ALL SCI-FI

[Eadie]

This may be the most important documentary for sci-fi, fantasy, & horror fans!

https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/videos/how-colorized-historical-footage-is-painstakingly-made/56957

It's about the series America in Color. But what if the same process was applied to Forbidden Planet?
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Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.

[Gord Green]

I don't think the process would make much difference to the film as released.....But it would make a very real difference to the deleted scenes!

Imagine a completed film containing all the deleted elements etc.
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Eadie]

[Bud Brewster]

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With all due respect, Gord, your admirable dream of "restoring" the deleted scenes seems somewhat unrealistic. Those scenes — which only exist on an aging 16mm print with numerous scratches and countless other flaws — cannot be "restored".

Hell's bells, they looked like crap when that old work print the Baron's received was brand new — and after all these years, that print is now a lost cause. We can't "restore" what looked bad to start with, and which now looks horrible because it's aged so badly.

As I've said before, the only way to re-insert those scenes into Forbidden Planet would be for skilled computer artists to start from scratch and recreate each one of those scenes, using the existing movie and the piss-poor copy of the deleted scenes as nothing more than "visual references".

However, on a more positive note, it's obvious that the technology now exists to do exactly that!

If James Cameron can create Avatar from scratch, then it's possible to recreate the deleted scenes (and even a few brand new ones) for Forbidden Planet.

I think we could even create the entire sequel I described, and it would look exactly like it was filmed and released in 1958, two years after the original!

Frankly, ladies and gentleman, THAT'S what I'd really like to see! Not some modernized bastardization of the great original, which Hollywood promotes as a "remake".
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

Bud, I never said anything about "cleaning up" those scenes! That would be like polishing a turd.....cleaned up crap is still crap!

But to take some of those scenes and through CGI making them look and sound like they should have is a different thing and to be desired. Heck, If George Lukas can "enhance" STAR WARS the same could be done for FP.

I'd rather see an enhanced version of FP over ANY kind of remake!
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.

[Bud Brewster]

[Maurice]

I know they mention their researchers, but what always concerns me when they colorize film is that they are frankly guessing what a lot of the colors are, especially as regards hair color, clothing, wallpaper, etc. Does that woman have brown or auburn hair? Is she wearing a blouse that matches? You end up coloring (pun intended) our perceptions of the images because of the largely subjective choices that have to be made.

I've run into a similar issue when digitizing old films where the prints are faded. I can use the color correction tools to try to compensate, but then am I confident that I know what the colorspace for this film should be? Do I know what sort of film it was shot on and what its dynamic range is? Or in trying to fix it am I making it look different than it did originally?
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles