Most Warner HD-DVDs have some form of bit rot that have made them unplayable. Most of mine including Forbidden Planet are now unreadable. I even purchased a couple of sealed Warner HD-DVDs and they were unplayable straight out of the package. HD-DVDs from other studios and some Warner discs weren't affected.
That went well...Forbidden Planet wouldn't play-though the extras did. Wouldn't you know it, my copy of Spartacus works just fine, and so did Fast Times At Ridgemont High, but it was Forbidden Planet I wanted to see.
Rinse the discs under warm -- not quite hot -- tap water. Top and bottom sides. Then dry off with a white cotton cloth or undershirt or something. Then play the disc. It should work.
That's because Fast Times and Spartacus HD-DVDs are from Universal, not Warner. All of my HD-DVDs from Universal still play fine.
It's not about dirt it's about clingy residue from the factory that's all but invisible to the naked eye. Tech support at Disney Movie Club taught me about this over the telephone and darned if it didn't work while he was holding on. It has also worked with other discs.
These discs played fine for years so it's nothing from the factory. The bit rot on Warner HD-DVD discs has been known for almost ten years. Warner Brothers HD-DVD's Disk Rot
Monster Vinyl store in Collinsville, IL had a home built Robbie The Robot on display for sometime...anyway here's a video filmed inside back in 2019...
@Solaris, if emulating your image using Blu-ray data made one thing clear to me, it's that you put some serious work, and a healthy dose of vision, into your original. My hat is way off to you. I should also say that I love your coloring and contrast, but I couldn't quite match it. Maybe I got close enough for digital. Anyway, below is my attempt. Perhaps due to my extraction process, perhaps due to the original Blu-ray data, things aren't as crisp as I might like, but, well, I suppose it's something anyway. The touch of Photoshop unsharp mask helped a bit in that arena. I tried not to stray into artifact territory. It may not display at its full size, but you can always give it a click or something. If the image is useful to you Solaris, do what makes sense to you with it!
Okay, since I was in that mood, here is something for me. A bit of a crop of the original overall frame... Is it just me, or did they really set up the cave structure here so that if would suggest a rather stocky Id Monster "body"?
Well done, and thank you! Taking out that distortion was tough, but I think you did a great job overall. The color looks good!
Interesting fun fact: Forbidden Planet was shot in the original 2.55 CinemaScope format... but for reasons unknown, it's never been released in anything but 2.35. Nobody knows why. I suspect MGM/Warner Bros. has never gone back to the original negative and scanned the whole frame. CinemaScope changed to 2.35 at some point in the middle of 1958 (five years after the format debuted), to accommodate mag & optical sound at the same time.
Though I enjoyed re-watching Forbidden Planet recently using a standard DVD of the most recent transfer, and have considered buying the Blu-ray for another watch, I’m concerned that there is such a thing as a transfer of a 1950s sci-fi film that is too crisp and clear. If I understand him correctly, in his War of the Worlds Blu-ray review - https://www.amazon.com/War-Worlds-C...s-tv&sprefix=war+of+the+worlds,aps,185&sr=1-5 - Mr. Swanson indicates that such movies actually suffer somewhat from modern transfer technology, which can be so crisp that it can show matte lines and wires that could not be seen (or as readily seen) when the movie was originally released. Swanson opines that the creators of the War of the Worlds Blu-ray took this into account and "digitally altered the 4K scans to produce the same degree of soft image that audiences originally experienced when they first saw the film in 1953". I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall reading a review of the Forbidden Planet Blu-ray that indicated that the image was so well-defined that special effects wires were visible. When I watched the standard DVD, I saw none of that. Anyone think the Forbidden Planet Blu-ray suffers from too much definition (as odd as that sounds)?
So I bought the Blu-ray. I have the standard DVD. If the former is not better visually than the latter, you all are going to be in a heap of trouble.
Thank @Vidiot for sharing that fun fact! I believe Kino-Lorber is now releasing 4K Blu-Ray titles and recently read some news online via The Digital Bits website that MGM has begun licensing some of its older library titles out to Kino..maybe Forbidden Planet will be a candidate one day to get a Restored 2.55 Frame Format to UHD 4K media!
No comment! Yes, that is true, and the argument Criterion made was that since they used the original negative, you would never see the wires as clearly in a print in a theater. If it had been me, I would have "split the difference" and not removed all the wires but I would have softened them a little bit. In other cases, you can argue that the mistakes are part of the heritage and tradition of the film, and it'd be wrong to cover them up. We walk a fine line when we remaster them. I tend to fix lighting problems and time-of-day problems, and I'll reframe if a boom mic is showing in one shot, but beyond that, it is what it is. I have fixed bad VFX shots on occasion when it didn't take too much time, and it was more a question of bringing out what was good and reducing what was bad.
Good points, but outside of an Ed Wood film, I'd rather not see the wires. But just to be clear, you cannot see the wires or similar supports or "flaws" in the Forbidden Planet Blu-ray, correct?
$9.99 at Amazon and available "soon" (a couple of weeks, it seems). I'll be comparing the two (DVD and BR). I appreciate the movie a bit more after acknowledging it was a few years before NASA and our space program. It's quite good, given they didn't have much to go on. The romantic (more like modern day masher) sequences and the fairly lame Holliman comedy relief are vestiges of movies of the time (like one might see in a 1950s WWII movie set in the Pacific), so it's hard to blame them for adding that "window dressing" we have learned to do without in sci-fi films. It reminds me a lot of early Star Trek, where Kirk was not adverse to chasing the skirts and lame humor scenes often worked their way into the plots. That said, I mostly watch it for the colors. I could play it with the sound off if I had to. Dreaming while awake, for lack of a better analogy.
I think the flaws are there for people who look for them, like the Krell "underground city" matte paintings. We've been howling at the horrible mistakes in the Bond films for the past 40 years, just going through them again in chronological order on Blu-ray, but the effects were about as good as they could get them for their time. I judge this stuff in context and try not to be too critical: Forbidden Planet was 1956, and what they did was pretty miraculous for the time. On the other hand, the effects for Disney's 1979 Black Hole were incredibly bad, and that's just judging by Star Wars' 1977 standards.
And that astonishingly bad matching action in one of my all-time favorites, North by Northwest (the train dining car scene). As bad as it is, most people don’t see it unless you point it out to them.
