"The Outer Limits" coming to blu-ray with new HD masters late 2017/early 2018

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by jupiter8, Jun 6, 2017.

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  1. Morpheus

    Morpheus Forum Resident

    Location:
    Texas
    I didn't care for the newly rebooted Outer Limits either at the time, but time has mellowed my view on them. I think they are pretty well done generally, but somehow different--I can't put my finger on the difference. I guess they were less a monster of the week series. But has some actors starting out their careers early on. Plus there are just so few good SF series on TV that catch my attention or that I have not seen.
     
  2. Deesky

    Deesky Forum Resident

    Yeah, I remember reading that too. I think I also remember that the Canadian versions weren't cut, so those would be the ones to get (short of a new remastered release).
     
  3. reapers

    reapers Forum Resident

    Location:
    Michigander
    No, their programming is typically shows from the 50s - 80s
     
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  4. longdist01

    longdist01 Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    I definitely recall those Test patterns on a few stations outside of Chicago, and while visiting Northern Michigan and watching late night TV with relatives.

    Did any U.S. stations broadcasting early HD programming included a test pattern at start of the day/end of the day?

     
  5. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    I might just have to get this if the price is reasonable.
     
  6. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    They had to build the man's arm out of plastic in order to have the stop-motion creature crawl up it. But for 1964, it was Creepy AF.
     
  7. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    My decades long best buddy just LOVES that one, it is his all time fav!

    He'd always make the faces and noises of the creature whenever we'd watch that one.
    (give him a beer and a J and he'd do all sorts of kooky stuff). :biglaugh:

    He was also the first person I knew who got the complete Twilight Zone on VHS as soon as it was available back then.

    IIRC he got it through some tape a month deal by mail. For VHS they actually looked amazingly clear back then. Of course I had to borrow them after he got his first few views in.

    My wife and I would wait with great anticipation for him to bring over several more tapes on his visits!

    I REALLY hope these will be blu ray quality and not just something put on blu ray for the sake of blu ray. :waiting:
     
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  8. MikaelaArsenault

    MikaelaArsenault Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Hampshire
    Oh right. I remember now.
     
  9. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    TWILIGHT ZONE - Columbia House. I got those too. They were the best-mastered VHS tapes I ever saw. Rock-solid black & white. Their biggest sin was they were on VHS with all of the inherent problems of that format, particularly, having to locate a particular episode, which invariably was the second or third or fourth one in. That meant a lot of winding and rewinding. They also cost a fortune. The first tape was always a reasonable amount, and you got four half-hour episodes. Then it was $25 or so for every tape thereafter. That alone would have added up to around $1000. There was also a time, about three quarters of the way through the program, where the tapes just stopped coming for a number of months. I was just getting ready to write someone a letter when the next tape came in the mail. It was a gap of like six months or so and I was convinced they were not going to finish. But the caveat was that they were raising the price for the remainder of the tapes to $29.95. Great! Either have a partial set or spend more money. Naturally, being the fan that I am, I opted to suck it up and pay the difference. Just put it on my tab there, Columbia House...

    By the time my collection was complete, it was just about time for DVDs to pop up in the marketplace - and the first TZ DVDs were in the same jumbled order that these VHS tapes were. I think they used the same masters as well. So I sprang for five "collections" of TWILIGHT ZONE on DVD in jumbled order. And as soon as those were in place on my shelf, out came the Season sets. Here I finally balked, despite the glowing reviews of remastered video and isolated music tracks and commentaries. I just did without - and it was painful. Finally, I sprang for the Blu-rays. I don't like to think about how much money I've spent on that series.

    For OUTER LIMITS, I also had a set of VHS tapes - and then upgraded to DVD when they were first available. Somehow, with only 49 episodes, it doesn't add up to be quite as bad as TZ, cost-wise. THE OUTER LIMITS *never* looked as good as TWILIGHT ZONE. I hope this Blu-ray release will finally do the series justice, but even with perfect mastering, the shadowy images may always look worse than the often brightly-lit TWILIGHT ZONE.
     
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  10. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    Bingo, that was it!!!!!! Thanks! He got them through Columbia House mail order!

    I distinctly remember him complaining about the flow of tapes coming in "monthly" as being VERY uneven, and expensive...but he was die hard so he stuck it out for the whole set.

    And as you say, wow, for VHS they were scary clear, you could hear the set background noises, see things moving that shouldn't, before that I never saw the Zone look that "real", it was almost eerie after years of a bad 19" CRT over the air viewing to see them in that clarity. :faint:
     
  11. Do you mean that, for you, those shadowy images were not well rendered on the VHS and DVD formats for The Outer Limits? I can only speak for the VHS tapes as a reference (and the memories from the original airings are getting dimmer), but those chiaroscuros from the episodes shot by Gerd Oswald (son of "German expressionist" director Richard Oswald) ARE tOL for me!
     
  12. rikpepe

    rikpepe Active Member

    Location:
    06451
    • That is good news very good news,
    • Favorite episodes anyone?
    • Architects of Fear - echos in the present in our fear based culture
    • The Galaxy Being - an intelligent species a truly different life form - in 2 dimensions - not some stupidly redundant anthropomorphic Star Trek/Wars alien when the two protagonists talk about God "all powerful being" the creature replies "Electromagnetic Radiation - God one in the same" it is bone chilling and a revelation as some theories of the big bang involves layers of electromagnetic tradition coming together started thr whole thing, and the echo of the big bang detected by ATT scientists in 1964. Trivia -- did you know that on old cathode ray TVs - if you - on an empty channel - turned down the brightness and sl adjust the contrast you could see a few dots of "snow " this is the left over radiation from the big bang. This yiutube video explains but does not show you how to do it. I'll have to dig up my CRT sony from somewhere in my basement ...
     
  13. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    The transfers of THE OUTER LIMITS to VHS and DVD were always "adequate", but always seemed a notch below what the format *could* do. Many of the *bears* are poorly lit, hidden in shadows and dark places, and dark images always suffer the most on those old video formats. The sound always seemed "splashy" and distorted.
     
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  14. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    The producers of the 90s series just took the name. They had never even seen the original show nor knew anything about it or even when it had aired. I so had looked forward to my favorite show being resurrected but was completely and utterly disappointed. They would have trick endings all of the time, far more like Twilight Zone than anything Outer Limits ever did.
     
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  15. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    I bought this before I even had a CD player to hear it on.
     
  16. knish

    knish Forum Resident

    Holy hi-fi, this is wonderful news!

    Let's all hope that Kino Lorber can and will do for Outer Limits TOS everything that CBS Paramount did for the Twilight Zone series BD set. Can you imagine having Frontiere's and
    Lubin's complete isolated scores from "Guests", "Inheritors", "Forms of Things Unknown" (coda during final fade out), "Expanding Human", "Controlled Experiment", "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" (bedroom scene), "Invisible Enemy" (bazooka blast scene), "Duplicate Man", "Demon With a Glass Hand"? None of those ever made it to CD, at least not all of the suites and cues.

    AND, provided the maestro is up for it, an interview with Dominic Frontiere? Btw, for fans unaware, CBS Paramount was able to arrange an all too brief chat for its Fugitive series 4th season DVD set.

    Happy B-Day & Many More!
     
    Last edited: Jun 17, 2017
  17. ERRATUM! Meaning "directed" of course... As the director of photography I was thinking of was Conrad Hall... :doh:
     
  18. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    My memory is that Image Entertainment (who got the home video rights to the series in the 1990s) were very nervous about releasing a "niche" show that cost a fortune and might bomb. As a result, they only released a dozen or so of the best episodes first, and once those sold well, then they got the OK to put out the full season sets. They weren't happy about it either, and I know they got a lot of complaints about it. I seem to recall the full season sets were remastered from B&W finegrain positives to DigiBeta SD and looked better than the earlier 1980s analog transfers. I would bet the Blu-rays will be done from the original 35mm negatives on pin-registered scanners and will look extremely detailed.

    No, we had the producers for the revised Outer Limits at Complete Post in the 1990s, and they revered the old show. The problem was that Showtime and the Canadian syndication company pressured them to make a more contemporary series (whatever that meant), which forced them to move away from the kind of mood of the 1960s show. They did try, but the TV business generally boils down to "who's got the money" and "who's really got control of the show."
     
  19. Heavy Music

    Heavy Music Forum Resident

    Well, the season 1, 7-disc Blu-ray set for The Outer Limits (1963-64) is up for pre-order on Amazon.com with a release date od March 27th 2018!
     
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  20. James Slattery

    James Slattery Forum Resident

    Location:
    Long Island
    That wasn't what the guy who wrote the book on the original series said in his book, which was what I was going by. He said he asked one of them which was his favorite episode and the guy told him something to the effect that "that was way back in the 50s". The original show is my favorite show and the new one had none of the feel of it and always had TZ like trick endings, which OL never had.
     
  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I can only tell you what the producer in charge of post for Outer Limits told me in the hallway at Complete Post on the 3rd floor, where they did a lot of the VFX for the show. You can believe the book or me -- it's your choice. I have no dog in the hunt because I never watched the show and don't care. But what he said had the ring of truth, and we both knew and understood the 1960s show very well.
     
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  22. Alan G.

    Alan G. Forum Resident

    Location:
    NW Montana
    I just got the CBS produced DVD of the first season. Unfortunately, they never did another season. For DVD the quality is very good. Now there’s repeated theme music that is simply creepy. Something I never forgot. Haunting.
     
  23. Barnabas Collins

    Barnabas Collins Senior Member

    Location:
    NH
    I've got the DVD set of Outer Limits but I might have to upgrade to blu. Been hankering to watch the show again. "Architects of Fear" is one of the creepiest and most moving hours of television I've ever seen. A great performance from Robert Kulp and the ending never fails to devastate me.
     
  24. townsend

    townsend Senior Member

    Location:
    Ridgway, CO
    "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture . . ." Well, here is the first review I have found of the blu-ray release: The Outer Limits Blu-ray - Season One

    I think the remastered B&W looks great It is unfortunate that the set cost so much money. I know it will fall in time, but this just seems a ridiculously expensive set as a starting point.
     
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  25. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

    There are some TV series that I wouldn't buy if they were free. THE OUTER LIMITS though was an automatic buy on Blu-ray, sight unseen, and pretty much no matter the cost. It's a treasure in my view and needs to be seen in its best possible condition.

    I bought the old videotapes, the two-sided DVDs, and now the Blu-ray set. And when Season Two shows up, it'll be a Day One buy for me.

    But that's just me. I realize that others have their treasures and that this might not be one.
     
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