Little House on the Prairie: building the best possible collection (2 Viewers)

[charlesgunn]

I've had the Imavision , UK and Dutch dvd sets over the years and I know the former had them the wrong way round . I assume they were in production order on the dvd .
Broadcast order is rarely the same as production order and in most cases , even with a show like LHoP there's rarely any plot points to force a running order except of course in this case.
My US set should be here in the next few days so it will be nice to have them correct

 

[charlesgunn]

Just over £15 delivered including expedited post to the UK from Amazon.com in 6 days - that's really good going.
Very quick browse of the discs and the 2 part episodes hold no bad surprises that we saw with Remember Me .
To Live With Fear ends with the caption "Next Week To Live with Fear Part 2".
Journey into Spring Part 1 ends naturally but with no caption and finally we have Gold Country back to its feature length original.
And Bunny and The Race are the right way round finally

 

[Bob_S.]

Little disappointed in the special features so far. Hoped there would be at least a few commentaries.

 

[charlesgunn]

Little disappointed in the special features so far. Hoped there would be at least a few commentaries.

Yes , the one thing the Imavision discs had in their favour were the commentaries and for later seasons the interviews.
I was a bit naughty . I knew I would not be keeping the Imavision sets ( bar the one with the book and the movies) so I spent quite a bit of time compiling several discs of bonus features only before I sold them. I made copies of the discs that included them and I was then able to transfer them to a hard drive recorder and re-compile them onto new dvds . Can't recall if it was 3 or 4 discs.
No special features on the UK discs at all IIRC so those bonus features are not something I want to lose .
I think it was the movie set that had 2 discs of bonus features with in depth interviews of about an hour each with the 2 Melissas so that set won't be going anywhere.

This 15 minute per season documentary on the Blurays are very nice but we need more

 

[Greg_S_H]

Amazon's policy of combining every existing version into a single review section is terrible. I was really concerned about comments about season three having missing scenes and episodes out of order, and then I read charlesgunn's comments here and went to take a closer look. Those comments were from 2003 and 2005. Way to go, Amazon.

Going to order with confidence now.

 

[Ethan Riley]

That has just got to stop. They've got 15 year old vhs reviews linked to brand new blu ray editions of things.

 

[patjo]

Amazons review service could be extremely useful and it is for many things. But this mixing of reviews of different versions from different countries on different formats in different decades devalues the service a great deal.
If Amazon want people to use it then it should be worth tidying it up a bit .

 

[ChrisALM]

The reviews sections for some products can be very misleading and its not just the DVD products. You have to be very careful to tie in the review with the right product. It is surprising that Amazon would even let something like this practice get started. The longer this is allowed to go on, the bigger the mess is going to be to clean up.

 

[moviebuff75]

I have a question about the episode "Little Women" on the new set. Does anyone else's copy cut to a black screen at 8:54 at the end of the scene? Thanks.

 

[patjo]

I have a question about the episode "Little Women" on the new set. Does anyone else's copy cut to a black screen at 8:54 at the end of the scene? Thanks.

I think you mean 9.54 .
Yes it seems we have another messy edit . There is more to that scene but it's extremely brief and just amounts to seeing the dog running away for a few moments longer . This then cuts immediately to the follow up scene of the girls walking. There should be no fade out as shown by the audio glitch at the start of the scene with the girls walking but it may have been the easiest way to cover the lost moments although the technology is there for them to do it properly if they wanted to but as we saw with Remember Me they don't seem to take that little bit of extra care so they could also have adjusted the soundtrack which shows all the signs of old fashioned syndication cuts although that's obviously not the case here as the missing footage is so very short.

These anomalies are showing signs that this being the first ever restoration from the original broadcast versions that the negatives have not been 100% fortunate with the 40 years they've been sitting in the vaults .
I hope if things like this continue that they'll source syndication prints to make sure there is no footage missing - but once again that takes effort they don't seem to want to put in and judging from the very reasonable prices these Bluray sets are selling for I'm guessing the budget for the restoration was not large enough to do things like reinstating damaged or missing footage so instead its being covered up.

However , in this case the missing footage is of no consequence so I assume they did what they could although I think they could have made it less obtrusive - it's certainly a neater job than the end of Remember Me Part 1

 

[moviebuff75]

Nothing is missing. I compared it to the dvd. Both show the dog exit the frame and start the next scene at the same time. Looks like two pieces of film weren't put together.correctly for the NBC print.

 

[moviebuff75]

Happens in two more as well: The Music Box & The Election

 

[prairiefan]

Nothing is missing. I compared it to the dvd. Both show the dog exit the frame and start the next scene at the same time. Looks like two pieces of film weren't put together.correctly for the NBC print.

I compared it to the Dutch dvd which shows that there IS footage missing although this may be similar to the Country Girls missing footage where the syndicated version runs slightly longer .
As this is supposed to be a restoration from the negatives , split film should not be an issue

 

[t2smith]

I compared it to the Dutch dvd which shows that there IS footage missing although this may be similar to the Country Girls missing footage where the syndicated version runs slightly longer .
As this is supposed to be a restoration from the negatives , split film should not be an issue

I don't think this was a restoration from the negatives. They probably used the already edited for NBC film and scanned that for the HD restoration. This would explain why some footage exists in various DVD releases and foreign language syndication broadcasts that didn't make it into the Blu-rays. It would also explain why the Blu-rays can be sold for less than $20 a season and why the complete series can be bought on Vudu in HDX for $39.99. I'm not an expert at restoration, but it seems like a restoration from the negatives would be a much more expensive undertaking. From what I understand, the outdoor scenes were mainly shot in Simi Valley and sometimes other locations, while the indoor scenes were shot in a studio. Many times while filming at various locations, they would shoot scenes for multiple episodes. Imagine scanning all the negatives and having to put the scenes back into the correct sequence as opposed to simply scanning in film that has already been edited. I've always heard that restoring an old 2 hour movie is an expensive and time consuming process, but they've managed to restore over 200 hours of Little House. Even if I'm correct and they used already edited film intead of negatives, I'm more than happy with the quality for the prices we are being charged.

 

[moviebuff75]

The old US dvd cuts off at the same frame as the blu ray and actually starts later than the blu -ray. This tells me that they cut some frames when they spliced the two together for NBC, but obviously didn't match them up. I believe they used the NBC prints, so what is on the blu ray is what was shown.

 

[moviebuff75]

There aren't frames missing.....that is TOTALLY INCORRECT. Every frame from both scenes is there. The new version comes from the NBC broadcast print....already edited. It is one print of film. Period.

 

[moviebuff75]

I'll get the time stamp for the other two...The Election is close to 11:00 give or take. There are enough commercial breaks here so there should have never been a fade to black at this spot. What I think happened: The original negative had the extra frames. When the version made for whatever print the Dutch dvd uses, they included those frames. When the NBC version aired, they had to splice the two scenes together, losing a couple of frames in the process (you have to lose frames from each side when splicing film together....always.) This would result in both scenes losing a frame or two before broadcast. This would have only affected the broadcast version and not the negatives, as those aren't spliced together. The editor cut the frames but didn't join the two scens properly. I was around back then and tv shows, even new ones, featured little mistakes in editing....splices on-screen, etc. I think it was a mistake in the original editing. The blu-rays are simply the NBC prints, cleaned up...mistakes and all. If this had only happened on the one episode I would have been concerned, but the fact that it is on three, tells me this is correct. There is also no apparent damage on the remaining frames around the blackouts.

 

[Mark-P]

Can't you all just enjoy LHOP looking so beautiful and ignore the tiny glitches? I know I do.

 

[ScottRichard]

Seriously, people are arguing over a few odd splices and 2 seconds of the dog running after all these years of horrible, chopped up prints! I mean it's one thing to make note of it but after years of watching the current DVDs with whole scenes missing, abrupt edits throughout episodes, muffled sound, that weird echo thing where you hear the voices before they start talking, often terrible picture quality, and the list goes on, how can this be so bothersome?

 

[LeoA]

In a way, it's rather a compliment. I've yet to see a DVD or Blu-Ray tv release that I'd consider perfection.

When it gets down to nitpicking like this though as we dissect these releases, you know they at least aced the fundamentals.