively is in direct tension with that scarcity. So we made a system to incentivizes creation, and then destruction of the creation. This is visible with the "copyright cliff" in books, but also the incredible difficulty of legally keeping computer programs running over the decades. Copyright's restrictions on derivative works, coupled with the insanely long copyright term, create a sort of digital wasteland, with only those willing to go underground having great collections of old programs.
Which people? In the case of abandonware, the original software is often not in the hands of the copyright holder anymore, due to neglect or lack of interest. Sometimes all or most relevant physical copies have become damaged. All that remains is a (cracked) file download in an abandonware website. Thanks to the abandonware community it gets preserved.
Besides, a piece of software history only serves its purpose if you can experience it. With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it? You cannot always wait it out, you might die first due to how long copyright lasts. Or is this nebulous concept of copyright more important than human experience?
>With no way of legally experiencing it (you cannot buy it) how do you propose to experience it?
You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
No, that's the point. Only "pirates" kept copies. Copyright owners didn't care, only got involved on the legal side of things. When copies became "legal" again, they were often cracked copies.
I know you keep ignoring this, but that's just because you're unfamiliar with how the abandonware community worked.
> You don't need to be able to experience it. There are many things in life that I can't experience and that's okay.
Games are not static works of art. A game needs to be played in order to be preserved. If you were familiar with the abandonware community you'd know this was their mission. Just because you don't care about this doesn't mean it's not important.
All your comments so far boil down to: "I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights." Which is a you rather than us kind of problem.
So why can't those "pirates" keep legal copies instead of an illegal one.
>A game needs to be played in order to be preserved
Does a bottle of wine need to be drunk in order to be preserved, or does storing it in a wine cellar preserve it. The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.
>I don't care about old game preservation, and so I don't see the problem with copyrights.
My opinion boils down to:
* Preservation does not justify piracy
* Preservation is often used as a euphemism for piracy
You're being wilfully obtuse if this is your genuine opinion about video games. Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad.
https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos
He intentionally samples less than 5 seconds iirc, and they still ding him, take all profits from the video, which took many many hours to create, and he cannot afford a lawsuit. It's absolutely ridiculous.
[1] https://youtu.be/VvFGumd_esg?&t=685
Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.
The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.
> What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?
Because the DMCA and copyright in general proved to be a massive hindrance in actually having Youtube be workable, so they made their own system which functionally bypasses it, by giving in to the corps. The corps can either misuse the DMCA and make life hell for Youtube, or they can get in on the system with Youtube and make some cash on the side. There is no middle ground where the DMCA isn't misused, Youtube gets to exist and the corps don't get paid.
On top of the shenanigans we have seen recently about revoking paid licenses to watch movies.
I guess I do understand it from the business perspective - I never buy a physical release myself - but ... 20 years later, it will be impossible to get these games.
It's worth doing the 30 days trial. I sign up for a month or two whenever I feel like the library has at least 10 films I'd want to watch.
Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?
That’s not what “remux” means. A remux is the original data from, for instance, a Blu-ray disc, transferred into a new container without re-encoding. What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
There is a community insofar as there is a relatively small group of people who sink their time into producing high quality remuxes, and this group talks to each other (on IRC and elsewhere).
>GP is correct that files with purely additive changes (like additional audio tracks) to remuxes are called hybrid remuxes.
As I corrected on a child comment to the GP, this is not correct. It is not convention either. A hybrid remux has a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources. Simply combining tracks from different sources isn't a hybrid remux, it's just baseline good practice.
Agree once you're compensating for drift by scaling the audio track you've pushed yourself out of remux territory, but again these aren't hard and fast rules (evidenced by the disagreement over terminology).
These things are normally detailed in release notes. People write pretty detailed notes laying out exactly what they did.
This explicitly breaks the rules of multiple communities I participate in. All streams must be untouched in a remux, and a hybrid remux is a release with untouched streams from multiple sources (there are also hybrids which are not remuxes).
What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
Probably. Not all places allow hybrid remuxes.
I promise you that I have these definitions correct as they are most commonly used, since I am actually involved in this space.
The word "Hybrid" has been used in the way you describe, most notably by FRaMeSTOR, but I would say that everyone else has coalesced on what I described and would call my definition the standard one. It's also how the "Hybrid" edition label is used on PTP.
>What even is "a stream which is a hybrid of two or more sources?" Cutting between or combining multiple audio or video streams is simply editing. You're describing a fanedit.
No I'm not. I stand by what I said. As an example you can look at Bridge.to.Terabithia.2007.Hybrid.1080p.BluRay.REMUX.AVC.TrueHD.5.1-BLURANiUM.mkv For the sake of those reading, I will copy from the release notes:
>GER has hardcoded translated movie title which is not present in other transfers so hybrid was needed to restore the original picture. Hybrid was done with USA disc since audio from same disc was used. GER video was retimed to 23.976 FPS, trimmed on valid IDR frames and merged with MKVToolnix.
In this case, two Blu-ray video streams were spliced together.
>What the author is referring to would be called a “hybrid remux”.
No. While the "hybrid" term has been used this way, the standard definition now is for remuxes where a single stream has been created by stitching together streams from two different sources. For example, a video from source A has generally better picture quality, but has some glitch or issue that requires patching in a segment from source B to create a hybrid video stream. Doing this for the main video without re-encoding is very difficult/unlikely to work because video codecs are very hard to work with in this way (you'd have to have two sources encoded with the same codec, the same encoding settings, you have to slice things at a clean GOP boundary in both sources, etc), so most commonly hybrid remuxes refer to the Dolby Vision layer.
Source: I happen to be involved in this community.
I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.
Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconci soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from the show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...
And I'm pretty sure the ones that got released were based on pirates when they were released.
The substitute is a subpar filler compared to the original.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Don’t get your hopes up. That release is very special. It happened at just the right time: discs were still selling and streaming had not yet taken over.
There is simply not sufficient market for such restorations any longer. They probably didn’t make back the cost of the remaster.
Star Trek: TNG was a bit of a special case though, because it had to be re-cut and new digital special effects created and edited into scenes.
I think this perspective holds more true for things that were broadcast in HD but only got commercial DVD releases. That's a disappointing lapse in high quality availability where HD content was distributed, just not in a persistent form for home use. In those cases the best quality available is an HD TV or satellite recording which might not have been preserved even in online media sharing communities.
But we have this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."
Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
https://youtu.be/eCIXkBEoqeM?si=Ts0enOPy3z9fVBg6
(Link is just to a review of it, you need to torrent it if u want to watch it (its 41GB lol))
They didn't mention that probably the Mondo release of that film is the 'best' one? Someone else did a good version count of all releases: https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/id/136114
Curious what the upcoming DCP release is sourced on
GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_20140330_DLA_IOP_OV
GoodBadUgly_FTR_S-235_EN-XX_10_4K_PRKC_20160613_MPS_IOP_VF
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2181751/dvds-with-t...
The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.
It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.
considering how the frontier labs have become the ultimate pirates and gotten away with it I wonder if "the people" would be able to do the same
You could just as well say that political protest is not a thing, that it’s just vandals looking for reasons to break stuff.
Whether a 90GB file will still have anyone seeding it on a small or public tracker at the point you want to download it is another question of course.
I've thought about making an Oppenheimer where the damn ordering of the scenes is fixed and the cringe ones deleted
But his weird audio mixes make me nuts. So fix those too, please.
I personally liked Oppenheimer fine as it was (except the crappy explosion), but I can see why others might not.
I also enjoyed that old Paul Newman, John Cusack, etc one that focused less on Oppenheimer. Fat Man and Little Boy.
Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.
This honestly reads like you don't watch a lot of movies, which is fine! The audio was really bad, which makes it nearly impossible to follow without subtitles. But with subtitles, this film is very middle of the road in terms of timeline ambiguity. I also don't think an ambiguous timeline is bad, if it recontextualizes a scene.
I mean in that Einstein scene, they are cutting footage of RDJ telling Oppenheimer he's a patriot who ran the Manhattan project with footage of him as a bumbling student people made fun of. That was definitely not a "big plot twist," they are explicitly saying it was after the war, even if it was momentarily confusing because so much is going on. I thought it was a pretty rewarding film to pay attention to.
When I heard, later, that the film was going to be a three parter instead, I thought "Uh oh. There's plenty of material for two films, but three? Filler City, here we come."
My wife and I saw the movies in the cinema, and while we enjoyed them overall, I found that I was right about the filler. I was particularly annoyed by the barrels-down-the-river scene, where the film turned what should have been a moment of quiet drama into a sort of rails shooter on the screen. That scene threw me out of my immersion; the whole time, I was thinking "The only reason for this scene to exist is to be made into a video-game level." As a video game level, it would kind of work: you're in the barrels floating downstream, and you have to shoot enough orcs with the bow you somehow have (or flatten them with your barrel that has been inexplicably launched out of the water) to stop them from killing your friends. (Or perhaps the video game level would make more sense if you play as the elf on the shore, killing the orc archers before they can shoot the fish^H^H^H^H dwarves in a barrel).
Regardless of how that scene would work as a video game, the problem with it is that while watching it, I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, instead of on the edge of my seat with excitement. That is NOT what the audience should be experiencing, and it means that someone — director, producer, screenwriter, editor, who knows — made some very poor choices in putting that scene on-screen.
So yes, I'm not at all surprised that a fan edit of The Hobbit which removed all the filler would be wildly popular. In my case, I would rather buy a 4.5 hour version of the film than the officially-released version. If only that version was for sale legally.
P.S. Not all the filler material in the Hobbit film trilogy was bad. Some of the scenes that weren't technically in the original book, such as Gandalf and Galadriel discussing the threat of The Necromancer, were a positive addition and helped link the Hobbit film to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If Jackson had stopped there it would have been fine. I have never watched the fan-made "Tolkien Edit" recut version of the Hobbit film(s) so I don't know if that scene was included or not — but in my opinion, that one would fit into a "Tolkien Edit" even if it wasn't technically part of the original book.
[1]: https://youtu.be/HLReeDFGA7E?t=975s
(Why? Why do companies do that??)
Leone is one the greatest directors of all time. I've been nagging my sons to watch this trilogy for years.
Just dropping my referral code in case anyone wants a Mubi trial btw: https://mubi.com/en/t/web/global/fpiivi3
As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).
It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars.
- there was a children's book (that my family had) that accompanied the movie
- there is a scene in the book where Biggs comes back to talk to Luke
- this didn't make any sense to me as a child b/c that scene isn't in the movie
- I realized years later that they cut the scene but AFTER the book was printed.
The scene in question is here btw: https://youtu.be/O7J_IZ9agRI?t=318
I think it's a really important scene, and I'm sad that it was cut from the movie.
Side note: the (extremely well-done) Star Wars Radio Drama [0] included a great many expanded scenes on Tattoine (with quite a bit of expansoin on Tosche Station), and I think those scenes (which include the aforementioned scene with Biggs) really add to the richness and flavor of the setting.
If you're a fan of Star Wars and haven't yet listened to the radio drama, I highly recommend it!
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-29uKdckL4
Very little was really lost IMO if you look at those movies with an eye free of nostalgia, but I'm sure many MANY people would disagree with that.
I think the main series has turned to trash, but isn’t it still commercially successful? I personally adored Andor, but even my parents couldn’t sit through the first couple episodes because they’re slow moving.
On the other hand there are signs of the brand wearing thin in places, Mandalorian vs. Grogu was a critical and commercial flop (assuming the usual 2x budget for marketing, if it was more for marketing then it might have been significantly worse than just breaking even).
The trend is really clear though, and it's not going in the right direction for Disney. Obviously they have the resources to reverse that, but the question is if they have the vision and the will.
We watched it yesterday at home and it was… a strange movie. It looked like it was shot on the same stage they use for the show, the budget seemed far lower than other Star Wars movies, and the story was confusing and rambling in a way my children had a lot of difficulty following. I’m glad I didn’t see it in theaters.
If you haven't seen Moana 2... well, don't watch it. And I say this as a parent who watched Moana and loved it. But if you did watch Moana 2 and thought the plot didn't make any sense, it's because they planned a whole TV show then turned it into a movie at the last minute. This resulted in delightful moments like a villain that comes out of nowhere, and in the course of her intro song has a heel-face turn without any explanation, then disappears out of the movie forever.
Marc Bernays Randolph, cofounder and first CEO of Netlifx is nephew of Edward Bernays who is nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward developed propaganda in 30s in US, later, after Goebbels did same, renamed to public relations. Nowadays, we have Netflix doing same.
I think it's pretty clear to everyone now that when Lucas is flying solo his final output is... not great. He obviously imagined a universe a lot of people find compelling, but wasn't always the best person to realize the vision of that universe.
- Commander Worf, Take Me Out to the Holosuite (7x4)
One of the things I'm most looking forward to is watching the series with my kids when they're old enough.
---
Unrelated but the TNG episode Tapestry also deserves a mention. [1] Wtf happened to media. Writers used to actually understand people, now everything is so trite.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGvUDvZ7KyU
I'm sad to say the newest Trek shows have just missed me.
Then there was Picard which actually showed some promise but I couldn't find myself caring about the new characters they tried to introduce on top of the layers of nostalgia. I heard it got a soft reboot or new writers for season 3 but I have no idea, I haven't heard anything about it.
Voyager was still good but that was the last show I actually watched on the regular.
Unfortunately, we don't have a Rick Berman, or anyone else that maintains the same ideals, at the helm anymore.
The evidence is pretty compelling that George had a lot of great ideas as well as some not-so-great ideas and his own ability to distinguish between the two was... less than ideal. Thus his best work was from those times he collaborated closely with talented people who had significant input as there was a strong, empowered curator. Positive examples include the great results on Star Wars, the fact that Empire is so good and his work on Raiders with Spielberg. A clear negative example is Phantom Menace where George was in absolute control.
A lot of fanstastically talented creators simply shouldn't have unchecked 'final cut' over their own output. It's really nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly, is more common than not.
https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-woman-who-saved-star...
I was talking to Bob Gale once about this topic and he said that him and Zemeckis had put a veto clause in their contract when they sold BTTF to Universal in the 90s giving them the power over any later fuckery with the releases, while they are alive. This was during the height of the 3D TV craze and he said Universal had asked for permission to do a 2D->3D conversion of BTTF and both Bobs had refused. So there's one franchise at least that won't get dicked with in the near future.
[I'm not totally against 2D->3D conversions if done right. The Titanic conversion looks like it was filmed 3D-native, beautifully done. The Star Wars: Episode 1 conversion is essentially unwatchable and killed the whole project.]
The changes are mostly just window dressings around the original footage, like extra CGI in transition scenes. They don't really change much of the core movie experience. It does end up causing some funny side effects though. Like when the main characters move from one place to another you'll see a splashy dinosaur like creature or fancy robot, but once they actually arrive in the scene the background falls back to the original with a lot less of that added CGI action.
I don't begrudge any director the freedom to go back and revise their work to more perfectly realize their creative vision. The problem is when they try to erase the original released version of an historically significant film by making it completely unavailable. George had no issue accepting the accolades and billions of dollars from the original trilogy. It's fine to later release his 'perfect vision' but in today's digital media era, there's zero reason or justification to make the originals unavailable. Be proud of what your younger self made and let fans decide which they version they want to watch.
I'm not just being post-hoc selective here. I think original theatrical releases of classics should remain available even in cases like Blade Runner where the OG theatrical release is a widely-hated, critically panned abomination made by a clueless executive producer without the involvement of the director, writer or main star and released over their strong objections. It is objectively awful and by far the worst release of the film - but I still believe even that miserable train wreck should remain available forever (perhaps with appropriate warning labels :-), even if only as a cautionary tale to future clueless executive producers).
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first
Fortunately, we can still watch the Director's Cut. It's a shame, too, because the Final Cut has a lot of improvements otherwise (e.g. fixing Zhora's face is a major one).
Personally, when it comes to revisiting revered classics many years later, I think directors (even good ones) should focus on correcting obvious technical errors like matte lines in effects, muffled audio or the proverbial boom mike at the edge of a shot. They need to resist the urge to make non-technical stylistic changes like color grading or noise reduction (looking at you James Cameron). Things like adding back cut shots or recutting scenes to change pacing need to be carefully considered and only done when the original cut was obviously in error or not what the director intended at the time - perhaps due to not having time/budget to reshoot, overdub or being overruled by the studio or producer.
When a film has become a classic, and is of historic importance, it should be respected as an artifact of its time and a snapshot of a director's abilities, style and tastes at that point in their development. They should be thankful for the opportunity and stick to making it what their original intent was then, not what they'd do if they made it now. Otherwise, they're quickly on a slippery slope toward a strange stylistic hybrid between then and now.
James Cameron's Aliens "Directors Cut" is an example of a mixed bag. Fixing the VFX matte lines is a definite plus but the excessive noise reduction sucks all the texture out of the image. Adding back the lengthy sequence at the beginning of the film showing Newt and her family encountering the Aliens on the mining colony removes much of the suspense and mystery, making the film worse IMHO. Cameron cut that scene after test screenings for good reason which makes the addition feel like it was motivated by the studio's desire to market the Director's Cut with "X Minutes of New Footage!".
The same is true of the entire ~20 min French colonist digression in the Apocalypse Now Director's Cut. It's mildly interesting from an historical point of view but it brings the entire movie to a grinding WTF halt. It's a clear example of putting a mistake back into a film that should never have been in the script in the first place. The 'Newt's Family' scene in Aliens is just unnecessary but it was probably hard to know that until seeing a rough cut.
I think Aliens has a couple of additions that do make sense, Ripley being told of her daughter and the scene with the miniguns, but that's about it.
Agreed about the rest, you're basically reading my mind about how I feel about movies.
https://fanedit.org/what-the-final-cut-shouldve-been/
https://archive.org/download/blade-runner-the-penultimate-cu...
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing to support this idea. If I make something, I can change it however I want, as many times as I want, and throw away old copies - even if you really really liked those old copies. It's my art, not yours.
Maybe one could make the argument that George Lucas is not the only artist here, and I'd agree with that, but to imply that society is owed something that someone created of their own volition, simply because society happens to like it, feels wrong. He can change it however he wants until the day he dies, as far as I'm concerned.
After that day, I think the argument changes.
The timespan for which we grant a creator the sole right to decide about his work is arbitrary and, last but not least, almost all of our cultural works are derivative in nature, so what actually is our own work is equally arbitrary defined.
In the existing framework he can do what he did, but the current one is not the only possible.
It's not the creator's responsibility to facilitate that, but they also shouldn't be able to hinder it.
I think this is where most opinions differ.
Authors, painters, musicians (and at some points in my life I've considered myself among them) can have a lot of intent in creating something, and a lot of intent later to alter something, but at no point do I believe an artist owns their art once released/sold, outside of IP laws. What I mean is George Lucas has the legal right to only release the shitty remastered versions, but he certainly can't dictate they're better.
The whole concept of "death of the author" is about how regardless how a writer meant something to be interpreted, if another interpretation gets more traction, and is more coherent, it's hard to argue it's wrong.
What the movie means, how it affects people, how it reflects on the author, etc. are all out of his control, but the public doesn’t get to argue with him on what it actually IS.
Once the author dies, all bets are off because things must continue to change to remain accessible to others. Translations, data format changes, viewing methods, etc. all can require adaptations. Since we can no longer ask the author their opinion, we take the works as a whole. No future discussion of SW would be complete without taking time to reference the changes it underwent over time. If nothing else, it adds necessary context to understand the media.
IMO it’s also kind of a blessing. It gives us multiple angles to consider a work from when squeezing more meaning out of it 100 years down the road.
Or take video games, particularly 2d / pixelart ones - they were built for CRT displays and relatively low resolutions. They can remake them now with multiples of the original resolution and fidelity, but for many people it loses some of it. Some art doesn't translate at all - take this digitized artwork from Castlevania, which was digitized specifically for display on CRT displays but which loses all charm (e.g. the eyes reduced to a single pixel) when rendered somewhere else: https://x.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587
But this probably applies to film as well; if a film was made for a 35mm projector from the 70's, it won't look good or anywhere near that "experience" on a modern day 4K OLED display without editing.
At the end of the day I think the viewer should be given options and choices. And for a good while it looked like they would - with DVD and blu-ray offering options like different audio tracks, camera angles, and different versions of the same film in one package. But that never materialized because I suppose it's only a wish from purists. And at that point they're competing with piracy and internet hobbyists like the article.
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during processing the film. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for texture, gamma response, color sensitivity
> Consider film grain - it's an artifact, an unintentional or unwanted side-effect of how films used to be made.
I don't think it's quite so binary. Depending on the context and intent, film grain can be an undesirable artifact of limited celluloid chemistry, optics and available light. But it can also be an expressive aspect of the artistic medium no different than depth of field, focal length, color timing, grading, etc.
There are certainly examples of low light scenes where it's clear the filmmaker reached the limits of then-available optics and chemistry and they were forced into compromises such using higher-speed film and/or 'pushing' the chemistry during processing the film. These can increase grain and the result is often shadow detail being lost in the noise floor. I agree that's always bad.
But there are also wonderful examples where directors and DPs very intentionally selected film stocks for their unique texture, gamma curve, color sensitivity, etc as an expressive choice. It's no different than a painter intentionally using different canvas textures, brush bristles and pigment viscosity as part of their expressive palatte. In this form, the unique textures of different film stocks are often referred to as 'image structure' (a less pejorative term than 'grain' which is often construed negatively).
> But because it was a part of a production, people wanted it back
Artists hate any limitations on their vision, whether technical, financial or societal. They want maximum expressive freedom yet also grudingly concede pushing against limitations often elevates their work to new heights. When film grain was a limitation they struggled against, they hated it. When grain is an artistic element giving their image texture, they want in their toolbox.
To be clear, not all chemical, optical or technical limitations from the past are missed. No VFX artists are pining for the black matte outlines from misregistered optical printing or generational mismatch in multi-pass composites. :-) It's whether it's an artistically useful expressive tool. Interestingly, in the late B&W era as optics, lighting instruments and film sensitivity improved, there was a trend among cinematographers to banish depth of field forever as an unfortunate historical limitation of the past. Of course, that was obviously a brief over-reaction to finally tasting freedom from a long-resented shackle and DoF (or the lack of it) is an invaluable compositional tool in the hands of a master (https://creativecow.net/depth-of-field-gregg-toland-citizen-...).
I suspect we could share several enjoyable beers discussing the edge cases; the historical limitations: which of them can arguably have some expressive merit and which have no real redeeming qualities outside retro callbacks and nostalgia (anamophic lens flares being a good candidate: https://theasc.com/article/star-trek-into-darkness/).
- people form a relationship with and an emotional response to the art
- they give you money for the art
Now, the latter gets into questions like Sony or Steam removing games or films which people have previously purchased. A consumer rights question. People tend to feel they have been treated like a sucker when the publisher does this.
The former you are effectively rescinding the emotional relationship with the art. A much more complicated question. This can certainly be pathological - see kpop and the idol industry. But I don't think it's unfair to say that insisting that the art relationship should be totally unilateral and you owe the audience nothing, is going to anger the audience.
You don't own art that has been released to the public, anymore than you own a car or pizza that you sold.
Buying a pizza does not give you any rights to force the owner to maintain that recipe you purchased a slice of.
You're correct. I did not.
> they now have some obligation to society, should society deem it good enough.
I was expressing a wish or, perhaps an ideal, not an obligation. I don't think there's any implied ethical, moral or legal duty on a creator to do what their patrons or fans want. As an amatuer filmmaker who's also worked in the industry creating technology for cinematic storytelling, I'm as pro-creator as can be.
And, full-disclosure, my feelings about Star Wars are 'complicated'. In 1977 I'd just become a teenager when I saw Star Wars at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. It not only rocked my world, it made me want to be a filmmaker and changed the course of my life. Turns out I was better at software than filmmaking. Fortunately, as film became digital, my interests collided :-).
Decades later my software was used extensively to make several Star Wars films including hundreds of shots in Phantom Menace. I was at the ranch many times during production and was back at the Chinese theater for the premiere of TPM - almost exactly 22 years to the day after my life was changed in that theater. Prior to the premiere I'd only seen storyboards and individual shots so, going in, my expectations were as sky-high as any fan. But, like many hardcore fans, I felt let down by Phantom Menace. Did George owe fans the film they wanted him to make? Nope, not at all. He made the film he wanted to make. Even though I was disappointed by TPM, it hasn't changed how much I respect George. He's still a remarkable filmmaker.
To such a sentiment, I can only say ... maclunkey.
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels (and newsletters) in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
[1] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."
I still don't know what exactly caused this but most likely a multitude of factors are in play. - Deserts are bright, so a bright light was used to illuminate his face, causing his eyes to sparkle. - Streaming from Netflix and compression / decompression might have eaten away some of the high frequency detail
I also learned that they shot the movie in a bigger film stock, so the digitized version of this movie is highly regarded.
If anyone has any idea as to why these scenes in particular look off, i would love to learn more.
I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.