Did Syndication Prints really look this bad?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by goodiesguy, Jun 13, 2013.

  1. mj_patrick

    mj_patrick Senior Member

    Location:
    Elkhart, IN, USA
    Ah, WFLD! My dad had installed a rotating outdoor antenna that allowed us to get the signal. WFLD is actually where I first discovered The Brady Bunch along with other sitcoms, classic Tom and Jerry and Three Stooges, and the great Son of Svengoolie. It was such a cool channel. They changed quite a bit after they became affiliated with Fox.

    Now that I have officially dated myself, yes, that crap quality feels authentic. Yes, it looks terrible, and yet there's a charm to it, although I'm not nostalgic (or masochistic) enough to want to return to it. LOL!
     
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  2. Mark Nelson

    Mark Nelson Forum Resident

    Location:
    United States
    Growing up loving WLVI in Boston, it was interesting to come across several WFLD promos on YouTube a few years ago, and realize/find out that both stations were owned by Field Communications, who apparently dictated a uniform look and program schedule among their stations. Looking at the WFLD promos is like looking at a clone of WLVI, just with different booth announcers.
     
  3. entropyfan

    entropyfan Forum Resident

    We obtained our first family VCR in the early-80s and I'd tape EVERYTHING off tv just for the novelty of being able to tape. I was a weird kid.

    I recently discovered an old tape I had filled up with episodes from one of those omnibus syndicated WTBS cartoon shows. A 30-yr-old time capsule preserved at SLP speed. Washed-out pre-'48 Merrie Melodies, carved-up King World prints of the Little Rascals, and commercials for 80s toys and junk food. Watched the whole thing. I'm a weird adult.
     
  4. MarkTheShark

    MarkTheShark Senior Member

    Some years back I picked up a really cheap public domain box set with 30 episodes of The Lucy Show, from a company called St. Clair Entertainment. Most of them looked exactly like they had looked on Channel 32, which is where I remember watching them in the 1970s. Often times at the very end of the opening titles, there will be a voice-over of someone saying "brought to you by..." leading into where the sponsor billboard would have been. Or in some cases, the audio would be muted for those few seconds. (On this as well as other series of the era.) Now, this was years before Paramount started releasing season sets of the series, which compared to these copies, look and sound like you're in the room with the cast while they're doing the show.

    After I bought that cheap collection (which I think had all the public domain episodes) I looked at some of the reviews on Amazon, and for the most part, people were shocked and appalled by the terrible quality. But for me, I grew up watching reruns on local TV stations and that was what they looked like, so it didn't bother me that much. Unless it was a daytime rerun on an actual network (those apparently used 35mm film or a video transfer of same), I just understood it as a given that if you were watching a rerun of a syndicated show on a local TV station, it would be sourced from a 16mm film print with some degree of wear and tear. (Channel 44 seemed to get worse film prints than WFLD or WGN -- I wonder if trashed prints were cheaper?) But like I said, the official sets are a world of difference.

    I remember thinking to myself back in the early 1980s, why don't they just make video masters of these shows? They'll look and sound better, and it's probably a lot cheaper! And within a few years, I started to see that happening.

    You're right about the Field Communications stations -- I believe in some cases they used the same staff announcers who recorded tracks for different cities. One thing I remember that used to drive me nuts about watching shows on Channel 32 -- they seemed to have an iron-handed policy of NEVER showing a closing logo at the end of a filmed show -- Screen Gems, Paramount, Hanna-Barbera, Fox, it didn't matter, after around 1980 or so, apart from a few times where they wouldn't catch it, they seemed to make a major point to cut those off. I wonder why -- they'd save a few seconds that way, but I wonder if there wasn't some kind of incident where this or that property changed hands and maybe they got in trouble for showing the wrong name? Who knows, but that's about the only explanation I can think of. Later on, for a lot of shows they'd copy a severely cut-down version of the show opening and closing credits, and run that from a different tape instead of the one that was part of that day's episode. The one for Three's Company started with the names of the writers from a particular episode, then cut to the very tail end of the closing credits of the show in progress, and looked really tacky. But it saved them 30 seconds or so of airtime.
     
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  5. ridernyc

    ridernyc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida, USA
    I know they are not prints, but last night I had The Simpsons on and my good that show looks horrible in HD. The episodes are now sped up and jumpy and full of weird artifacts.
     
  6. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    Channel 48 was a Field Communications station in Philadelphia, and yes, the logos and presentation appeared to all be the same in the other cities. I know for a fact though that the announcers were local. For many years, Channel 48 had John Carlton as its main booth announcer and he even hosted on-air movie presentations in the early days. Later on, a fellow named Kal Ruppel was their staff announcer. In radio I worked with both of those gentlemen over the years. John Carlton was the long-time voice of the Arco Go-Patrol on variuos radio stations in town; later on, he was a dee-jay at our WPEN (nostalgia) station. Kal Ruppel turned up as a salesman at the same station in a different era.

    I'm not 100% certain that they were not "voice-tracked" to the other Field Stations, but I don't think so.

    Harry
     
  7. JamieC

    JamieC Senior Member

    Location:
    Detroit Mi USA
    I know that the guy who did the station announcements("Stay tuned for the Brady Bunch", "Field Communications") was the same guy in Cleveland as Detroit.
     
  8. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    My bet is that the local station may be time-compressing the HD copies, adding the jumpy/sped-up artifacts. The upconverted-to-HD masters don't look that hateful (though they are not "real" HD). I don't think The Simpsons started mastering to HD until about 2000-2001 or so, if even then.
     
  9. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    So, let me understand this. The Simpsons was never shot on film? No negatives or anything from the early years? Always went to video? How did they animate it?

    Sorry for being dense..
     
  10. MarkTheShark

    MarkTheShark Senior Member

    Would that be Dr. Don Rose? I do remember some time around 1981-1982, some of his announcements during the afternoon cartoons would omit the channel, like instead of saying "now back to Tom & Jerry on Channel 32," he'd just say "now back to Tom & Jerry." And if there was a last-minute change, you'd hear the evening announcer (Ron Beattie or Jim Barton) instead of Dr. Don. Any time I heard the "other" announcer (who I am pretty sure was local) during the afternoon cartoon lineup, it was a heads-up that something got changed.

    Sounds like the Philadelphia voice talent was indeed unique to that market, though.
     
  11. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Very interesting question!

    Pretty much all animated shows through the late 1990s (for the most part) were drawn on cells, photographed on 35mm film, then the film shots were spliced together and transferred to video for air. At some point in the 1990s, they figured out that it was much faster to paint the cells in a computer -- started by Disney's CAPS system -- and so they'd draw on cells, scan them into a computer, then scan the files out, color correct those, and air that version. In all cases, the end result was SD videotape only. (Titles and in some cases VFX were done only on video as well.)

    As a sidenote: I worked on tons of animated shows in the 1980s through the mid-1990s, and we started off doing everything from 35mm print and mag. They used the print because a print was a delivery requirement for archival purposes. Eventually, they decided to save the money and just go from negative, partly because it looked much better, partly because it was cheaper, but mainly because it was faster. But the negative took more time to color-correct.

    By the early 2000s, they stopped using cells entirely and the shows were produced 100% on computer. Everything went to digital files, and there was no more film at all. All the animated film shows were 4x3 (1.33); starting somewhere in The Simpsons season 20, they went to 16x9 HD (around the time Fox went mostly HD). I'm not sure if there was a period where they were animating in 16x9 but only airing the 4x3 extraction, but I suspect they may have been HD as far back as 2005 or so.

    What p!sses me off is, given that the show has made billions of dollars, why don't they just go in, scan all the film (or cells) to digital files, then extend the backgrounds out to 16x9? Literally, they could convert the entire show to HD by doing a combination of using a lot of the old shows and also doing new animation. To me, I don't have a problem with this, provided it looks real good and is done well. It's sure a damn sight better than just upconverting the old SD tapes from the 1990s.

    I'm flabbergasted that Fox won't spend the money to preserve a show that will probably run for another 20-30 years in syndication. And if you think 4x3 TV looks old-fashioned now, wait until 2055. (If man is still alive...)
     
  12. OldSoul

    OldSoul Don't you hear the wind blowin'?

    Location:
    NYC
    So, do you mean putting new animation into the shows from the early '90s? That wouldn't look right at all. Look at the animation from the first seasons, then look at the animation from now. The best way would be to look at the full intro from back then and now. Not only are things more streamlined, but the animation is more limited now. Characters don't move the way they used to. I don't think adding backgrounds would look good.
     
  13. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    No, just extending out the backgrounds to fill a 16x9 frame. At least then, they'd be "HD Compatible," in that sense. Now, all we have is a 4x3 picture in the middle of a 16x9 frame, and there's only so much they can do to uprez SD content to 1080. The backgrounds aren't necessarily animated -- just drawn. We'd just see more of what's already there.

    In a perfect world, I'd say use all the actual cells for the first 10 years of the show, then create new backgrounds that look identical to the old ones except they're wider, and then composite the two together. I don't think it'd cost a fortune, maybe a million bucks a season or something like that (total guess on my part). A show as important as The Simpsons deserves this kind of care.
     
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  14. OldSoul

    OldSoul Don't you hear the wind blowin'?

    Location:
    NYC
    I'm still not sure how seamless that would be. But OK.
     
  15. lugnut2099

    lugnut2099 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Missouri
    As far as Simpsons goes, I don't think they ever went "HD" until Season 20 when the show switched to widescreen. They had been using digital coloring starting with Season 14 (2002-03), and had experimented with it on a couple episodes before that, but just judging from DVD commentaries it sounds like they had essentially been continuing the standard old-school animation process, just using digital color instead of hand-colored stuff like before.

    And the problem with reconstructing from original cels for those old episodes is that apparently a lot of them are just gone. Matt Groening mentions several times on the commentaries about a time he went into a Fox vault was horrified to find that cels from early-season episodes were literally just scattered everywhere and some laying on the floor, not to mention that many had been stolen and resold. He says to this day he'll still appear at conventions where someone will bring up one of these stolen cels for him to sign and it infuriates him all over again (though he still signs them, realizing it's not the owner's fault, but always informs them that the cel was likely stolen years ago).


    EDIT: Oh, and even if all the original stuff did exist, I'm not sure Groening would sign off on a 16x9 remaster. Again on the DVD commentaries he mentions more than once that he hates going to peoples' houses and seeing them watching older, non-16x9 episodes in stretched/cropped modes. I forget the exact quote he used on one, but it was something like "Look people, it's a 4x3 show, it's always going to be a 4x3 show, watch it that way!"
     
  16. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I think if Fox told him, "you'll make 3 times more money this way," he'd agree. :)

    There's always been conjecture on how much Groening really controls the show. My opinion is that James L. Brooks is responsible for about 90% of the show over the years, and that Groening barely shows up for meetings and to get his checks. Note that in 24 years, Groening has only written four episodes:

    http://www.snpp.com/guides/epsbywriter.html#god

    I suspect he had a much stronger hand in Futurama (which is also an excellent show). I was a huge, huge fan of Groening's comic strips going back to the LA Weekly days and "Life in Hell." Having worked on a lot of Fox shows myself, my take is that the network is very, very... economical. I still think it would be possible to digitize the shows and create new 16x9 backgrounds, but I don't dispute it'd be time-consuming and expensive. I'm doubly-baffled that they wouldn't just pull the original negatives and retransfer all the 4x3 shows at least that way to HD. And that would've been easy and very inexpensive, relatively speaking (like maybe $20K per show, tops).

    That is sobering to know that they were so careless with the original cells. I know there were terrible clashes in the early days between the show's staff and Klasky-Csupo, who tried their best but were often late delivering shows (due to last-minute script changes by Brooks and the other writers, who were more used to live-action sitcoms than animation). Eventually, Brooks yanked the show and gave it to Film Roman for the animation work, and those guys are tops (and original head guy Phil Roman was and is a good guy). The animation quality on the show has steadily gotten much, much better over the years; I think it actually improved remarkably when they went all digital.

    I dunno if you've ever been to LA, but I always chuckled when I drove down Highland Avenue near Fountain, which is where the Klasky-Csupo building was, and across the street was an independent convenience store which was the model for the Kwik-E-Mart. I always meant to stop by to see if Apu was working there, but never got around to it.
     
  17. lugnut2099

    lugnut2099 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Missouri
    Yeah, and again I go by DVD commentaries, but it seems like Groening was much more involved in the show up until Futurama started and then he kinda let it go. It seems like he appears on the commentaries for most every episode leading up to that period, but only shows up for a handful afterwards. It sounds like he did always have a guiding hand for at least the first 10 years before letting it go to work on Futurama, since writers/producers will mention stuff that Matt vetoed or was just hesitant about (and also jokes or plot points that he would contribute).

    As far as that whole Klasky/Roman thing goes, there's a lot of good, candid stuff about how all of that went down on the commentaries for those early seasons too. There's a great story about Season 1's "Some Enchanted Evening," which was intended to be the premiere but wound up being the final episode to air that season because of how screwy it came back from Klasky. When the final, supposedly "finished" version came back, a big screening was held and the entire thing was met to dead silence. The animation was bizarre, timing was off, basically everything that could be wrong was wrong. When it finished, James Brooks announced "That was sh-t." Apparently Gabor Csupo came back with "Well maybe it's your show that's sh-t."

    Supposedly the whole show was in danger of being aborted if the second episode sent in ("Bart the Genius") came back as bad, but it wasn't and they had time to fix stuff, so the Xmas episode got pushed to the forefront so they would have time to work on the others. The Season 1 DVD does contain the first 15 minutes or so of the original rejected "Some Enchanted Evening" and it really is as bad as they said. And for extra fun, it also includes commentary from those who worked on it, and even a decade later they still get upset watching it.
     
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  18. Frittenköter

    Frittenköter Forum Resident

    Location:
    Germany
    All of the Season 1 commentaries feature them apologizing. It really is funny.
     
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  19. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    Dr. Don Rose was a one-time Philly "Boss Jock" on the legendary WFIL radio, who by the '80s had moved on to San Francisco. He did those kiddie-show voiceovers for the Philly market too. I recall a bit of a "welcome back to Philly" atmosphere when he started doing those, even though he was thousands of miles away.

    Harry
     
  20. ridernyc

    ridernyc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida, USA


    I wish I had an easy way to capture a sample and upload it somewhere. It really is jaw droppingly bad. So bad it's like someone is playing a joke. It was on in the background and I first noticed it because I thought something was wrong with my hearing because the voice of Mr Burns sounded wrong. Then I started watching and noticed how it just looked terrible. Then I realized all the jokes were about a half beat off in timing. After about a minute of watching closely you start to notice sections where something went wrong with whatever is doing the time compression and suddenly it will just skip like half a second. Like maybe to make it even shorter someone went in and just start cutting out half second chunks here and there. A character will start moving through the frame and then suddenly jump to a new position.
     
  21. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member

    If they are going to extend backgrounds on old animation, shouldn't they start with Snow White? I think it's much better than the Simpsons. Imagine what that would look like in 2.65:1 or something.
     
  22. ridernyc

    ridernyc Forum Resident

    Location:
    Florida, USA


    Big difference between messing with the random somewhat generic TV animation backgrounds used in The Simpsons and and changing what are considered works of art in a Disney masterpiece.
     
  23. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    I hung out at Film Roman with my animator buddy Jon Lopez during the run of KING OF THE HILL and he took me around to see how everything was done. Jon was (at that point) the "timer" guy who had the complicated job of breaking down each scene by what moved, when and what didn't. Made my head hurt but it was great watching animators drawing stuff, the entire process (other than what was done in Asia) was just like the old days pretty much. I was impressed.

    Jon went to DreamWorks and I hung out with him there. His job? Animate the DUST for the horses in this film called SPIRIT, STALLION OF THE something. He was the "effects" animator and drew on PAPER dust clouds around horses feet. Arggh, what a job.

    The best thing about DREAMWORKS was the always open cafeteria, free, all you can eat. They didn't want the staff to ever leave the place. The food was amazing, free and if I worked there I would have gained 50 pounds.
     
  24. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    There's a difference between a 70-year-old classic movie (designated in the "protected" category by the U.S. government) and a TV show that runs every day of the week. This thread is about TV syndication, after all. The point is to try to present the show in the best way possible for HD audiences.

    Yep, judder -- uneven, erratic horizontal motion artifacts -- are a big problem with time-compression. It's exacerbated by the fact that the original material was done at 23.98fps, so in the 29.97 world of TV, the time-compression modes drop certain fields here and there, and motion starts getting affected... sometimes badly. It's terrible that TV stations still believe they can get away with this.

    Those who want to know more should read the book The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. Very eye-opening book on how the show was created, how it was produced each week, and how tough it was to write on the show.
     
  25. boyjohn

    boyjohn Senior Member

    OK, well, as long as that's what the audience wants then. They also seem to want never ending shows about Pawn Shops and Oil Drillers. Sometimes I just wish I were dead so I didn't have to deal with this world any more.
     

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