What's new

"Gone with the Wind" Blu-ray Questions (1 Viewer)

Colin Jacobson

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 19, 2000
Messages
13,303
I got the new 75th Anniversay Blu-ray box and needed a couple of questions answered:

1) Has there only been one transfer out prior to 2014? I'm pretty sure the 2009 70th Anniversary BD was the first BD for this film and the transfer used for the non-boxed set release but I'd like confirmation.

2) Could someone confirm the old BD's running time? The "new one" is 3:53:14.

I'm 99% sure the 75th Anniversary box just reuses the 2009 disc. It also opens with an ad for Blu-ray that seems kinda old to me...
 

Robert Harris

Archivist
Reviewer
Senior HTF Member
Joined
Feb 8, 1999
Messages
18,271
Real Name
Robert Harris
Colin Jacobson said:
I got the new 75th Anniversay Blu-ray box and needed a couple of questions answered:

1) Has there only been one transfer out prior to 2014? I'm pretty sure the 2009 70th Anniversary BD was the first BD for this film and the transfer used for the non-boxed set release but I'd like confirmation.

2) Could someone confirm the old BD's running time? The "new one" is 3:53:14.

I'm 99% sure the 75th Anniversary box just reuses the 2009 disc. It also opens with an ad for Blu-ray that seems kinda old to me...
There would be no reason for a new image harvest. Last one was superb.

One would wish to get the new set however, as there is no higher achievement, and nothing short of beating up one's wife, husband or significant other to get one on TMZ, than to be seen exiting a workout facility in West Hollywood, and holding a genuine simulated Rhett Butler handkerchief against one's nose.

Miley, eat your heart out...

RAH

RAH
 

Angelo Colombus

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 19, 2009
Messages
3,406
Location
Chicago Area
Real Name
Angelo Colombus
I agree with Robert that the 70th anniversary release was excellent and i have seen the movie many times so i guess it would be hard to improve the image on a future re-release.
 

Wayne_j

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Nov 7, 2006
Messages
4,898
Real Name
Wayne
A review on AVS indicated that it is the same encode. It is VC1 codec with Dolby True HD. Warner's encodes are currently AVC and DTS HDMA.
 

Colin Jacobson

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 19, 2000
Messages
13,303
Robert Harris said:
There would be no reason for a new image harvest. Last one was superb.
Not arguing they need a new transfer - just want to confirm that they've used the old one! :)
 

Dave B Ferris

Screenwriter
Joined
Apr 27, 2000
Messages
1,260
Apart from the quality, I thought Eric Scott Richard (my apologies if I've mangled the name) documented, in posts he shared on this forum, either missing or truncated scenes.

If I am remembering that correctly (or maybe I'm thinking of his posts about The Wizard of Oz), the pertinent question *could* be whether there have been any changes, which Colin may have referenced with his question about the running time.
 

Mark Collins

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2008
Messages
2,552
Real Name
Mark
I would love to be there but the 4 hours and 5 minutes is a bit long for me now. Last time I viewed the film on the big screen was 1999. The show airs twice more at my local theater. I am still thinking about it but just do not think I can do it.
 

Colin Jacobson

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Apr 19, 2000
Messages
13,303
Wayne_j said:
The only thing they really could have done is re-encode it with a higher bitrate.
I really would be surprised to learn this is anything other than a direct reproduction of the old disc. If it's not a replica, you'd think they'd leave off the "Blu-ray is awesome" ad at the beginning - or update it with movies newer than "10,000 BC" and "Dark Knight"! :lol:
 

Mark Mayes

Second Unit
Joined
Mar 14, 2004
Messages
271
Location
West Hollywood
Real Name
Mark Mayes
I am getting it, but was looking at the earlier release tonight and think it's unnecessary to do anything to it except take the yellow tint down a bit (I can do this myself.) The screening on Sunday in Burbank looked good, but a bit murky as projected.
 

Garysb

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 31, 2003
Messages
5,849
Apparently there is a new featurette but all videos from the 70th Anniversary set are carried over including the flipper version of :MGM: When The Lion Roars". This per Lou Lumenicks's column:
On the Blu-ray front, Warners’ “75th Anniversary Ultimate Edition” of “Gone With the Wind” utilizes the same superb transfer from the 70th anniversary Blu-ray, which I reviewed in 2009.
And despite what I was led to believe, it ports over ALL the previous special features — among them a two-hour making of documentary, one-hour profiles of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, as well as a 90-minute TV movie starring Tony Curtis as David O. Selznick — again in standard definition on a single Blu-ray disc.
Also back is a two-sided DVD containing the excellent six-hour documentary “MGM: When the Lion Roars,” narrated by Patrick Stewart.
There is one major new feature — a 27-minute featurette, “New South/Old South,” that turns out to be far more provocative than what sounded like a bland travelogue in Warner Home Video’s marketing materials, delving deeply into the problematic racial politics of “Gone With the Wind” and how they’re rooted in still-extant Southern fantasies about slavery and the Civil War.
The film “is a national epic in a sense for white Southerners,” says James C. Cobb of the University of Georgia, one of several academics who are interviewed in Gary Leva’s documentary.
He says the Oscar-winning classic “enshrines both the old South myth of elegance and gentility and the myth of the lost cause of the gallant outmanned confederates fighting to their last against Yankee invaders.”
Cobb complains that even his students are in denial about slavery as the driving force behind the South’s secession: “The first thing you have to do is destroy the ‘Gone With the Wind’ image of what the Civil War was about. There are so many people today, not just Southerners, who want to believe that it was about almost anything but else [but slavery].”
“Before the war, white southerners knew very well the war was fought for slavery,” explains Randy J. Sparks of Tulane University. “It’s only after their defeat that white southerners are able to create this prevailing myth that the war was not about slavery at all.”
As novelist Kathryn Stockett (“The Help”) puts it, the film “has the magical quality to actually alleviate a white Southerner’s guilt and make us believe that’s how it really was. You actually think for a second, ‘Wow, I wish those days really existed.’…You have these [slaves] who are working for these white families…as if they get a paycheck, and it’s something they choose to do.”
Cobb calls the film “seductive” and says, “it would have you believe that there could be these rich and powerful people who would never abuse that power — and the [slaves] who were exploited to create the wealth and sustain that power would never, for a second, resent it or hold a grudge.”
Lolis Eric Evie, a columnist for the New Orleans Times Picayune, says the film “attempts to have it both ways, portraying black people as being happy in the context of slavery. But they also have Ashley [Wilkes] saying, ‘I would have freed my slaves once my father died.’ Well if they were so happy, why would he want to free them?”
Some unreconstructed Southerners may be more comfortable with the other new special feature that shares the disc with “New South/Old South” — 12 minutes of newsreel footage, much of it unfamiliar, of the film’s Atlanta premiere and the gala events that preceded it in December 1939.
Besides the film’s stars and their spouses — Leslie Howard, who had returned to England immediately after war broke out that September is conspiculously absent — there are some unlikely participants as Claudette Colbert and bandleader Kay Kyser.
Besides the two new featurettes (both in HD on a separate disc), all that’s different this time around is a handsome new box cover, a profusely illustrated 36-page booklet on the film’s fashions by designer Austin Scarlett and a couple of premiums: a miniature music box that plays (what else?) “Tara’s Theme” and a replica of Rhett Butler’s handkerchief.
 

dana martin

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2003
Messages
5,722
Location
Norfolk, VA
Real Name
Dana Martin
the only way I am getting this again, is if Gable and Leigh show up at my house and perform it live, the last release was perfect then, and it's still perfect now!
 

Garysb

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Jul 31, 2003
Messages
5,849
The selling point of this release is that it is much cheaper for the same content as the 70th Anniversary edition. By the holidays it will probably be even cheaper. For anyone who doesn't have the earlier edition or who wants to give a gift to someone who doesn't have it, it is a bargain. This release was not meant for those who already purchased the 70th Anniversary edition. This discussion reminds me of the Looney Tunes threads where people complain about Warner re releasing the same cartoons again and again. Not much new here, time to move on.
 

Will Krupp

Senior HTF Member
Joined
Oct 2, 2003
Messages
4,014
Location
PA
Real Name
Will
dana martin said:
the only way I am getting this again, is if Gable and Leigh show up at my house and perform it live, the last release was perfect then, and it's still perfect now!

Word to the wise...if Clark and Viv show up at your door, DON'T answer it (RUN!!!!!!!)
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Latest Articles

Forum statistics

Threads
356,710
Messages
5,121,107
Members
144,146
Latest member
SaladinNagasawa
Recent bookmarks
1
Top