True- sometimes I'm just too lazy to go downstairs and watch the DVDs, or I'm busy cooking or something...
I have recently been fascinated with the many variations of Paramount Television's "Blue Mountain" when it came to being shot / transferred to videotape. The question is this: why does one version look dark and one light? I would like to think it's the tape stock it was on, like the 2" tape, or the type C 1". In this compilation I did... #1 - normal peak, dark - as seen on pre-1987 episodes of Solid Gold (except episode 7 of season 1), Bosom Buddies (except the pilot episode), pre-1987 episodes of Entertainment Tonight, The Powers of Matthew Star (episodes 7 and 11 only), Madame's Place, most episodes of Star of the Family, Taking Advantage, America, and (I think) Mr. Smith. #2 - tall peak, dark - as seen on later episodes of Star of the Family, the Taxi 1-hour special A Taxi Celebration, and some season 2 and all season 4 episodes of Webster. #3 - normal peak, light - as seen on Family Ties, most season 1-3 episodes of Webster, Bronx Zoo, Duet and The Art of Being Nick. #4 - normal peak, fully videotaped - as seen on The Jesse Owens Story, Star Trek (The Original Series), Anything for Money, MacGyver, The New Love, American Style, The Cavanaughs, Hard Knocks, and five episodes of season 1 of Friday the 13th: The Series. ~Ben
Naw, you're overthinking it. It's because idiots were color-correcting the logo and just didn't care, and the people supervising didn't try to keep it consistent. The tape doesn't change -- the people processing the image change. So it's a people problem, not a technical problem per se. I have seen some horrific end logos dropped in on famous blockbuster films even in recent years. There's a thing in video transfers where we have "log" images (very low-contrast, before color-correction) and there's "Rec709" images (normal HD). I've seen log Warner Bros. logos dropped in at the end of big movies, and my jaw dropped because they just looked awful. It's nice to know that the studios are hiring handicapped people to check these films, because you'd have to be blind to make a mistake this big.
That really is a tough job. I do agree with you about the way certain post-production houses handle logos like this. I think the 3rd and 4th logos freezing at the end might be another one of those "blemishes" you refer to regarding the way these post-production houses you're thinking of handle these edits. ~Ben
Generally, I think a better way to handle main titles and end logos is to just make a "master copy" as a digital file, then drop that in to make sure it's absolutely consistent on every show. Nowadays, that's very easy to do, but it was a huge chore in the 1980s and 1990s. When we got long-term syndication projects, like Dallas or Knott's Landing or Happy Days or Laverne & Shirley (all of which I did), we did create digital source reels like this just save time and ensure consistency. (We always made sure the titles were identical, so in rare cases where little changes got made, we made sure we used the correct one.) I think I told the story of how on The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, I rebuilt the entire main title from the original episodes, just to get a cleaner picture and avoid all the optical dupe generations. I wanted to do this with M*A*S*H as well, because that was the dirtiest main title in the history of American television, but we unfortunately couldn't make that deal with Fox.
Also, most people at home were watching these on 13" or 19" black-and-white (or maybe color) sets with not-so-great reception anyway so it's not like they would have looked great even under the best of conditions.
Regarding M*A*S*H - apparently someone has recently remastered all or most of the episodes, as the ones airing on WGN currently look amazing, and sound amazing as well. You can tell at the opening theme when the audio is so clear. I have the DVDs, and they aren't as good as these WGN copies (sorry, Vidiot). Occasionally there's an episode that has somewhat muffled sound for some reason, but the picture is still better.
I wonder if you're familiar with Vidtronics, Pacific Video Post Production, Compact Video Systems/Services and Modern VideoFilm? Perhaps they were responsible for churning out the minor variations of those Paramount logos we saw. I would guess that the 1980s syndicated prints of Star Trek were likely videotape edited at Modern VideoFilm. ~Ben
JLTV is airing VHS copies of 'You Bet Your Life' with the elapsed time and speed in the upper left hand corner!
Oh, the technology was for crap in the 1980s and 1990s. We never had access to the original negatives. If they redid all the scans in at least HD from the negs, I bet they'd look like a million bucks today. We did our best in the 1980s and early 1990s, but there's only so much you can do with the gear from that era, working with IPs. Having said that, the M*A*S*H shows actually looked really good, having the best-of-the-best union crews at Fox on the show. Yes, I worked at Modern for about 3 years and Compact for a year. Vidtronics was one block from where I work now, and Pacific (later called Laser-Pacific) was two blocks away, both on Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood. You'll find pretty much the same companies did all the same work during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly for TV syndication and home video. Complete Post was another one, and I did a ton of Fox work there during the 1990s, just as they were bought by Technicolor. (Interesting footnote: Vidtronics was Technicolor's video arm, but that eventually went out of business. Years later, Technicolor bought Complete Post around 1999-2000 and got back into the digital video post business as film use started to fade out.) You can draw a correlation to the improvements in technology for cameras and post-production and the improvements in average home sets. I would say that a $500 4K set today is arguably ten times better than a $500 set was 20 years ago.
I'm just happy we have good looking prints that were transferred with care these days. Thanks for the work you've done towards this effort over the years. I was watching The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island on MeTV today and both looked great. Does anyone remember when TBS aired colorized versions of the first season of Gilligan's Island? Blegh...
Yeah, the sad thing is, all the 1980s and most of the 1990s colorization shows were done via analog, and that's one reason they look like crap. Nowadays, they can be much more exacting and actually do it pretty well... provided they spend a lot of time and money at it. I know a former exec with Colorization, Inc., and he told me at the end of the 1980s (around the time they went out of business) that everybody discovered that when you colorize an old show... it's still old. The color version didn't really attract the big audience they were hoping for. Their faulty reasoning was, "if only these shows were color, lots of young people would watch it!" Now, they're doubly screwed because I think a lot of audiences don't want to watch square 4x3 pictures on large 16x9 screens, because now that looks old as well. I actually like the idea of colorizing I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, and all the other shows where at some point they switched from B&W to color. At least that way, they have a general idea of how the show should have looked in color. There are a handful of B&W shows that kind of fall into a film noir area -- I would put Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Outer Limits in that category -- where I think going to color might not artistically be a good idea. Classic movies? No, that's a bad idea, too. About the only exception I would make would be cartoons, where they have very definite lines defining the outline for each character, plus we know how Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, and all those other characters should look in color. And the only reason those were shot in B&W was for cost reasons. Disney has done some experimental in-house work redoing some of the early Mickeys in color, and they look great. But I don't think a mass audience wants to watch them... because the cartoons are old.
Speaking of cartoons... were you involved in the computer-colorization of the black-and-white Looney Tunes cartoons released between 1935 and 1943, as well as some of the Harman-Ising-era Merrie Melodies from 1931-33? These colorizations took place in 1990, 1992 and 1995. ~Ben
Pretty rouch PAL to NTSC here, everything veers into the pink side and the colours are very muted, poor Benny looks ill.
Did syndication prints really look that bad? Well, I had seem some pretty beat up films in the late 1980's / early 1990's being re-run on Australian TV but I've never seen anything like this until I bought this DVD set (only ten bucks so I'll forgive them for now) ..... Warning to lovers of good quality, this film may kill you!
There appears to be a pitch error on this Australian rerun of this 1979 Mork & Mindy episode (specifically, it's S02E10A, "Mork vs. the Necrotons [Part 1]"). The video plays at normal speed, but the theme music is higher pitched (but not the Paramount logo theme after it). ~Ben
All I know about are the ones sent to Korea and re-animated in color for TV syndication, and those look haaaaaaarible. I've never seen any WB cartoons colorized via computer. If they did it today, in HD (or 4K), it would look a lot better and would make more sense. It might even be cheaper to do it today than it was 25 years ago, because the computers are faster and the software is more powerful.
Speaking of those notorious hand-colored jobs, this one seems way off... (it starts with the re-drawn 1936 studio logo zoomed up and out of focus, then pans out, and is then followed by the 1939 Looney Tunes series logo; for the ending title, the "That's All, Folks!" is seen outlined, and then filled up with white) ~Ben
Yeah, that's one of the Korean re-animated things, which I believe were actually done back in the 1970s. Those were awful. The original B&W cartoons are pin-sharp and could yield very good colorization source material... but WB would have to want to do it, and they'd have to come up with enough of a budget to do it right.
I saw the computer-colored ones on Cartoon Network (and maybe elsewhere?) in the mid-to-late 90's and they pretty decent, as I recall. Not as horrible as the Korean colorized ones, that's for sure.
Speaking of old Syndication prints, here's one for The Fugitive. It's part 1 of the series finale. Unlike the 80's/90's prints from Worldvision, these ones weren't time-sped at all. Instead, they were chopped up quite a bit.
Ah, okay. Yeah, I remember they were perfectly watchable. It helps that it's colorizing the original drawings and not re-drawing the material.
Certain ones were, just as certain ones were "redrawn" in the late 1960s. And certain ones were done both ways. But only a selection.
This variation of the 1967-69 Warner Bros./Seven Arts opening/closing title - which was the first that you'd see on most (if not all) of these hand-colored jobs (from 1968 to 1972) - was recently seen on Cartoon Network broadcasts of "Daffy's Southern Exposure." Unlike for standard issues, this version does not have the Technicolor legend below the "A Warner Bros./Seven Arts Cartoon," and could be had with any of the Looney Tunes opening and closing title themes from 1936 (starting with "Plane Dippy") through 1943 (the final black and white short was issued on December 11 of that year, called "Puss 'n Booty"). This video came from the 1939 cartoon "Scalp Trouble." ~Ben
