Sergio Leone Special Editions (1 Viewer)

[Haggai]

That title seems closer to the original than the German title of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is "Zwei glorreiche Halunken." I think it means "Two Glorious Scoundrels" (corrections welcome)...but why only two? Warum nicht "Drei"?

 

[John Hodson]

I assume because they were 'zwei' glorious scoundrels, 'drei' was just a bad guy, and bad guys don't normally make the title.

Beats the hell out of 'The Magnificent Stranger'...

 

[Haggai]

I'll have to check again later, but I think the little German lobby card included with the R1 SE just had pictures of Clint and Lee, implying that they were the "zwei" of the title.

 

[John Hodson]

Probably for the same reasons the German artwork for FAFDM...

...features Klaus Kinski - marketing!

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

I have all of these on order from Amazon along with My Name Is Nobody 2-disc set.

 

[Anthony Neilson]

That looks nice. Do you think the watch plays Mortimer's little theme ? I'd be tempted if it did.

Let us know what it's like when you get it Marco !!

 

[Bob Graham]

The term "Halunke" meaning scoundrel or crook popped up in a lot of German release titles in the mid 70's. I think it began with one of the Terrance Hill/Bud Spenser films (I can't say which one for sure) that had "Zwei Halunke" in the title and the releasing companies wanted to trade-in on their popularity, making totally unrelated films seem like sequels; thus "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" became "Two Glorious Crooks", "Emperor of the North Pole" was released as "A Train for Two Crooks" and "The Four Musketeers" was released as "Four Crooks for the Queen".

This "faux sequel" trend was rather common then. Some of my favorite other German release titles: "Blazing Saddles" was originally released as "What's Up, Sheriff?"; "House of Wax" was called "The Cabinet of Professor Bondi" and "This Island Earth" was called "Metaluna 4 Doesn't Answer"

 

[John Hodson]

Sadly, not.

 

[Guido Bibra]

Be careful when ordering the German discs - there's a problem with the MPEG encoding. The discs play fine on TVs, but on software-players and some projectors the picture doesn't deinterlace properly. The German discs of My Name is Nobody and Nobody's the Greatest had the same problem - unfortunately it's not the fault of TLE-Films, but Paramount who used a cheap authoring studio who can't seem to handle their encoder right.

The restorations are beautiful, it seems that the German discs of "Fistful" and "Few More" do look a bit better than the UK discs. But with the encoding-problems I would strongly suggest to get the UK discs instead.

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

^ Guido, does this mean I'll have a problem playing these discs on my DLP projector - is it trial and error or are all setups effected??

 

[Guido Bibra]

Marco,

I don't know what the encoding might do with a projector. There were a few people in the forum at cinefacts.de who had trouble playing the discs on a projector, some had none.

The encoding trouble seems to be a so called "field swap", where one movie-frame is split into two half-videoframes which do not belong together. Only a very good deinterlacing-routine can fix that - of all the software-players only the very new versions of PowerDVD are with some special tweaking capable of that, and only in a lesser quality than the normal routines.

It might be possible that you don't have any problems on your projector, but I think this is highly dependent on the used equipment. If you're getting the discs, would you let us know if you have any trouble with the playback? This is really trial-and-error at the moment...

 

[Rob Foss]

Before anyone gets carried away with visions of discs that don't play, TLE's Senior Producer Torsten Keiser had this to say about the 'problem' on the Sergio Leone board on Aug 27 re the 'My Name Is Nobody' release:

'.. the progressive flag problem is, as far as we know today (judging from our own tests and the reactions from all the newgroup or forum posters we could gather) only an issue with some PC based players; and there the problem can mostly be solved by changing the settings of the player so it performs a proper de-interlacing. All of the stand-alone player owners/connected to either regular TV or projection equipment reported no problems, with merely 2 having to adjust Program Motion Settings to a slightly faster mode during playback with their projectors; an adjustment that took both seconds to do. TLEFilms has pushed for an encoding with fully operational progressive capability from the beginning; but due to contactual reasons Paramount was unable to switch authoring houses - and the encoder there could not set that flag. However, as I said before, this problem only affects some PC players; the discs work fine, as far as we can see from the feedback we got, during playback on all other equipment.

I would just point out that it's not even known yet whether or not the 'problem' with the 'Nobody' disc is even present on the new Geman 'Dollars' discs. Some people just seem to be assuming that it is but even if it is you're highly unlikely to be affected by it.

Let's just try and keep a sense of proportion, guys.

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

Phew, thanks a lot!


I'll let you guys know when I receive the sets... they shipped out earlier this week so I should have them soon (I just hope Amazon.de puts a little more effort and thought into packing my order this time so that it doesn't arrive in pieces!).

 

[Guido Bibra]

Rob,

Torsten Kaiser tends to understate the problems with the transfer. Unfortunately it's not just that the progressive flag has not been set, there's also the fieldswap problem which makes the deinterlacing so difficult. Maybe the deinterlacing routines of good projectors really can fix that, but I'm not convinced that the encoding is "normal" like TLE claims.

Marco: the packages from Amazon.de are usually very strong cardboard, they should survive the journey to Canada. It works the other way around quite well, my orders from Canada to Germany usually come in comparably flimsy envelopes and hardly anything breaks.

 

[Magnus T]

I don't know if you're reading this thread or not, Mr. Harris, but, if you are, could you please give some personal comments on the MGM SE's? Specifically, what you think of the transfers and how they compare to theatrical prints, previous LD's and DVD's, etc.

I personally like the MGM: SE transfers quite a bit, but at times there are too much EE for my taste.

 

[Mark_Wilson]

These play fine on my pj, either native pal or upconverted to 720p. I have seen the problem with described playing them in powerdvd 4.0. I've also seen this with some of the Eureka MoC releases. I do know those are progressive encode (not prog. flagged), so that may be the issue.

 

[Jim Rykel]

That German set looks sweet. So no new word on when these might be released in Region 1?

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

Can anyone please describe the effects I'd be seeing from the apparent "field-swap" errors, as I've recvently been having a lot of trouble wwatching PAL encoded discs on my setup and I received these sets the other day and am experiencing more troubles with them as well!

I just want to try and figure out if the issue is with my setup or the discs themselves.

Thanks!

 

[Guido Bibra]

Depending on your settings, you might have massive ghosting or combing effects, because the deinterlacer has problems recombining the different fields. At least that's what's happening with most of the software-players, but I have no experience with projectors. Perhaps someone else can help you find some settings which might work?

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

I'm good than!


No ghosting or combing effects on my setup!


And I must say that the DVD's look fantastic and the overall packaging and presentation is also terrific!

The extra non-disc related stuff is kind of cheesy... I ended up tossing the pocketwatch and silver colored Paramount logo coin into the garbage along with the cheap plastic gold key and lock set which looked like it came with a pair of birthday lootbag handcuffs or something.


But the restoration is absolutely beautiful and the extras and menus deigns, etc. are all incredible as well! I highly reccommend the set, I'm sure it's better than anything we're going to see in R1!