Josh Z

The Director's Cut DVD also has some teal & orange coloring, but it was made stronger on the Blu-ray.

The movie was not teal & orange when it played in theaters in 1979. Nor were prior video editions of the movie teal & orange until the early 2000s. The teal & orange color fad is a recent development that started with the advent of digital color grading.

hanshotfirst1138

Didn't Michael Mann do the same thing for his films on the recent Criterion releases? They must think it improves the films for some weird-ass reason? Granted, the calibration on my HDTV probably IS way off, but it sounds like that's not the issue.

Terrier

"Teal". Could it be some kind of contemporary military mood, dominating media and society, behind this?

Terrier

Teal is a higher temperature green. A bluish green. The standard settings on some flatscreen TVs (like Sony) are too bluish. Maybe that's the problem, rather than the Blu-ray disc?

ntnon

There may be some settings issues, but isn't the blue!orange things quite established..? TVTropes, Wired and others write about it extensively..

LPMA

Teal and orange are complimentary colors. When together they're supposed to "pop" and make an image that's more pleasing to the eye.

ntnon

So there's some kind of logic in using it on trailers and posters and "new" films, but existing films are surely already pleasing enough without the - surely expensive - extra work needed to re-colour them..

hanshotfirst1138

Thank you. If that's how he wanted to make the films, that's how he should've made them. If he wants to make Avatar 2 or future films of his that way, that's totally fine. But stop putting mustaches on the Mona Lisa. It must be expensive to do this to begin with, so I'm sure that directors want to George Lucas it and make these the "definitive" versions, but it's not like it's something that ever likely to be fixed either. The home video market is on it's knees, another rerelease seems highly unlikely, and on the off chance there is one, this will probably be the master for the foreseeable future. And I've NEVER understood why it's so damn difficult to put the mono on. It can't take up that much space anyway.

Josh-da-man

Maybe we're seeing these older films like Alien, Aliens, and Terminator being re-colored to teal and orange so they will look less 'dated' to modern viewers who are accustomed to this particular color palette.

Sort of the same logic behind George Lucas re-working the first three Star Wars movies with a bunch of CGI stuff in the background.

TheDuke

I love the sort of faded, drab color timing of 70's and 80's movies. It's a shame.

zyzzle

So do I. Yes, drab and faded is oldschool, not attractive to "modern" (ie, stupid, cookie-cutter hyperactives) audiences so the producers feel they'll sell more if they put a pop to it (teal and orange), completely obviating the original intent of the picture to begin with.

It is a real shame, and I am glad that I am old enough to remember the days when audiences were more sophisticated and producers and studios were willing to experiment, take a chance, and maybe give a million bucks to a guy like Lucas to flesh-out his pet project of THX-1138. Now, Lucas, et al have completely been bought out by the system, are money-crazy hounds. Money is paramount to them, even surpassing their once unparalleled artistic merit.

Lucas instead thanks us, his original fans for 40 years, by changing his films drastically into some purported cash cash cows because he thinks they've become stale to "modern audiences." Cameron, too is guilty of this and should remember his "poor" roots and be thankful to his fans who put him on the map, not insult them with a morass of teal and orange...

It is disgusting.

HellTrack

I thought the Alien blu-rays looked amazing. Though, on the third one, I always watch the special edition where it's a cow instead of a dog that's the host. I don't tolerate violence to dogs.

ntnon

Running with those two points, a) is analogous to some Dada works, or "repurposing" or even remakes. They (should) exist ALONGSIDE the original - not replace it! And a "definitive" is basically one-for-one with 'director's cut'. Again, I sympathise, but it's an ADDITIONAL version, not a replacement...


I suspect your first point "this will become the master" part-answers your mono one... and I'm sure they routinely ignore mono soundtracks to appease the masses with hi-tec sound systems and no knowledge of their purpose - to play things, not to revise them.

As for the market being on it's knees, isn't that marketing speak for "find a way to sell the same people the "same" product again and again"? DVD, Director's cut DVD, DVD Special Edition, blu ray, blu ray Extended Edition, newly re-coloured version...

ntnon

What's really sad (to fans of the original visions) is that it seems like it ISN'T the "producers" or "studios" but the directors themselves...

That said, if it IS the director making an artistic - rather than 'cynical' - choice, should the fans fall in line? If the person whose vision the original represented says that their vision was not reflwcted as well as they'd hoped... is a re-coloured version really that different from a re-CUT version? Again, it should be that both exist side by side, but if they did/do would both then seem more valid? Questions, questions..

Rypro 525

Question, was the opening scene (in 2005) from the original pilot or was that shot now. Its been so long since ive seen the early episodes

Josh Z

Wrong thread?

hanshotfirst1138

Not based on the evidence here.

That's probably the single dumbest thing I've heard, which means that that is most likely the way that directors and producers are thinking about it. Exactly what "modern viewer" would choose to buy it instead of walk past it because of different color timing is a mystery to me.

The difference being that the directors would argue that they didn't "replace" it. Lucas of course has babbled for years about how if you want to see the originals, they're out there on VHS. If the two things existed side-by-side, these would be non-issues, but they only way to get proper versions of these is on only SD DVD or even VHS tapes. That's not OK, IMO.

I would be an "additional" version if the originals were afforded the same level of care and restoration and weren't regulated to older, lesser quality releases with no interest from an involved parties on their restoration or continued existence.

But the mono issue is different. If they'd rather people listen in surround, simply load that up as the first track, and then put the mono on there. People uninterested in it will never select it to begin with! And that's not even counting the nonsense downmixes which serve NO purpose, since they'll upset those interested in the original tracks and be of no interest to those who just want surround mixes to begin with.

It used to be when the market was at its peak. Nowadays? I doubt it. Properly recolored versions with mono soundtracks have, with the best will in the world, a miniscule audience which likely wouldn't even support the cost of new printings of the discs, it'd be totally pointless. It's the same reason why Lucas' Orwellian rewriting of history is allowed: 99.9% of the population simply don't care.

I'd pay for properly colored version, but I doubt enough people would to even cover the cost of a new transfer.

Agreed. It seems like the revisionist power of new technologies means that it entices many of them to go back and make it "like they always wanted it."

I would say no. There is importance to film history at stake here, not just what the fans prefer.

Let's ask the cinematographers, color-timers, FX artists, etc. what THEY think? Granted, some may be fully on board with it, and you could argue (and maybe some of them even would, who knows) that what the director says is the final word or that when they signed on, their work should be subsumed to him or her, but to my mind, we are talking about larger issue of film history here. But it's academic anyway, like I said, the vast majority of the population don't and wont' care. But I already have the Legacy, Quadrilogy (That's not a word), and Anthology boxed sets clogging space in my bedroom, I'd like to be able to dump them and have a properly definitive collection and more space.

orangerunner

"Correct" colour is always going to be debatable. The colour of the raw negative film that came straight out of the cameras back in 1978 were a completely different colour than what you saw in the theatre in 1979 after colour timing had been applied.

Even on the original film the colour shifts from age so even if you applied the exact colour timing today to the original negatives it probably wouldn't look the same.

Remember too, each theatre had a different projector (or set of projectors) set to varying degrees of intensity, altering the contrast and colour even further.

I'm not a colour timing expert but matching colours exactly, especially over many years, is extremely difficult whether it's film, paint on a house, a canvas or a vintage car.

Yes, there are many examples of films that colour has been purposely tweaked for whatever reasons, justified or not, but obsessing over EXACT colour reproduction just takes the enjoyment out of the movie itself.

rocket1312

The films aren't necessarily being "re-colored." If a new scan is done from the original negative, they basically have to do the color timing from scratch. There are a few reasons why the color might change...

1) It's been so long since the original came out no one remembers what the thing originally looked like. Or they don't have suitable reference elements on which to base their decisions.

2) Color timing was all done photochemically in the past, so it wasn't an exact science. Digital tools allow for much more control and the ensuing result may actually be closer to the original intentions.

3) People change. I was an art major in college and there's no way I'd do things the same way if I were to revisit old projects. No matter how true my intentions were, I don't think I'd be able to tap into whatever my frame of mind/reference was even just 15 years ago.

4) The person doing the timing might not care what the original looks like and just does what they think looks good.

Don't get me wrong, I wish it didn't happen, but I don't think the reasons are as insidious as some are implying. I do believe that sometimes studios try to make things look more modern. They do this for the same reasons that Predator gets degrained within an inch of its life. There are actually people out there that prefer it that way. Just browse around on other forums and you'll see all sorts of crazy opinions on this sort of thing.

hasslein

That would be a great gimmick to sell tv's, if possible, a teal & orange color filter.

rw2516

How accurate would color stills/photos be for a frame of reference?

Josh Z

You imply that there were no standards in place until the digital age, and that's just not true. Cinematographers were well aware of the color properties of different film stocks, and would carefully time prints based on the characteristics of each stock. Reference prints were struck for the specific purpose of having a source to compare the color timing against.

Josh Z

They generally cannot be used as a reference. Publicity photos would be taken by a studio photographer who'd visit the set. How he chose to shoot and time his photos may have very little relation to what the film's cinematographer had planned.

Josh Z

All of your points here are accurate. What they all really boil down to is that the people doing digital color grading today are frequently ignorant of what older movies should look like, and simply grade them based on what they think looks good to their eye today.

DVD Polizei

Don't give THEM any ideas.