A Few Words About A few words about...™ Peter Pan -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[telzall]

The more I consider an "archival" transfer to DVD/blu ray the more enthusiastic I am!! I would be genuinely proud to have many of the Disney classics in that form.

 

[MatthewA]

If they still have the raw 4k negative scans, they can start from those to do a less intrusive restoration with more accurate color/contrast. Dirt, dust, and scratches don't need to be retained. Subtle details like sparkles, reflections, and paint strokes do. Film grain does. The goal is to recreate the original theatrical aesthetic as much as possible with modern digital technology.

The surround sound remixes are not something I'm as upset about unless they're really poorly done. The best ones sound quite good, but they should never be substitutes for the original mono tracks. The original mono track on the Dumbo Blu-ray was one of the best quality mono tracks I've ever heard, and they had to source it from an original film print due to something really stupid the studio did in the 1950s involving original sound elements of this and other films.

 

[Dick]

Thousands of people buy the Disney Blurays.
If we had the original grainy films released I suspect Disney would receive thousands of emails from angry consumers that the classic animation film doesn't look like a brand new Pixar film.

Wah-h-h! Damn, I'm tired of this dumbing-down of everything because a faction of this country moans and cries when they can't have something just the way they want it. What about the rest of us? Disney now caters exclusively the former while ignoring the latter, although it has been largely we who made them into the megabillion-dollar company it now is.

 

[telzall]

Wah-h-h! Damn, I'm tired of this dumbing-down of everything because a faction of this country moans and cries when they can't have something just the way they want it. What about the rest of us? Disney now caters exclusively the former while ignoring the latter, although it has been largely we who made them into the megabillion-dollar company it now is.

Falling on deaf ears; preaching to the choir; but, I love it!! The future is in the past!

 

[PMF]

Let's not forget that this stuff isn't new at Disney; for even Roy had once resigned.

 

[MatthewA]

Twice, actually. His first resignation was from the board in 1984 to avoid a conflict of interest in the series of events that led to Ron Miller's ouster and the ascent of Eisner, Katzenberg, and Wells to the top positions. The second was to stop the monster he helped create in the process.

 

[Dick]

I wonder when Disney will take heed with the handling of their own heritage.
Such alterations are not a sign of advancement.
For my money, these Disney decisions are a reflection of the Peter Pan philosophy that states:
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up".
Maybe 2025 will be better. Until then, No Sale..."Not me".

The alterations are unique versions of the films from which they are bastardized. The original, grain-intact, unfucked-with materials are still safely in their vaults, I'm sure, and so aren't technically lost, except to fans who collect these ageless films on video. I suppose there is a modicum of comfort in that. A very small modicum...

 

[MatthewA]

Was Peter Pan the first Disney animated feature to use safety film, or was it Alice in Wonderland? IIRC, 1950 or 1951 was the changeover year, but Alice had already started before that.

 

[PMF]

I

The alterations are unique versions of the films from which they are bastardized. The original, grain-intact, unfucked-with materials are still safely in their vaults, I'm sure, and so aren't technically lost, except to fans who collect these ageless films on video. I suppose there is a modicum of comfort in that. A very small modicum...

"It's a small modicum, after all".

 

[PMF]

Do we yet have a name for Disney's propensities towards quizzical BD transfers?
Perhaps, from here on in, we ought to refer to this pattern as The New Peter Pan Syndrome.

 

[MatthewA]

I

"It's a small modicum, after all".

I prefer Animaniacs' take on the size of the world.



Or The Simpsons'*



The same year Scar called them out on it in The Lion King, the Sherman Brothers themselves showed in Beverly Hills Cop III they had a sense of humor about that thing they unleashed upon the world:



Sorry, but I'm on Scar's side this time.

*The real thing was sponsored by Pepsi. Joan Crawford was still part of the company at the time.

 

[Spencer Draper]

An archive label of sorts would be a dream. They already do the Movie Club exclusives and have started doing more new BD releases so it is feasible. Admittedly the first thing I would want wouldn't be a feature at all but would be the Zorro series.

Aside from the Laserdisc release of Peter Pan which DVD and/or blu ray would you, or anybody, recommend, based on faithfulness to original, intended, color palette?

Well usually the earlier the transfer is the less changed it is. Many have gotten all of the original Gold Collection DVDs to have less altered versions on DVD but those were largely reissues of the last Laserdisc master.

Thanks a lot. Now you've inspired me to buy an external upconverter so I can actually watch laserdiscs on my 1080p Epson projector without having everything squashed to 16x9. At least it's better than the cropping we were subjected to in the 1980s theatrical reissues.



Those stately, extra-laden, "restored and remastered" CAV laserdisc box sets of Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and the double feature of Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros were about $99.99 new. And for the most coveted titles, the lack of copy protection meant a year's lag between VHS and laserdisc.

The extra-less CLV equivalents were about $39.99 new, while a a two-disc CLV release was $49.99. And their prices were still less than Fox's. That is, if you were lucky enough to live where they sold and rented them.

Will the inevitable 4k releases be plagued with the same smear-storation and oversaturation mentality? I hope not. Hopefully they will get right what the current wave of releases got wrong, and hopefully it won't be limited only to the most popular titles, the 1% of the Disney catalog.

If you want to talk about a wide variance of colors on the same film, compare the opening of the 1980s Bambi video to the THX-approved 1990s one. By that time it's painfully obvious that they've started freeze-framing the titles, and why the RKO logo has never been restored to this particular film, nor even a Buena Vista from the 1950s/1960s, is beyond me.

I broke down and bought the original CAV laserdisc from eBay and did an A/B comparison, which is not easy to do on my receiver (Sony STR-DH820) because of the lag time of switching between sources. I watched the first few minutes of the film. Even in Squeeze-O-Vision, the laserdisc wins on color even though the Blu-ray is sharper, and I'm projecting these onto a 136" constant image height screen, so every flaw, digital or analog, will show up. The LD doesn't have the same "airless" feeling, for lack of a better word, as the Blu-ray, since it hasn't been de-grained like almost every little piece of animation coming out of the studio since around 1994/1995 or so.

As I recall them, the very first wave of Disney home video transfers (1978-1982, which includes the MCA Discovision deal) were way too yellow and full of motion blur artifacts (film-to-video transfer machines with 3:2 pulldown to eliminate ghosting frames didn't come out until around 1982 or thereabout, IIRC). The overall transfer quality improved dramatically in the later part of the decade. The original c. 1980 film-to-video transfer of Bedknobs and Broomsticks was all that was on laserdisc before the 25th anniversary restoration/reconstruction of the original cut, and the transfer was so bad (and time-compressed from 117 to 112 minutes, and though the VHS of that same initial transfer had the Buena Vista logo, the laserdisc didn't) that I honestly preferred to watch it on later VHS releases or The Disney Channel cablecasts which used later, clearer, more colorful remasters. Prior to 1984's release of 1973's Robin Hood (even that deserved a better Blu-ray than it got), the only animated features from "The Canon" that got released during this period stateside were Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and a VHS-only Fun and Fancy Free that still made a lie to the Eisner-sans-Katzenberg-and-Wells-era claim that the 50th anniversary reissue was "for the first time ever." Even though both the whole and the sum parts had been made available on tape, and the two components were separately on laserdisc before that*. Actual short cartoons, as opposed to the sum parts of 1940s package features, were another matter. Those got plenty of laserdisc exposure in the 1980s, yet after that Mickey Mouse box set in the 1990s, not much until Walt Disney Treasures filled in the gap on DVD while Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons got plenty of pre-DVD LD releases. The less said about The Spirit of Mickey, the better.

After having gotten to see the "unrestored" 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm at the Castro in San Francisco, I think it's time the Disney classics got that kind of treatment. I would love to see a comprehensive 4k UHD series of the entire animated canon, even the flops, released the way Trancas suggested. Uncut, unmolested, with only the artifacts of age removed, and with non-fluff extras; i.e., what the Blu-rays should have been all along. Younger fans who grew up with the artificially sweetened over-digitized versions will likely be in for a shock, but they'll come around. Older ones who know the difference won't be disappointed. Whenever I watch that Cinderella comparison, my eyes always snap back to the Technicolor print scan where the colors seem more naturalistic, nuanced, and lifelike and less Crayola-ish. Even the darkness of the scene makes sense since it's night time and it shouldn't be anywhere near as bright as the Blu-ray makes it look; where's the light coming from? Hopefully the cinematic rescue aid society that keeps these films from being lost to time will listen and finally come through.

And they need to stop using the alleged ignorance of children (more like ignorant or careless adults projecting those qualities onto a straw figure of their own creation) as an excuse to cut every corner.

*The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad was another matter; there, they already broke them up from the get-go into two separate releases paired from other cartoons, the full version with Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone's wraparounds remaining unreleased until an early 1990s laserdisc release.

No problem! Glad to see someone else getting bitten by the bug-although it might be a bad thing since I got bitten rather badly. With a really good player it is remarkable what can be done with upscaling this format in 2018. If you look on the Laserdisc Forever page on facebook there are numerous examples of people doing so with high quality equipment and ex-broadcast professional gear-even some who dabble with MUSE on the LDDB forum. Many HT receivers now have 4K upscalers that have exceptional results with SD materials. As long as there's a good comb filter somewhere in your setup and your player has a quality video output then the results can be quite good. I run my Panasonic LX-900 directly into my XBR960 HDCRT and on good transfers they look remarkably DVD like.
I've found a few of the super fancy Disney boxsets and hope to get the rest of them even though this was in the period where they had already begun making changes. The boxes themselves are works of art and some of the best packaging ever to come out on the format.
As said by some others the RKO logo is reinstated on the 1997 "restored" Bambi for some reason.

I also can agree that Disney took some time to get transfers that were halfway decent. Even then you could have oddities: I remember putting on the Archive Laserdisc of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and wondering just why it looked so poor-and for some reason the curtains in the opening tiles are a completely different color.

And don't feel bad; I've done toggling between sources on my own setup innumerable times to look at differences only to then realize I've spent far too long huddled over the monitor babbling like an absent minded professor.

 

[MatthewA]

Even some of the LD misfires from that era have good things about them, including the two you mentioned. The 55th anniversary Bambi looks awful but, as you said, is the only source of the RKO logo and has a music-and-effects track. Meanwhile, the exclusive archive 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is the only source for Operation: Undersea, the Disneyland TV episode. The DVD is a superior representation of the film, and it is chock full of extras, but that's not one of them. There was a late 1990s box set of early Disneyland TV shows, too, and some are only available on that set. The virtual disappearance of all but the most ubiquitous examples of old-school Disney from TV since 2002* hasn't helped matters, as it's made it hard for newer fans to even know these things exist.

With the Exclusive Archive Collection and Walt Disney Treasures (and to a lesser extent, the Signature series that consisted of True Life Adventures DVDs; one wonders whether they'll ever re-release the People and Places series, which produced several Oscar winners and nominees and was mostly in CinemaScope, or delve into the studio's history with educational films outside of the excellently put together war propaganda and space travel collections), they have precedent and experience for what to do and what not to do. They keep much, much more than they throw out, and the live-action films are not nearly as heavy handed in their restorations, although sometimes they reveal a little too much with process work. They are capable of greatness and they've proven so time and time again. So I haven't lost all hope that more rational thinking will prevail, and perhaps someday, the dreams that we wish will come true…

Meanwhile, the music department never fails to amaze me with improvements in audio quality and coming up with comprehensive, remastered soundtracks for both popular and lesser-known movies (both the in-house Legacy Collection and Intrada's release of live action deep cuts and fan favorites). IIRC, the choice between stereo remixes and mono originals started in the later laserdisc years when Image Entertainment was actually distributing their discs.

*Now enough time has passed that I hear the more recent shows that pushed them out referred to as "old school." Uh uh. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when they're talking about "the good old days" of Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph.

 

[David Norman]

Even some of the LD misfires from that era have good things about them, including the two you mentioned. The 55th anniversary Bambi looks awful but, as you said, is the only source of the RKO logo and has a music-and-effects track. .

Maybe I misunderstand, but the new Signature Bluray of Bambi also has the RKO logo opening

 

[MatthewA]

Then that would be a change from the older Diamond Edition Blu-ray, the one I own, which didn't.

As for whether the actual transfer different in any other way, the only screenshots I could find didn't suggest much of a radical change. Except one of the features that didn't make the jump was the one talking about the restoration of the film.

 

[David Norman]

Then that would be a change from the older Diamond Edition Blu-ray, the one I own, which didn't.

As for whether the actual transfer different in any other way, the only screenshots I could find didn't suggest much of a radical change. Except one of the features that didn't make the jump was the one talking about the restoration of the film.

It is different than the Diamond. Otherwise the transfers are pretty much identical.

I've never paid any attention to Logos in general, but apparently it's a bone of contention for many so it was discussed in some forums far more than would seem reasonable. To me it's like the missing/censored Centaur in Fantasia -- it's there, but it doesn't really change anything for me

 

[Brian Kidd]

The problem is that, though folks who care enough about film to post on a message board are still such a small number of people when compared to the total movie-purchasing public, that there's not much chance of Disney recouping the costs of a separate transfer and disc run. On top of that, the purchase of physical media is consistently declining. Now that studios have found that people are willing to pay $10-$25 for access to digital versions, they aren't putting as much effort into the disc versions in a lot of cases. Heck, on a whim I bought a used DVD copy of the recent Batman: Gotham by Gaslight animated feature and the MPEG encoding was so bad that it often looked like a VCD, there was so much macroblocking. It was the worst studio-released DVD (that wasn't part of a cheap multipack) that I've probably ever seen. If I had paid full price for it, I'd have raised holy heck.

It all comes down to the fact that Disney (and a lot of other studios) doesn't care what we think. They are going to continue to sell transfers of their animated output with boosted colors and a complete absence of film grain, even when it often erases lines and brush strokes that remind you that each of these masterpieces were all the more wonderful because every second consisted of 24 detailed paintings, all done by hand. Why? They sure look bright and colorful on the TV that Middle America bought down at the Walmart and left with the settings all blown out.

Sadly, there's nothing we can do.

 

[MatthewA]

Sadly, there's nothing we can do.

Yes there is. Cut them off financially, like I did. Stop subsidizing shoddy work.

 

[Robert Harris]

Yes there is. Cut them off financially, like I did. Stop subsidizing shoddy work.

Not sure that I categorize as shoddy work.

More oriented toward a different customer base, while concurrently being disrespectful of the studios’s original ethos.

 

[Mark-P]

Meanwhile, the exclusive archive 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is the only source for Operation: Undersea, the Disneyland TV episode. The DVD is a superior representation of the film, and it is chock full of extras, but that's not one of them. .

The complete episode is available for purchase (in HD too!) from iTunes or Vudu, but at the ridiculous price of $14.99. I can’t imagine why Disney thinks a single episode of their classic tv show is worth the same amount as a feature film.