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Studios in contest for ugliest biblical cover (1 Viewer)

Rick Thompson

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The artwork could and should be better. As noted previously, the "Ten Commandments" art is particularly ridiculous ("at least it's clear that it's not the famous NINE commandments movie"). Awful type design, awful typeface choice.


Ditto for "King of Kings" or as the artwork says, "King of KINGS." To coin a phrase, you could say it lets us know we not talking about a "King of QUEENS" movie! They would have done better to either crop the original top and bottom, or simply use the title in the original stone typeface. It was classy and fit the epic.


What we're getting is sort of like what happened with music CD art. With only a 4-1/2 inch square canvas, you can't do much. The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" design is stunning on a 12-inch LP cover. On a CD booklet it's a splotch.

You have to be original, and originality is rarely valued very much in Hollywood.
 

Charles Smith

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I've always bemoaned the loss of LP cover art as much as anyone, but among the type of CDs I'm interested in (classical, shows, some jazz), there's been some decent variety, and they've done a lot better in many cases of emulating some of the original look.


Nothing even close to the same respect has been accorded movies. Not since laser disc, at any rate, which I think enjoyed a better percentage of good cover art than DVDs and -- without a doubt -- BDs. I thought about this thread as I browsed in a couple of stores the other day, and it's unbelievable how many covers strive for the same brain-numbing faces, fonts, and colors.
 

Phoebus

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Still, to look on the bright side, we have new Vistavision, Technirama, Ultra Panavision and Dimension 150 movies for the "large negative" area of our blu ray libraries.


It will be nice to see what the restorers have been able to do with Greatest Story and The Bible.. Just to be able to assess the pictorial grandeur of the originals is of great interest to me, despite Greatest being painfully paced with Wild Western landscapes and peculiar cameos - and Bible having an overblown 60s eurotrash daftness about itself. [Judge for yourselves! Their original trailers are on You Tube.]


This debate about original running times has been very interesting. I'm not sure what Greatest would gain at its Longest, somehow - as it stands it feels infinite in length already.


Hope these will all be Region Free!
 

OliverK

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Originally Posted by Phoebus

Still, to look on the bright side, we have new Vistavision, Technirama, Ultra Panavision and Dimension 150 movies for the "large negative" area of our blu ray libraries.


Very true. Especially TGSET and The Bible offer picture quality that surpasses by far what Blu-Ray has to offer so they should have stunning detail. And if they deliver in picture quality I will gladly redo all the covers to make them look the way the movie posters did back in the day.


TGSET is also listed on Amazon Germany now and it seems to be a new listing, so the title actually seems to come - probably Amazon.com will also add it soon.
 

OliverK

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And just a small note to the studios who now have announced biblical epic number 3 and 4, namely Fox and MGM: You get an A for effort and an E for timing - how many of these movies you think the consumer will buy?


So if these do not sell that well at first it just might have something to do with the fact that after years of inactivity ALL the studios seem to want to release a big biblical epic within a timespan of a week!
 

Phoebus

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"Especially TGSET and The Bible offer picture quality that surpasses by far what Blu-Ray has to offer so they should have stunning detail."


Well, "Battle of the Bulge" is Ultra Panavision 70, and "Patton" is the only other Dimension 150 movie out there..

Bulge does look rather nice, though the movie itself is more like "Dalek Invasion: Bulge" than WWII reality. Also the enemy tanks never properly blow up, they just hiss smoke - only the prop Alled tanks explode with real flames.

A very flat part of Europe has developed vast mountain ranges, actually northern spain.. the tanks are inaccurate and on loan from Franco. Hugely entertaining though, somehow. [I fell asleep at the end so I dont know who won the war.. since we never see any of the daleks exploding, I'd be surprised to discover that they lost ..]
 

Joe Caps

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Saw the Bible when it openined and Greatest Story Ever Told. Neither one looked all that great, even in 70mm
 

OliverK

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I saw the new 70mm print of The Bible twice and the detail certainly was there. But it has rather dull colors and I believe this was even hinted at in reviews back in the day, the same goes for TGSET.


Do you also remember these to be less colorful and a bit drab looking?


And of course the Adam and Eve part of The Bible looks really really bad, but fortunately it does not take that long until it is over.


This is an interesting contrast to TTC and KoK that make up whatever detail they might be missing with incredibly rich colors.

Originally Posted by Joe Caps

Saw the Bible when it openined and Greatest Story Ever Told. Neither one looked all that great, even in 70mm
 

Paul Rossen

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Originally Posted by Joe Caps

Saw the Bible when it openined and Greatest Story Ever Told. Neither one looked all that great, even in 70mm


Really? I recall that both looked pretty good. I was quite surprised at the size of the D-150 screen at Loew's State as they brought in a new screen just for The Bible. True it didn't appear as good as Patton looked in D-150. GSET looked good to me at the Warner Cinerama. Not as sharp as Spartacus of a few years earlier but still pretty good. The monochromatic costumes against the background was pretty impressive.
 

Douglas R

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Originally Posted by Victor Wright




Canada is getting The Greatest Story Ever Told on Blu-Ray, March 29...


It's also now coming to Germany on 15 April . Amazon.de also has the cover (Die Grosste Geschichte aller Zeiten). Odd that Amazon's US site doesn't list it yet.
 

OliverK

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Saw it yesterday - in keeping with the spirit of this thread I will say it is The ugliest cover ever seen for The Greatest Story Ever Told [/url]





It's also now coming to Germany on 15 April . Amazon.de also has the cover (Die Grosste Geschichte aller Zeiten). Odd that Amazon's US site doesn't list it yet.

[/quote]
 

GMpasqua

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I'm confused - is "The Greatest Story Ever Told" being released on Blu-ray in the US this March? but I have not seen it up for order anywhere except on Amazon Canada
 

OliverK

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Very nice, can you maybe change the blueish background in color to something more light-brownisch?


And is it only me or is the blue cover color of Blu-Ray cases a really bad idea that conflicts with a lot of the artwork compared to the color of black that we had with DVD?


Your cover is much better by the way than that of the German release.

Originally Posted by GMpasqua

maybe:
 

Charles Smith

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Interesting point there. In all this recent talk about cover art, the one thing I don't think anyone's mentioned is the incredible predominance of the color blue as background for so many releases across many genres. (I think. Maybe I've just locked into this and am seeing it "everywhere".) The blue case must be an influence -- yes? no? Or is this "sameness" of blue backgrounds just an incredibly overused marketing trend?
 

OliverK

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There definitely is an influence of the case color which imo is not a good thing, the cover should not be affected by the color of the case.


It is blatantly obvious with the German release of TGSET and everybody who has seen artwork for the movie will attest to the fact that there never was much blue, if at all, in it.

Now it has been beaten with the ugly, errhh Blu-Ray stick.


On another forum somebody posted a pic of a black Blu-Ray case and it looked very very nice - too bad nobody seems to be selling it:


http://forum.blu-ray.com/blu-ray-technology-news/67610-black-blu-ray-cases.html


In the end I will admit that the covers may as well show all the principal actors dressed in pink with high heels as long as what is on the disc has been done right but still I wonder why so little effort goes into making these Blu-Rays look classy - presentation was very very important for all these movies and all of them were given the raodshow treatment and now we get them on Blu-Rays that just look cheap.


Originally Posted by Chas in CT

Interesting point there. In all this recent talk about cover art, the one thing I don't think anyone's mentioned is the incredible predominance of the color blue as background for so many releases across many genres. (I think. Maybe I've just locked into this and am seeing it "everywhere".) The blue case must be an influence -- yes? no? Or is this "sameness" of blue background just an incredibly popular and overused marketing idea these days?
 

dana martin

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Originally Posted by john a hunter

Perhaps with a discrete Cinerama logo and then it would be pefect for me at least!


In a perfect world, MGM would release this as a two disc blu ray book and the second disc would be smilebox edition



so this would work


 

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