Disney’s Restoration of Dumbo and Efforts to Preserve Their Film Library - Page 4

No, I'm afraid for better and worse, I'm all digital projection. Our own Robert Harris mentioned to me he had a nice set that he donated to te Academy Library. UCLA has a lot of great Tech prints too if you're looking to find some to view. I'm sure private collectors like Mark Kausler have material.

It was my understanding, I believe from watching the extras on one of the dearly-departed Treasures sets, that Walt actually did the voice of Mickey for the interstitials on the Mickey Mouse Club and that it was the last time he ever did the voice. The Good Morning America clip linked to in the previous post indicated that was, in fact, Jimmy MacDonald. Am I just imagining things or did GMA make an error?

GMA is wrong. Walt came out of retirement, so to speak, for the Mickey Mouse Club interstitials, but Jimmy MacDonald had been doing it since Fun and Fancy Free in 1947. If you've seen those segments, you can really tell how smoking had affected Walt's voice; he could no longer do a falsetto as high as he used to.

 

How an ABC news show, of all things, got that wrong is beyond me.

 

And since you mentioned the Treasures sets, will there ever be anything similar in Blu-Ray? Hopefully they will be restored and not monkeyed around with. The two Silly Symphonies on the Dumbo Blu-Ray have some registration issues that stick out like a sore thumb in HD.

Watched Dumbo tonight. I understand the controversy about the noise removal, but these newest 4K sourced "renovations" don't seem to lose the texture of optical effects and filters. I'm not seeing blurring or smearing. For reference, I'm using a calibrated 46" LCD monitor - maybe it's more obvious on larger systems or projectors.

What really amazed me was the audio. I opted to watch it with the original mono track. This is one of the best monaural sound restorations I've heard. Wide range, no noise reduction artifacts from what I could hear, and ridiculously high fidelity.

There really aren't many optical effects in Dumbo. It was the "bargain basement" film of the big five.

I never quite got why the blu-ray release of Dumbo has the original mono audio as an option, but the option of the original mono sound for Alice in Wonderland was last featured on the 2004 DVD.

Does anyone know if this is the exact same transfer as the UK release from last year, i assume it is, i also assume but may be wrong that its the same encode and everything except the original mono track. ?

 

I hate to assume, but it has got me wondering.

Malcolm, DVD Beaver's review seemed to indicate as much.

I did, too, and I was really impressed with the sound quality, more than just about any pre-1950s film I've ever heard.

Most comic characters in classic films are caricatures. Willie Best's character in The Ghost Breakers (1940) was a caricature, but so is Jerry Lewis playing the same character 10 years later is Scared Stiff (1953). But because Jerry is white, its okay for him to play a bumbling goof. I've never really understood that. I fully understand that at the time bumbling goofs were probably the only representations of black people on the screen, but in this day and age I'm not sure why we can't enjoy these films at face value.

Besides Willie Best was far more talented than Jerry Lewis ever was!

Doug