Universal releasing Non-OAR dvds including "The Forbin Project, "Charley Varrick" (1 Viewer)

[Jay E]

Seymour

Your post made me laugh & cry at the same time.

 

[John Stell]

Well I went through the disc yesterday. What a cheap-jack effort. The label on the disc itself looks like something you make on your home computer: white label with black lettering. There is no menu (at least I couldn't access one.) The movie just starts up after the Universal logo. The opening credits are in widescreen, and then the film switches quickly to full frame. The film is probably pan & scam but I noticed little actual scanning.

 

[John Hodson]

Good grief, it actually gets worse...

 

[Jesse Skeen]

Well, that's how all movies SHOULD start....

 

[John Stell]

I'm talking about the DVD logo, not the theatrical logo. Basically you get two back-to-back logos.

 

[Bob Graham]

BUt look on the bright side: Universal discs with no forced trailers :b

 

[Dick]

I have e-mailed to Univesal Home Video a link to this thread. Hope they bother to look it over. I will continue sending it to them weekly as it grows longer. Maybe they'll actually pull a "reversal of a Custer decision" and decide to issue widescreen editions...?

 

[Jeff_HR]

Too, too bad!!!!!!

Well LONG LIVE Widescreen Laserdisc. And stick it to a dumb management at Universal.

 

[Peter M Fitzgerald]

Well, looks like it's time for me to fire up the ol' DVD recorder and burn my widescreen COLOSSUS LD to DVD-R. I would've gladly forked over the cash for a nice, legit, anamorphic widescreen COLOSSUS DVD from Universal (and still would, if one ever reaches market), but they have blundered badly.

More's the pity, since things seemed to be going pretty well with Universal's recent catalog releases on DVD, until this wretchedness.

For instance: the cheesy man-into-snake flick, SSSSSSS (1973), isn't 1/10th the movie COLOSSUS is, yet it got a widescreen DVD release from Universal just a couple of months ago. And I bought SSSSSSS; goofy fun, all the better in its proper aspect ratio.

Shame on you, Universal, for this thoughtless turn for the worse, with pan-scan/open matte releases like COLOSSUS, ICEMAN and CHARLEY VARRICK. No OAR, definitely no sale.

 

[Gordon McMurphy]

This is so depressing. Someone at Universal has lost their brain. If they ever had one.

:frowning:

 

[Bill Huelbig]

I was really looking forward to seeing COLOSSUS in widescreen for the first time ... probably never will, now. Unless Pete Apruzzese gets a print for the Lafayette Theater in Suffern, NY someday!

 

[JeffMc]

This makes absolutely no sense. Who at Universal is making such decisions? Heads should roll!

Even at a low price of around $5, there's no way I'll buy COLOSSUS this way. I would have paid premium price for a proper presentation, but there's no way I'll support this kind of shoddy P&S release. I know some fans will want to pick it up anyway because that's all there is and it is cheap, but we need to show Universal we won't stand for it. I'm sure it's just a dumb catalog title to those Universal execs (how do these nitwits get their jobs anyway?) and they probably don't even really care how well it does sell, but at least we can get satisfaction knowing that we can make them have warehouses full of unsold P&S COLOSSUS discs. Piles and piles of shiny silver landfill.

 

[AndrewWickliffe]

Universal probably culls them from people thrown out of film schools for complaining about black bars...

 

[Brent Avery]

Geez, I really wanted to add this to my collection - but I did pickup Missing as well as Cloak and Dagger which were under a " Studio Selections " series that I assume Universal also used with Colossus. Try to figure out why Missing and Cloak & Dagger are anamorphic ( 1:85 ) and another title The Cure - also 1:85 is released full frame along with Colossus. What a hit and miss lineup! Two out of four - not bad! Makes you wonder if they just release a widescreen film p&s by having a draw out of a hat. Well, I sure hope that they listen and correct this problem. If they can release the Airport series OAR than what gives?

 

[Michael Elliott]

For those interested, all of these will be in a certain $5.50 bin (including the OAR titles).

 

[Mike DB]

There have been some really great titles released in this budget line. It's sad that apparently Universal is just going with the cheapest transfers they have access to. There's no consistency, some titles are coming out OAR widescreen enhanced, others appear in full screen horrible pan and scan process.

It's frustrating because now that these movies are in print on DVD, it's unlikely they will get released again in any better version for a long time to come.

My question is if any of these titles are actually edited versions. To me, as horrible as the full screen process is, if there is no other choice, I may have to accept a full screen version simply because i want to see the movie.
It would, however, be unacceptable to find out that the movies are actually cut versions, edited for TV broadcast or for some other reason.

Does anyone know if any of the releases in this series have been edited differently from the theatrical versions? (and for the sake of saving time, let's agree that a film being shown not in it's OAR is technically an "edited" version but that I'm referring to time edits where actual scenes are deleted or trimmed)

 

[Dewitte]

Does anybody know where I can find a laserdisc copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project? I'd rather have a homemade DVD-R than a panned-and-scanned abomination of this classic. If anyone knows, please drop me a line or PM me.

De

 

[Bob Graham]

For those of us with DVD Burners, CHARLEY VARRICK will be shown letterboxed on Turner Classic Movies on Monday, January 31 at 11:15 PM (EST) and on March 17 at 9:30 PM (EST).

 

[Jeff Willis]

Hello all, from another Charley Varrick fan. I still have my LD WS copy (thank goodness ) I have a question about open matte vs pan/scan. What's the difference between these formats? I read a CV review at Amazon from a guy that recommended this DVD and said that there is no scene/picture lost from its pan/scan format. I was somewhat confused at that guy's review post. Here's the complete post from Amazon:
[start]
According to www.dvdtalk.com the picture was shot in 4:3 and then cropped on the top and bottom to get the widescreen 1.85:1 format. A bit counter-intuitively, but with this full-frame version you actually get more picture than with the widescreen version, namely on the top and the bottom. Nothing is lost on the left or right.
[stop]

What do you all think?

 

[seanOhara]

What he's saying is the film isn't pan and scan but open matte. This is fairly common for movies that aren't anamorphic widescreen -- the 35mm frame is actually squarish and the widescreen is created by matting off the top and bottom of the picture. Some directors only care about the part of the frame that will be shown in theaters, and they don't care if boom mics or other equipment is visible in the rest of the frame, but others "protect" for full screen by keeping the entire frame clear. Some full-screen DVDs are made by opening the matte, but while there is more picture on screen, the extra image is superfluous and ruins the composition. It's just as bad as pan and scan, just in different ways.