SOUTH PACIFIC comes to BD (1 Viewer)

If the rumour mill at digitalbits is true, around Easter next year, one of my all time favorites, the 1958 South Pacific, comes to hi- def. I wonder whether they willl include the longer version with seemless branching. However,one thing they must drop is that "commentary " from someone called Richard Barrios which must be the most incompetent commentary track ever put down. Full of mistakes and nonsense it belongs in the garbage can.But the thought of that 70mm picture and sound in hi-def has made my day.

Amazon has the art work for FOX's coming Blu-Ray release of "South Pacific" 1958 - though no release date is set at this time

Also up is the art for "GIGI" with a release date of Dec 16th - that's tomorrow

Warner has the art (but no release dates yet) for both the Blu-Ray and Standard DVD's of "The Wizard of OZ" and "Gone With the Wind" - both box sets (like the "I Am Legend" release), though no dates or art for "An American in Paris"

The GIGI blu-ray listed with a release date of Dec. 16 is an import.

greg I'm confused about what your trying to tell us.

are you saying amazon has links up to pre order these movies?

can you add the links to the pages you have mentioned in your first post?

Here's the link to the South Pacific page @ amazon with the artwork.

Looks pretty crappy considering the film involved. The two principals don't look "real." They look more like a stylized artist's rendition than anything else. Brazzi looks like maybe the funeral home has been working on him...

thats probably just a mock up.
this amazon page is also nothing but a place holder for if the movie ever gets released to blu.
amazon has hundreds of these pages.
they usually don't mean anything and is no indication of a future release.

edited to add that this doesn't apply to South Pacific on blu as there is an apparent release on the way according to "The Bits".
But for tons of other films amazon has these place holders.

I'm surprised they didn't get the still-alive Mitzi Gaynor to do a commentary track instead.

Guys,
Yesterday morning, I had a release date of 03-31-09 listed in the Blu-ray Release Schedule.


Edit: Just a few minutes ago, I found another confirmation of the 03-31-09 release date.


http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content/id...-in-march.html




Crawdaddy

Great news, here is hoping that Fox will give us a quality release of a 70mm movie this time. The Sand Pebbles and The Day the Earth stood still both look great and I have high hopes for South Pacific to also look that good.

On the one hand I'm happy to see a vintage R&H scope musical make it's way out. On the other, I would rather see Oklahoma, especially a proper transfer/digital restoration of the Todd AO version. Sound Of Music is probably a more logical choice over either, but IIRC that's already been rumoured for next year. SP does have some spectacular location footage on display-unfortunately a lot of it is frequently buried under those God-awful color filters. I'm sure I'll pick it up though.

SOUTH PACIFIC is enjoying renewed success on Broadway now, so maybe that's why it's coming first.

And -- in the Total Fantasy Dept. -- wouldn't it be nice if they digitally reversed the effect of Josh Logan's ridiculous color filters?

Ah. It IS hard to have a conversation about South Pacific without bringing up the dreaded use of color by Josh Logan. I've always hated them, too...and can only imagine how terrific the film could look on blu-ray without them. I will still get this, of course, but always wonder about what might have been.

Removing the filters cannot be done. It was done with individual frames (someone on Photoshop), revealing how bad the weather was during much of shooting (which may have been a factor in their use) but not with a moving picture. All they can do is tone it down a little at the color correction stage, making it closer to the subtler change in color that was intended. Ironic how a film that denounces judging people because of their color gets criticized for ITS colors.


I'd pay extra for a music-only track in its place. I really hated that commentary.

And there is going to be a BD-exclusive documentary. This should be interesting.

My main worry is that we get another Patton/Longest Day fiasco on our hands. It would also be nice if they could do any additional clean-up work on the formerly missing scenes, but they probably did all they could with them.

From an article in the American Cinematographer published at the time of the film's release, the reason for those filtered sequences was indeed given as the bad weather the crew encountered on Hawaii.They feared that scenes shot under those conditions would look flat and dull.
Yes a music track would be fantastic as well as a commentary track from Mitzi Gaynor in place of that gibberish from Barrios.

That is interesting as in his autobiography Joshua Logan admitted that he was very surprised when he saw how those supposedly very subtle filtering effects turned out - the filters had already been in place for most of the filming and so their effect could not be undone later and he wished he would not have used those filters.

I saw a new 70mm print of the movie theatrically in 2006 and have to say the filtered scenes looked very bad. I can understand that Mr. Logan was not too happy with how his movie looked when released.

I wonder if they can't digitally colorize the added scenes. The poor color quality of them does mar the flow of the extended version. And yeah, I couldn't believe my ears when I heard that stupid Barrios commentary. There--and in the filmed documentary extras--he came across as a spazzy, wild-eyed, overly-enthusiastic dilettante and film "buff" rather than the seriousfilm "historian" he purports to be. Yeah, you know--we don't need film fans and apologists doing commentary on these flicks. I'd rather have seen the robots from Mystery Science Theater do the commentary on South Pacific.

I don't think we will have to worry about this. The Patton / Longest Day fiasco was clearly visible in the DVD releases of those titles. SouPac's DVD release, on the other hand reveals an excellent quality transfer.

The title I would be very afraid of would be the 70mm version of Oklahoma! which has probably one of the worst looking transfers ever commited to DVD. The resulting feedback was also totally ignored by Fox, much as like what happened to the Patton / Longest Day BD releases.

Vern

Fox seems to have a track record of not offically acknowledging problems with transfers and still turn out quality transfers after such criticism has been recieved. That was the case after Episode 1 DVD release where all subsequent titles looked much better and I hope that this will happen with South Pacific, too. Now add the fact that Fox has already released some very good looking classic titles and I am cautiously optimistic that South Pacific will be the winner that we already should have had with Patton.

Me, too. Since all the other R&H movies have been restored, hopefully this will get the attention it needs. And hopefully The Sound of Music will get a new transfer; I assume the reason this wasn't remastered, as all the others were, back in 2005 is that this was the only one with an extant 16x9 transfer.