Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels-- Trying to release new Blu-Ray release by Thunderbean Animation

One of the problems with digital restorations is that no matter how much dust, dirt, and scratches you remove, whatever remains winds up looking more obvious. In other words, once you've removed the biggest problems, the little teeny-tiny problems that are left are easier to see! There is a point of vanishing returns where you just have to let it slide, pending available time and money.

 

Finished up watching Gulliver - this is definitely worth picking up if you enjoy classic animation. Short of having access to negatives, this is probably the best this feature will look. The main print used was processed by Technicolor in 1957; NTA re-released it to theaters to recoup some of the cost of the buyout of the bulk of Paramount's early animated shorts (this explains why the transfer looks about zillion percent better than the NTA tv prints which weren't done by Technicolor - the color shift looks like old Anscochrome photo prints).

 

Even Warner released this with the restoration of their classic Looney Tunes. Then you have decisions...leave the dust in the image that was on the original cels (and are really noticeable against a black background) or remove them and over process?

I saw complaints about the latest reissue of "Robocop" and, honestly, it has never looked better but the flaws are more glaring now.

 

Jerry Beck has a neat post about the Gulliver soundtrack at his site:
http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/gullivers-travels-on-records/

 

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/dvdreviews44/gullivers_travels_blu-ray.htm

Man. Talk about night and day.

 

The dog in a manger thinking of corporations sometimes flabbergasts me. For entities that are supposed to be these venal profit-driven monstrosities, sometimes they seem all too willing to just leave potential money lying on the table rather than give up any control or allow some flex in their policies. Sure, there's not a lot of money to be made from catering to the collector/cinesthete market for old movies (through a licensing fee or percentage of sales or something) but it's not like they're being asked to do anything either.

This sort of thing has been on my mind lately, as I plow through my pirate copies of WKRP in Cincinnati with all the original music cues...

 

Well, I'm reminded of the time I worked on a very meticulous remastered version of Africa Screams for the Lou Costello estate. We got the world's best surviving 35mm B&W fine-grain print, spent several days really getting it to look great, even did a lot of work on the audio, then the estate had it released through a distributor on laserdisc. Within 6 months, all the public domain firms had grabbed it and reissued it on VHS. KTLA (a local LA independent station) even showed it as a midnight movie, complete with the laserdisc graphics at the head. So this is what happens sometimes when you restore a public domain title that has little or no copyright protection.

I think the problem for 20th Century-Fox (who owns the show now) is that if each episode cost $50,000-$60,000 to clear for home video with the original music, that's $4.5 million just for the music rights. That's on top of paying residuals to the actors, the writers, the directors, and so on, plus mastering costs.

I can understand why whoever owns the negatives to Gulliver's Travels would be reluctant to spend the money to digitally restore it, but I think there are ways they could protect themselves, particularly with all the music copyrights and stuff like that. And from a purely historical point of view, they should do it just out of a moral obligation to preserve important films. It wouldn't cost that much money, provided the elements are available and in reasonable shape. (I'd be very curious to see if the nitrate seps survived 75 years.)

 

Yep...