The Golden Girls: Any Hope of a Blu-ray Release? (1 Viewer)

[Emcee]

The Golden Girls is easily my favorite sitcom. I've had all seven seasons on DVD for years. But I'd be willing to companion those DVDs with a nice, cleaned up Blu-ray release.

Does anyone have any information about there being a potential Blu-ray release for this show?

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[StarDestroyer52]

Being with Disney, its highly unlikely.

 

[Clark Green]

All season are on Hulu

 

[Chuck Pennington]

The episodes were shot on standard definition video. Only using AI to upscale them would “improve” their quality by any measure for Blu-ray, and even then it wouldn’t be authentic.

 

[Emcee]

All season are on Hulu

But Hulu ain't Blu-ray.

 

[Clark Green]

And as pointed out above, Golden Girls was shot in SD, and Blu won't improve on that. So Hulu will look fine and match the original image.

 

[smithbrad]

And as pointed out above, Golden Girls was shot in SD, and Blu won't improve on that. So Hulu will look fine and match the original image.

They already have it on DVD, Hulu isn't going to improve upon that. So, Hulu isn't really relevant to the question asked and answered.

 

[Malcolm R]

Yes, given the way they were shot, what we have is already as good as it gets. The only advantage might be to get a complete series on fewer discs that would take up less shelf space.

 

[Lord Dalek]

As others have said, there is nothing really to be gained from upscaling 480p60i 1" tapes to 1080. Those dvds are it.

 

[cinemiracle]

GOLDEN GIRLS - is a true classic comedy series. It never dates. It was probably the only American comedy series that I thought was actually funny. Brilliantly written- the likes of which I have never seen before in American comedy tv series.

 

[Mark-P]

Upconverting standard definition NTSC video using digital tools can improve the quality. Don’t believe me? I talked about it here.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

If it provides any sort of parallel... the Fraggle Rock blu-ray set improves picture quality noticeably over the DVD edition. Despite being SD-video NTSC source material, the blu-ray provides more breathing room for compression, color is better, and blacks are far less noisy than the DVD. I'd suspect that the same would be true here as well. Farscape is another example of an SD series that looks much better on blu-ray vs DVD (thought that was PAL and not NTSC source material... so a tad more native resolution... but it's really for all of these other reasons that the blu-ray looks superior in that case as well). Note that these improvements mentioned above are all apparent even without the aid of sophisticated AI to try to interpolate added detail.

 

[Jake Lipson]

Disney has never done a DVD release for the single season of The Golden Palace. I'd be more interested in that than in HD disc versions of The Golden Girls.

 

[jcroy]

Upconverting standard definition NTSC video using digital tools can improve the quality. Don’t believe me? I talked about it here.

This was also done for the blurays of the Eccleston and Tennant eras of Doctor Who in the mid->late 2000s era. Though it is from PAL upscaled to hd. (The BBC was still shooting in PAL resolution at the time).

 

[Desdinova]

The blu-ray of Monty Python's Flying Circus looks outstanding, far better than I expected owing to the lower video tech used in the late 60s/early 70s when it was shot. But considering the fanatical fan base for the series, it was a pretty much guaranteed success.

I think the question for Golden Girls is whether or not the fan base exists for such a restoration. I've never watched it (the concept never really hooked me) but I understand and respect its success and influence on its many fans...but whether or not those same fans would support via sales the costs in upgrading it strikes me as uncertain.

 

[KPmusmag]

I would upgrade as I think the DVDs are not as good as they could be. If it were truly remastered I would be interested.

 

[Robbie^Blackmon]

I'd settle for a standard-def re-release with uncut episodes and proper audio (as in sh-tereo) where applicable!

 

[derekbd]

The Golden Girls is easily my favorite sitcom. I've had all seven seasons on DVD for years. But I'd be willing to companion those DVDs with a nice, cleaned up Blu-ray release.

Does anyone have any information about there being a potential Blu-ray release for this show?

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There are computer video techy types that have been using what they term AI software to enhance SD animation (like Futurama) and live action (like ST Deep Space Nine) series and sharing them via Usenet and, naturally, bittorrent. The results are surprising already (they've been up to this for several years now) and they are improving all the time.

 

[AndyMcKinney]

As has been seen with the "Classic" Doctor Who blu-ray releases, one definite advantage to releasing standard-definition material on Blu-ray (besides less compression) is the fact that for BR, you don't have to use the very "lossy" MPEG-2 encoding that you have to do on DVD. The encoding for Blu-ray is much better.

Other possible improvements can be color grading, reducing video noise, etc. that likely weren't done for the DVD release. Also, going back to the original master tapes (the DVDs likely used copies at least a generation of two down from the original masters).

So, can more actually be done to SD video without trying to "fake" it up to HD? Well, yes. However, it's time-consuming (and costly) to do, so it remains unlikely.