4/20/2025 at 7:43:11 PM
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release.It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
by crazygringo
4/20/2025 at 10:28:18 PM
>> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong.> It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration. If I’m trying to preserve history, I shouldn’t fix errors. If I’m trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it’s ok to fix.
e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn’t fix any of the musical performance flaws.
Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and playback technology/medium.
by noizejoy
4/21/2025 at 5:52:04 PM
I think the book analogy is maybe useful here too. Spelling errors and even grammar and continuity errors get corrected all the time in books. Books have the concept of an Edition, a basic version number referencing each batch of production ("printing" in the case of books). For the archeologists and the very curious, you can try to find earlier Editions and compare/contrast, they don't vanish from shelves but often live side-by-side, especially in libraries with endowments or other charges to collect the full edition history of certain books.The book community and some publishing laws have built some required transparency here. Printings and Edition numbers are generally included as key front matter in the average book by all major publishers. Library catalogs understand that as key metadata.
Today film publishing doesn't include such metadata. It could. It probably should. Arguably Lucas himself experimented with trying to include such metadata when buliding the "Special Editions". "Special" isn't a great version number, sure, but it did make it explicit the idea that movies could have multiple editions intentionally, not just accidentally or by way of the implicit chance of change during processes like digitization and media transfers.
Relatedly, there's a lot of consternation in digital media that the side-by-side "sanctity" of editions isn't preserved. If you buy a book for Amazon's kindle at First Edition, it will silently deliver every updated Edition. Covers will change from the original art to "Motion Picture Inspired By This Book" art (or TV show, etc). There's a lot of questions about how much should Amazon disclose every time this happens and how much should Amazon be required to give you a copy of the edition you originally paid for on request?
(Maybe ideally every bit of media is collected in some form of "source control"? I wonder what it would take to make some form of source control the "required" or at least "most desired" form of digital distribution?)
by WorldMaker
4/20/2025 at 11:11:34 PM
In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.
Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.
Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
by echelon
4/21/2025 at 12:20:01 AM
"In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore."I quite strongly disagree with you. I lived through the latter stages of the transition from monochrome to full colour and various other things that were hailed as game changers that would render the previous status quo as somehow defunct.
I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.
We call them films or movies or whatever but those are long form stories. A book might be one too or a pdf. The novella is a short story. A matinee was an extended session at the cinema with multiple "value adds" to the main production. Theatre ... cartoons ... you know how this goes!
Might I remind you that you have only two eyes, which means that a radio drama in your car is the only safe media for a "drama" in a car, for the driver. You do get aural distraction but it is mostly manageable. One day you will have FSD (Mr Musk says so) and you will be able to watch telly with your feet on the dash but that is not today.
Media and formats change but the purpose is largely the same: telling a story. We are, after all, the story telling ape.
by gerdesj
4/21/2025 at 1:04:20 AM
It's not that older works don't have value, it is that a lot of people don't see the value. For example, changes in the way actors perform makes a lot of people claim that old movies are "cheesy" or have "bad acting" -- they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!by jhbadger
4/21/2025 at 2:02:39 AM
Not to make you feel old, but to today's 20-somethings an 80s movie is the same time difference as a 40s movie would be in the 80s. There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80s but it's the same difference in a purely chronological sense.by dccoolgai
4/21/2025 at 4:35:29 AM
> There's some interesting stuff I read a while back about why the 80s "feels culturally closer to today" than the 40s felt to people in the 80sWould you still have these articles by chance? This sounds interesting and is something I "felt" myself.
by steve1977
4/21/2025 at 10:09:44 AM
Not the poster you asked either, but another big reason why the 1980s seems more like today than the 1940s did the 1980s was that the 1960s happened in between the 1940s and 1980s. Our modern world view is greatly shaped by the struggles for racial and gender equality that occurred in the 1960s.by jhbadger
4/21/2025 at 9:57:48 AM
Not the poster you've asked, but I think you might be interested in Mark Fisher's "What is Hauntology?" (10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16). It argues the contemporary culture is incapable of coming up with genuinely new ideas because postmodernism and late capitalism constraint our imagination to the point where we can no longer imagine a wholly different system of politics and values. We're left with the upkeep of an already established system, and this is reflected in how the present crop of films and music mostly sample and rehash what's been done in the past century.As a personal addendum, I feel this can be (partly) attributed to the loss of the Cold War's ideological struggle that drove the West to innovate, not just in technology but in societal structures and freedoms as well. This is why it can feel as if we've arrived at "the end of history", the current system has won, so what is left to seek or prove?
by timlatim
4/21/2025 at 11:53:25 AM
Fascinating, thanks for that!Re your addendum and "the end of history": I think it would be myopic for people to think that the current system has won, and that there's nothing left to seek or prove. The current system has brought plenty to many but is destroying our planet, and there's plenty of space for fresh thinking. China is taking the lead in innovation [1]; so perhaps there's a new ideological and existential struggle, just with the US as the underdogs. Hopefully people see this as motivating rather than depressing.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/... (also https://archive.ph/urpbY )
by albumen
4/21/2025 at 2:39:22 PM
Hauntology, Lost Futures and Lost 80s Nostalgiaby _wire_
4/22/2025 at 12:12:37 PM
>they can't even enjoy a movie from the 1940s, let alone a silent film like Harold Lloyd's. Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!People grow up. In my 20s, I watched a lot of schlocky action movies and juvenile comedies. In my 40s, I watch a lot of classic and modern cinema. Do I watch a lot of movies from the 1940s? No, but I do watch some and I’m glad they are available.
by 542354234235
4/21/2025 at 8:54:30 PM
"Hell, I know twenty-somethings that can't even stand movies from the 1980s!"We all have anecdotes about the bloody kids! I noticed my granddaughter wearing a Metallica (Justice) T shirt - she does like the music - I asked Alexa. I dug out my old records and gave them to her. I also showed her how to rip a CD and put them on her phone. That's proper life skills transfer that is.
I watched Star Wars in the 1970s when it came out and it still seems to be quite popular. Perhaps you might like to avoid the shit films and go a bit more mainstream when you show kids films from the 1980s!
by gerdesj
4/21/2025 at 1:16:44 AM
> I defy you to watch something like a Harold Lloyd movie involving a clock and not have sweaty palms or at least a mildly elevated ... emotional response of some sort.Be that as it may, there's probably a day coming where only a handful of people on the planet even know who that is. Or who have even seen those films. And it'll be like that for most of our now-popular cultural artifacts.
How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read? The culture of those people died with them, and so too will it be with us.
Nobody is going to grow up to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers anymore. Nobody is going to watch The Andy Griffith Show or see Last Action Hero. Even if it happens on a rare occasion, those numbers will pale in comparison to the number of Fortnite players. Or whatever's popular in the coming decades.
Our world is ephemeral and dies with us. We should enjoy our media while it is relevant to us, because that's what it's good for. Telling stories in a framework that speaks to us. In the future, it'll be a relic. An artifact of a time long ago, whose people are all dead, and whose lessons may need to come with a history book.
Apart from students of anthropology, the vast majority of future people will probably find our cultural works to be boring, irrelevant, and unworthy of their attention.
by echelon
4/21/2025 at 3:18:21 AM
Counterpoint: the past continues to inspire, surprise, and delight.Your comment about “1700’s newspapers” reminded me of The Past Times podcast, where comedians read random newspapers from across American history. The episodes I’ve listened to were delightful, and they covered mundane news in mundane places.
“O brother, where art thou” is one of my favorite movies. It’s a retelling of The Odyssey (a literally prehistoric tale) set in Depression-era Mississippi, made in the early 2000’s.
The specific question of editing out these production artifacts doesn’t rile me either way, though. I didn’t see the original mistake, and I won’t notice the fix either.
I’ll also agree that just as no one steps in the same river twice, how the past is viewed and interpreted changes over time. What is valued or not also changes. 90% of everything is still crap. And quite a bit of the interest in the past is reflected in remixes or retellings for modern audiences.
Still, people also read Beowulf or Chaucer in the original or in modern translation. Others will enjoy both Jane Austen and Bridgerton. People will listen to Beethoven and Jon Batiste. Sure, not all those things are for everyone, but neither are modern music genres, sports entertainment, or most TV shows.
by bradreaves2
4/21/2025 at 4:00:50 AM
Yes, Homer will outlive us all, but what 20th century film is likely to have Homer’s longevity?I think people will still be playing Tetris and reading Homer in a thousand years, but I’m not confident at all that they’ll be watching any of our videos.
by goldfishgold
4/22/2025 at 12:46:32 PM
>How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?How many do you read from 10 years ago? Newspapers aren’t really meant to be “timeless”. They are specifically to inform people of what is going on at that moment. I’ve read books from the 1700s. I’ve looked at paintings and sculptures, watched plays written, and read about the lives of important people of the 1700s.
I do agree that most of our culture will be irrelevant to people of the future as entertainment, but will be invaluable as history. If you want to tell a story that is relevant to modern people, tell that story. Movies are remade/rebooted/gender swapped/set in new countries/etc. all the time. You don’t have to replace the original with a “fixed” version so that almost no one can experience anything but the update. We have dozens of retellings of Romeo and Juliet but the original(ish) play is still readily available. Just because new generations will have their own entertainment doesn’t mean we should overwrite ours and present it as if history doesn’t exist and everything revolves around and reflects the current culture and always has.
Speaking of Last Action Hero, those movies won’t ever be box office hits again but the action movies and political thrillers do tell us a lot about America’s anxiety and uncertainty about our place in world affairs in the post-Cold War world. They are interesting to revisit in the same way Casablanca is interesting to revisit and think about the context for a movie made about WWII when we didn’t know what the outcome of WWII would be.
by 542354234235
4/21/2025 at 3:55:54 AM
I’ve read Marcus Aurelius‘s meditations, a few Greek plays and studied kung-fu movies and Japanese cinema critically. People still endure reading Madame Bovary.Time stands still for no man, but we’re a curious people, and folks will search for meaning in the past through our art. As a parody of the traditional action movie, I’m sure people will be watching Last Action Hero for decades to come.
I think as time goes on the emotional hooks of media outside of universal themes fade away. My son will never know the time where “It’s a Wonderful Life” impacted my parents, or how the endless repeating of of “A Christmas Story” was a part of my siblings holiday. But the stories that are important to us or capture a moment of time will endure.
by Spooky23
4/21/2025 at 6:57:13 PM
Time And Tide Wait For Gnome Annby AStonesThrow
4/21/2025 at 9:05:33 PM
"How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?"Social history interests me. So does genealogy, although I am the apprentice. My family tree has over 150,000 records in it - thanks to my uncle's painstaking research.
I generally try to read summations by people who have read all those articles but I am happy to dive in myself if I have to.
Just off the top of my head: A great example of trying to get inside the thoughts and ideas of a long departed peoples - "Courtesans and Fishcakes". That book deals with the cultural mores of ordinary people not gods and kings and legends and stuff.
by gerdesj
4/21/2025 at 5:42:20 AM
> Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.OTOH, it's fun to watch for goofs in movies, and if they're fixed up, then there's less reason to watch some of these movies.
by toast0
4/21/2025 at 5:54:35 AM
> In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.The fact that when I die nobody will care about my porn collection is deeply unsettling. I'm saying this seriously, because it's something I enjoy so much, yet nobody else cares.
by anal_reactor
4/21/2025 at 9:04:07 AM
Another form of this observation is what initiated the flood of private equity into music back catalogs - people will go back and listen to music many many more times than they will a lot of other content. And the longevity of it is much longer, especially when you consider remixes, covers, and samples.Every so often I’ll throw on some old jazz standards I’ve never heard of. Some classical music. Some early soul and R&B.
Old movies though? Only the iconic ones through a sense of obligation (eg, school/study) or someone convincing me I absolutely have to. Metropolis, Citizen Kane, interesting movies for their time and contribution. I just don’t feel the need to go back to this stuff the same way I actually enjoy going back to old music or other art.
by glenngillen
4/21/2025 at 1:42:15 AM
I don’t really think that’s true with AI in the mix. Yes, they won’t be watching those specific movies, but AI will be trained on them and even use them as context. You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive. Cinema could start to get really interesting, and anything new is just a remix of the old anyways (we just build on what we have done much faster and more cheaply).by seanmcdirmid
4/21/2025 at 2:00:17 AM
> Cinema could start to get really interestingNot if you do this:
> You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive.
The story is told! Let's have something new instead of rehashing the same thing with fake actors.
by floren
4/22/2025 at 1:47:19 AM
When I was a kid, I dreamt a lot about what happened between those two movies, since Star Wars came out when I was 2 and ESB when I was 6. There were some comics sure, but I felt ripped off we didn’t get to see what happened between them (yes, the holiday special was a thing, but it didn’t help much). A lot of weird dreams on my part (which incidentally is probably closer to how AI works these days, just remixing my memories, adding some new details, and the fidelity isn’t as good as the original).by seanmcdirmid
4/21/2025 at 3:43:02 AM
I disagree. IMO the film is more like a novel. The styles will vary, but most feature films are the modern embodiment of a play, a medium that has existed for thousands of years.Styles change and not every movie will “survive” long term. But stories endure.
by Spooky23
4/20/2025 at 7:48:42 PM
I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
by madrox
4/20/2025 at 9:23:17 PM
> I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
by bigstrat2003
4/21/2025 at 12:38:46 AM
Absolutelyby madrox
4/20/2025 at 10:00:12 PM
I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful. It doesn’t stand up at all, with the one exception of the Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun. I wish we’d watched the original version.by simonh
4/20/2025 at 10:41:07 PM
Is it easy to find the original? I’d love a copy of each on my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice is welcome!by Henchman21
4/20/2025 at 10:51:49 PM
What you are looking for is 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
by Namahanna
4/21/2025 at 1:02:29 AM
The dedication of fans never ceases to amaze.> When a film is professionally scanned in 16-bit color as DPX image files, every single frame weighs in at 100 MB.
> With upwards of 175,000 frames in each film, a complete scan requires about 21 TB of storage
> 42 TB if you want a backup copy!
> And then you need at least another 21 TB of space to work on it
> over $1,000 just in hard drives is therefore required for every film
by matheusmoreira
4/21/2025 at 7:07:35 AM
You probably are not gonna to need 16 bit DPX for anything but high end compositing with CGYour point still stands but a good quality cineform or something is plenty. And you can definitely get 21TB cheaper than 1000$
by Melatonic
4/21/2025 at 1:35:22 AM
A tiny expense in the grand scheme of things. The original film stock probably cost an order of magnitude more.by SoftTalker
4/21/2025 at 1:05:02 AM
That comparison is really cool. I was mostly paying attention to the 4K77 vs 2011 bluray, and in most cases I thought 4K77 looked better. Not sure why they felt the need to mess with the colors so drastically in the 2011 version.by spiderice
4/20/2025 at 11:44:40 PM
Thank you!!!by Henchman21
4/21/2025 at 12:36:54 AM
Star Wars 4K77A 4K fan scan of a 35mm print the was in cold storage since 1980.
It's great to see OG Star Wars looking like in did in '77, with all the optical glitches and the lower contrast with slightly green shadow bias of prints from that time. True time travel that makes the reworked releases look silly.
Another project worth a look is Harmy's fan cuts of the original trilogy, which are tastefully re-assembled from multiple sources and graded.
by _wire_
4/20/2025 at 7:46:17 PM
I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)by alabastervlog
4/20/2025 at 7:51:58 PM
Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music.With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
by crazygringo
4/21/2025 at 12:24:37 AM
The color grading is a funny one. I worked on a large episodic animated series that was released in the US from a 16mm print copy of the episodes. The original transfer was done at a facility that I worked at, but only as a tape assistant to the colorists. It was transferred as SD to DigiBeta. Years later, the film was brought back out and sent to another local post house for an HD transfer. The person in charge of that made some "interesting" decisions, and the transfer was universally panned. Years later, the same prints were scanned again to HD, but with a different producer for the project. At this time, the colorist also took a lot of interest in the project and found reference film material on the exact same film the prints were on. Using that reference, the colors came out drastically different from anything ever made from these prints. Even though the original creator of the animated series was never involved in any of the post process decisions, it was later relayed that he was extremely pleased with the results of this release as it was the closest to the colors as he had envisioned them way back when the series was being made.Sometimes, the post processes loses a lot when people make decisions. It might take a special released version for the director to actually get a version they feel they wanted the world to see. Sometimes, yes, they go too far, but others it's actually a decent result.
by dylan604
4/20/2025 at 11:24:35 PM
> VLC is the worst with thatSo, what would you recommend instead? This is waaay outside my wheelhouse to judge.
by devilbunny
4/21/2025 at 12:59:58 AM
The best video player is mpv.by matheusmoreira
4/20/2025 at 9:15:27 PM
It was taken from streaming but that’s the “new” color gradeby tvaziri
4/21/2025 at 12:11:26 AM
looks like a videogameby trgn
4/20/2025 at 8:11:49 PM
There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movieby Ghos3t
4/20/2025 at 10:15:27 PM
Are they watching made-for-TV movies? Otherwise I’d think the movies would have been made for theater viewing, and watching it in 4k on a big modern TV would be a lot closer to how the creators wanted you to see it than using VHS and an old TV.by wat10000
4/20/2025 at 8:19:47 PM
It's similar to how old games look so different on modern hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares, while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in software as perfect squares.by mort96
4/20/2025 at 10:44:50 PM
Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>by teddyh
4/21/2025 at 4:57:39 AM
The weird rainbow effects on Sonic's waterfalls are NOT due to the properties of CRT, but a result of the Megadrive's awful composite encoder. Connect the screen through a RGB cable cable, or composite through a 32X, and the resulting image is much cleaner.Someone created a whole subreddit a few days ago to analyze the effect and post comparison pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fuckingwaterfall/
by pezezin
4/21/2025 at 6:40:55 PM
In that Imgur link I gave, a comment by “Illithidbane” linked to this YouTube video, which is all about the waterfall and RGB vs. composite: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0weL5XDpPs>by teddyh
4/20/2025 at 7:55:48 PM
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel,I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.
by thih9
4/20/2025 at 8:03:59 PM
The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2 spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up on the book.by WalterBright
4/20/2025 at 8:50:10 PM
Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).by mitthrowaway2
4/21/2025 at 5:24:51 AM
I suppose Tolkien’s work would be an exception, especially at the time. Typesetter seeing a made up word would correct it - and for most books it would have been the right choice.by thih9
4/21/2025 at 5:21:49 AM
It's debatable where the line should be drawn, and the best approach is not to draw it at all. Sure, update flicks with CG fixes, but the original theatrical version should always be made available too.That was Lucas' mistake with the original Star Wars trilogy. He fixed mistakes, CG'd characters and sets, spliced in deleted scenes, filmed entirely new sequences, replaced music, etc.. He felt he was making the movies better, but the updated editions weren't the familiar old friends people had known since childhood. If he'd made good transfers of the original versions available in the latest home video formats in addition to his newer versions, everybody would have been happy. He didn't do that.
Some people want the original versions and some want updated versions. Given that the first step to producing new spruced up versions is to restore the original, it makes sense to make both available.
by beloch
4/21/2025 at 3:11:39 AM
It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
by GMoromisato
4/21/2025 at 6:05:48 AM
> It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
by toast0
4/21/2025 at 6:26:23 PM
George Lucas had to shoot his Star Wars movie in Englandd instead of California and its what gave us the iconic Empire portrayed by British theater actors.by Yeul
4/21/2025 at 6:53:19 AM
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
by thaumasiotes
4/21/2025 at 5:52:00 AM
They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value.There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
by s1artibartfast
4/21/2025 at 3:54:39 AM
The counter argument is that once art is released into the world, it becomes a conversation with the people consuming it and no longer belongs solely to the creator.I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
by tummler
4/21/2025 at 3:18:48 AM
Art is subjective, and thus the decision to "fix" mistakes is also subjective. I generally will side with whatever the filmmaker wants me to see now.What's important is that the original is preserved, accessible, and we know the changes. This rarely happens.
by gwbas1c
4/21/2025 at 4:10:40 AM
> They weren’t done with intent.“A Litany in a Time of Plague” contains a famous line: “brightness falls from the air.” Many scholars believe it’s a printing error, that the original line was “brightness falls from the hair.” But with apologies to Jay McInerney (who made this point better than I) the former is so much more beautiful. Sometimes art isn’t intentional.
by matthewdgreen
4/20/2025 at 8:01:30 PM
Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original music.by WalterBright
4/20/2025 at 8:12:11 PM
They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the VHS release.https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
by shmeeed
4/20/2025 at 8:29:03 PM
Thank you, at last I have an explanation!As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
by WalterBright
4/20/2025 at 9:03:22 PM
Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie and TV soundtracks.by anjel
4/20/2025 at 10:31:12 PM
And video games too. GTA 4 has had that issue, and digital copies of the game have had music (which Rockstar no longer has the rights to) patched out.by bigstrat2003
4/20/2025 at 8:18:18 PM
If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you have to turn to piracy (and/or fan edits) to get the “real thing”. Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.by alabastervlog
4/21/2025 at 3:17:07 AM
> at some point you have to turn to piracyCory Doctorow's young-adults novel "Pirate Cinema" develops around this idea.
by teo_zero
4/21/2025 at 9:05:29 AM
The CD release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio program notes that it's mostly the original recordings, except for the music. They didn't have the rights to release the music on CD, so they substituted in different music. If you want the same program that was broadcast over the radio, you need to buy it on cassette, where apparently they do have the rights to the music.Something has obviously gone badly wrong in the world of IP licensing. Somehow I imagine that movies don't license different parts of their soundtrack differently to make sure they can never be rereleased.
by thaumasiotes
4/20/2025 at 8:05:46 PM
Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You can see the same thing happening with later releases of media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to have switched out many songs in the entire show.by Onawa
4/20/2025 at 8:16:07 PM
This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested Development was one where when it came to streaming they had to change the music.by pests
4/22/2025 at 2:52:01 AM
It happened with Daria as well.by Khaine
4/21/2025 at 8:45:08 AM
I don’t really follow film, though I do watch the odd movie.Do films still occasionally have different cuts, is that still a thing with DVD releases?
There’s at least two films I never liked the theatrical release of, but the directors cuts were entirely likeable.
by nandomrumber
4/23/2025 at 5:17:39 PM
The dangling licence plate sets a mood.by ashoeafoot
4/20/2025 at 9:25:29 PM
Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it.Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.
But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.
(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)
The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.
by krick
4/22/2025 at 1:22:23 PM
> It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion)How do you know the intent isn’t to make it better, anymore than changing the music or replacing/adding characters? Why can’t a movie maker think that the protagonist casually using racial slurs detracts from the movie and the story and that they thought it would be “better” without it? Even the term “politically incorrect” is not accurate, since it is really culturally incorrect i.e. it represents a culture that does not exist anymore. Politics influence culture and vise versa, but we are long past the era of the Hays Code. These are not government mandated decisions, they are cultural decisions (or monetary decisions to perform better for the current culture).
Why this knee jerk reaction only to those types of changes? Is changing them a moral judgement on you for liking them in the past?
> acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.
It seems like the opposite it pretty prevalent and vocal as well. The “woke” buzzword being thrown around at any new media with too many women or minorities or gays is seemingly never ending. Causing trouble by displaying today something new that wasn’t fine yesterday.
by 542354234235
4/20/2025 at 10:50:41 PM
[flagged]by jart
4/20/2025 at 9:14:24 PM
agree to disagreeby tvaziri
4/21/2025 at 12:09:42 AM
Okby damerou
4/20/2025 at 8:30:40 PM
> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
by jancsika
4/20/2025 at 9:05:12 PM
The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far.Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong" chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting. If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and Rachmaninoff
by davidcbc
