Re: James Bond Ultimate Ed Framing Issues
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Originally Posted by Tim RP
Fat chance. Never happen. Which is a great pity.
I know one shouldn't hate but reading about the issues that are cropping up (ha ha ha) it does beg the question: why can't these idiots get it right?
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Business is business, I suspect. If you've got so much budget, and so much time to do twenty films in, I dare say corners are cut to some degree somewhere, or things get left unchecked. After all, even technicians have to sleep and eat. Plus, we're all human, and mistakes do and can creep in.
However, that's just making excuses - more than one person must have worked on these films, and some faults are beyond understanding.
When such a fuss was made about the missing captions for Octopussy and Living Daylights in the original US pressings, why, several years later, are those same faults now transferred across the Atlantic and made once again on the PAL discs? Why was this not checked? Why was it not discovered? Why didn't someone who knows the films backwards not sit down and check each one from beginning to end? Were there no check discs? Isn't that pretty astonishing for such popular, high profile movies? This restoration has been going on for years, so it's not as if there wouldn't have been time to check twenty, two-hour films during that period.
Again, the missing mono tracks; that's not down to understandable human error - someone, somewhere, sat down and made a very deliberate decision not to include them.
Whether this was for disc space issues (which I doubt - a mono track takes up virtually no room at all), or because there simply wasn't the time/desire to clean up the mono tracks to a similar "standard" as the pictures, and so they were left until a later release, or whether it was simply down to the need to hold something back for the HD releases, to make them ever more desirable a purchase (at which point, we'll probably get still more deleted scenes, and better framing and colouring for those films affected this time round, not to mention that elusive trailer for OHMSS, once contained on the VHS release, but never on disc as of yet, which is about a minute longer than the DVD version, and contains footage unique to that trailer that never made it to the final cut of the film - a pretty important incluasion, wouldn't you say, given the lack of any other deleted material for this film), I don't know, but in any event, the term "Ultimate" is starting to have a hollow ring to it.
Some of these faults are sloppy (missing captions) and could have been easily rectified (just give us the original captions burnt-in, thus limiting the number of errors that can be made), some are completely incomprehensible (the cropping and colouring issues of Goldeneye and A View To A Kill), and some are, whilst very obviously made for a (doubtless, dubious) reason, quite simply unjustifiable (the loss of original sound mixes).
It's as if it became policy at some point to give with one hand (a complete cut of Licence To Kill, more extras), but to make sure that they took something away with the other, to ensure healthy sales of the HD versions in the future.
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