DVD Review HTF REVIEW: Li'l Abner (1 Viewer)

[TedD]

What happened to the bass on the audio track?

The fact that the original was optical should actually allow better bass since optical tracks are capable of flat response down to DC. (Well 1 or 2 Hz, but close enough...)

The VHS I have of this title has better audio than this DVD!!

Ted

 

[ArthurMy]

Again, I just have to sit and scratch my head. I've had the VHS for years, and the audio is about as good as the image, that is to say it's not too good. The sound on MY DVD is terrific - mono, but terrific.

 

[William Miller]

I love this movie! I have seen it many times in many ways over the years.

This DVD captures the eye-popping color perfectly. I wish there were not so many moments of picture fluttering or pulsing but it does not detract too much from the overall beauty.

The sound is a disappointment. It is not very dynamic and is very thin sounding to my ears. I don't know exactly what is missing, maybe it is some bass, maybe it's something else. Paramount has really improved their visual quality in recent months but at the same time, their audio quality has been dropping.

There is one thing about Abner that always annoys me when I watch it. There are way too many laugh pauses and double takes that the actors were forced to do. When you see that sort of thing with a big audience in a theater, they are not as obtrusive as they are when you are in your own private home theater. This type of thing is standard in many movies to help prevent laughter from drowning out the next lines of dialog but I just think they overdid it on this one.

 

[Everett S.]

What about "Vertigo"? Which is stereo on DVD and was a Vista Vision release.

 

[Joe Caps]

two things - Vertigo is a REMIX done for the 70mm reissue and is a disaster in every sense.

High Society had NOTHING recorded in stereo but the music originally. Dialogue was recorded in mono and so was the sound effects. High Society is a remix done for video - another Vertigo if you will.

 

[ArthurMy]

" There is one thing about Abner that always annoys me when I watch it. There are way too many laugh pauses and double takes that the actors were forced to do. When you see that sort of thing with a big audience in a theater, they are not as obtrusive as they are when you are in your own private home theater. This type of thing is standard in many movies to help prevent laughter from drowning out the next lines of dialog but I just think they overdid it on this one."

Well, I just don't think Panama and Frank were sitting there projecting ahead forty plus years to a time when people would be watching these films on DVD. They cut the film as it should have been cut for that time - and every one of those moments you speak of played beautifully in the theater with an audience (with many of the double takes doubling the laugh before it), which is, of course, how most comedies were meant to be seen. They don't know anything about this in today's comedies which is why today's comedies rarely, if ever, double and triple laughs. They get their one measly yock and then it's on to the next and the next. Give me Panama and Frank, Billy Wilder, Lubitsch, or Sturges any day, and they all let their comedy breathe and had reactions that doubled and tripled the laugh before.

 

[John Whittle]

TedD,

While this may be true in theory, it is NOT true in practice. (And if it wasn't recorded in the channel originally ....)

Check the Academy Curve for optical sound and you see where the roll-off is for both ends of the spectrum (hint: it ain't very good).

Remember Loren Ryder (later of Ryder Sound in Hollywood) was director of Paramount Sound at this time (he also was instrumental in VistaVision and the use Perspecta (sp?) which used low frequency to key the decoder to move the mono sound from speaker to speaker--a system used by Paramount and MGM to counter Fox's magnetic Cinemascope system).

John

 

[Jefferson]

My favorite is the double meaning in the lyric,
"I'd rather watch Daisy's (daisies)grow"



I am part of the generation that never knew this comic strip. (I was a child in the 70's and i heard about it but never ever saw it).
It makes it very difficult to enjoy this movie the way an afficanado of the strip would.

Still, the songs are a treat, and there is much to enjoy.
The soundtrack LP was indeed in stereo (my folks had it).
Sad that the film is not.

 

[TedD]

John, the academy curve was for playback, and has very little, if anything to do with what is on the track. (The exception being a few prints that have a very prominent HF boost to overcome the rolloff in the academy curve. I have run optical prints without the academy curve and they are very rich in bass. I have also run a couple of prints that require an extreme HF rolloff to sound balanced. The pipe organ in "Shoes Of the Fisherman" is very impressive on an optical track.

I also have a PerspectaSound decoder and 20 or so PerspectaSound trailers.

There was a theater chain in Hawaii that didn't subscribe to the academy curve and coincidentally played all the Paramount releases.

It wasn't uncommon for me to be able to actually feel the PerspectaSound keying tones.

If the PerspectaSound decoder were to be designed today, it would probably use either a brick wall filter at 50Hz or notch filters at 30, 35, & 40 Hz to eliminate the keying tones. (At least, those are the mods I made to mine.)

To me, "Lil Abner" doesn't have any low end at all, probably nothing below 150 Hz or so.

Perspecta doesn't account for that, as a 60Hz filter would be sufficient to eliminate the keying tones, which by the way were already 20 db or so below the program.

Ted

 

[Joe Caps]

John Whittle asserts that Paramount and MGM used perspecta to battle foxs four channel stereo process. This is true for Paramoutn, but not MGM who used fox mag stereo on many of their major productions.
Many MGM films have a perspecta logo but this does not mean that it was meant to bwe projected in Perspecta.
Both MGM and col;umbia used perspecta on their scope mag stereo prints. this was so that if a mag stereo system in the theater malfunctioned, the theater owenr could swith to the perspecta backup track while ttrying to fix the main stereo problem.

 

[Greg_M]

I've watched this four times already. The picture really does look good and the colors really pop.



Bullmoose: You actually paralyze with your eyes?

Evil Eye Fleagle: It is know in paralyzing circles as Fleagle’s famous fabulous factorizing whammy. I lets fly a triple whammy which hits the fleeing Yokum snack in the back. His bone marrow freezes. His pancreas petrifies. All his red corpuses, white corpuses stand stock still and stupidly stare at each other.

 

[John Whittle]

TedD

The "Academy Curve" was the whole chain not just the playback curve. I have the Academy report (I think it actually dates to 1939 with minor revisions) but there are also problems with the optical recorder as well, not to mention MTF of the recording film stock. Density tracks suffered from ribbon clash, Area tracks had resonance problems. In any event if you could listen to the original tracks you'd find that the production tracks are "eq'd" before they hit the dubbing stage (at least back in the 50s and earlier).

I should clarify my remarks about Perspecta. Back in the 50s the term "stereo" didn't automatically mean two or more recorded channels, it meant direction sound. Binaural was the term for two channel recordings. It was far cheaper for a distributor to make optical sound prints than magnetic sound prints since the latter needed stripping at an additional cost and then sounding (the term for re-recording the sound onto the print).

When the Fox Mag-Optical prints appeared (Fox at first refused to put optical on Cinemascope and the aspect ratio of the picture was 2.55:1) half of the optical track was covered with one of the mag stripes greatly increasing the noise level of that optical track.

I don't know of any picture that was release originally with a perspecta optical track and mag, but the optical would have been a very poor listening experience in the theatre.

I have no direct knolwedge of the various theatres that TedD mentions, but after the initial introduction of Cinemascope, the standards were relaxed and I'm sure there were independent theatres that did almost anything.

For futher information, find Frayne & Wolfe's "Elements of Sound Recording".

John

 

[Joe Caps]

Have to disagree with you on Fox and Optical tracks. Almost all Fox scope films were available with optical only tracks if need be. All of my pressbooks for Fox films say so - films avbaialble in optical mono, single mag mono and four channel mag stereo.
This created a lot fo inventory so when Fox developed magoptical print(first use - middle of 1956 for Bus Stop) it saved on inventory.
But perspecta was constantly in use as a backup track on both mgm and columbia mag stereo prints.

 

[John Whittle]

Joe,

You are no doubt correct. The original specs and licensing for Cinemascope didn't allow for it and I have forgotten how long it lasted (it was a bit before my time). There was also a budget requirement and all the picture originally had to be in color.

As for Columbia and MGM and perspecta on mag/op prints, that's the difference between engineering and practice. It's not something I would have done but that doesn't mean it wasn't or couldn't be done. The signal to noise ratio really goes bad when you cover up half the optical track. That was one of the problems that Dolby overcame with the SVA tracks. The concept of SVA wasn't new, it had been shown in the 40s and 50s and was even one choice Fox dismissed for Cinemascope. It was the NR of Dolby that made it practicable.

The bottom line in all of this is you really don't know what is in the vaults until you get in the vaults and see what was made. I was doing a stereo four track picture over at Todd-AO at the same time Warner Bros was re-issuing Camelot and they were taking all the 70mm roadshow prints and phsically cutting them and then resounding the prints. They were having trouble degaussing the prints and getting good tracks on them but at least they hadn't cut the negative for the release. (We kept shuffling reels between my picture and theirs in the screening room). BTW Todd had a matrix patch to use the 4-track print master for the 6 track 70mm release print so no new print master was dubbed for the 70mm version.

John

 

[TedD]

A brief excerpt from an interview with Ioan Allen of Dolby:

http://www.editorsguild.com/newslett...allen_one.html
The academy curve was to be measured at the output of the power amplifier with a multifreq test film played back in the theater. That is the only spec I have ever seen, and Ioan Allen's comments above leads me to beleive that an external filter was used to simulate the academy curve in the mixing room, rather than imposing the curve on the actual optical track itself.

And yes, optical recorders had issues, both variable density and variable area, much like the cutting heads on record mastering lathes had issues.

I specifically remember a trailer I had for "Were Not Dressing" made by Paramount 1934 that had significant low bass and a reasonable high end. Unfortunately, being nitrate, it's long gone from my collection. I have listened to many other films from the 40's and early 50's that have good bass and a resonable high end, certainly nothing like the results of an academy curve.

Anyhow, back to topic at hand: it took 20 DB boost at 50 Hz sloping up to 0 DB at 1K Hz to restore a decent balance to "Lil Abner" and make the result pleasing to listen to.

All in all, it's a good sounding track once it's bass deficiency is take care of.

Ted

 

[ArthurMy]

You haz spoken!

 

[Greg_M]

Joe Caps -

I think you mentioned you were working on a laserdisc version of "Li'l Abner" back when you were with Pioneer. I remember you saying that the song "Otherwise" was filmed and sung by Abner and the version in the film is actually a reprise with Daisy Mae.

Did Paramount film this number as well as "Unneccessary Town" and "Oh, Happy Day" the former appears on the soundtrack album, and the later is in the original screenplay (when Mammy Yokun is conjuring (over a steaming pot) up to Washington) and is listed as one of the songs in the Pressbook.

 

[Joe Caps]

from what paperwork I have seen both Otherwise and Unnecessary Town were both filmed but no longer exist.