5 ms·

Re: negative re-masters I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette.

by xattt 1y ago

Re: negative re-masters I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette. For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for. I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

sgt 1y ago
Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though. The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > But surely the film rolls still exist? I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money. So, I don't bet. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...
- MrRadar 1y ago
  A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films. Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.
esafak 1y ago
I recall reading that they assumed TV shows did not have as much long-term value as films.
itisit 1y ago
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties? The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0] [0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-circus-was-nearly-erased-by-the-bbc.html https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...
MisterTea 1y ago
> Were studios really that reckless with their properties? Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.
- MrRadar 1y ago
  It doesn't even take destruction of the property to keep media locked up forever, sometimes even just IP rights. For example original Brave Little Toaster film has never seen an official release in HD because it was produced as a joint venture and nobody has (apparently) been willing or able to hammer out a deal between the various rights holders for a new home video or streaming release. In 2023 a 4K scan of a theatrical print was uploaded to Youtube and despite the slightly rough state of the print it remains the best quality you can view the film today. There's even a pinned comment under the video from the original director thanking the person who uploaded it to Youtube for preserving their film!
- bravoetch 1y ago
  There are several Star Wars film projects that are collecting old film print, negatives, laser disc, etc and using that to remake the original releases. Gemini is very good at listing off all these projects, if you're interested.
gnomesteel 1y ago
Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.
  - HideousKojima 1y ago
    Assuming the cels weren't lost or destroyed. Or auctioned off to fans/collectors, as was often done: https://www.animationconnection.com/original-production-cels https://www.animationconnection.com/original-production-cels In fact there's an episode of the Simpson's where Bart buys an Itchy & Scratchy animation cel and is disappointed when it's just a segment of Itchy's arm (or something like that). EDIT: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_cel https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_c... The cel had Scratchy's arm, and it was in the episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" (S05 E21).
    - Stratoscope 1y ago
      Guilty as charged! This brings back a memory from around 1980. I ordered an animation cel from Original Animation Art (Starshine Group). You had to mail them a check and a description of what you were looking for, and hope for the best. The first one they sent me was a little bit better than Scratchy's arm, but not by much. I returned it and asked for something with the entire character in it. They sent Daffy Duck nearly off the edge of the frame with a nasty scowl. Not fun to look at. For the third try, I asked if I could please have something with the character smiling and in the center of the frame. And they sent a wonderful cel of Porky Pig from A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court! It looks very much like this one, but only Porky and not the background: https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-in-king-arthurs-court-1978-directed-by-chuck-jones https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-... That cel must have been from the same scene as mine, as some elements of it are identical, particularly his right hand holding the torch. Many years later I bought the DVD of this movie, stepped through it and found the exact frame with my cel. Too cool!
al_borland 1y ago
I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.
etempleton 1y ago
Film begins degrading immediately even if well stored. Television was seen as largely disposable and was treated as such.
Aurornis 1y ago
The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV. I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time. BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.
  - anjel 1y ago
    Residuals as quite lucrative potenial income stream argue to the contrary.
    - happycube 1y ago
      That made me think of Law and Order (since I remember reading that day players want to get on those shows for the residuals), and I saw a relatively early episode of SVU on a rerun that looked freshly shot.
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    I work in gaming and this is very much the same attitude, though it is starting to change: with things like Xbox Game Pass, there are now theoretically revenues to be skimmed from older releases via subscription revenues, so there is at least lip service paid to proper archiving of working files and source code. It's still tough to make the case not to phone home or rely on publisher-hosted services.
bluGill 1y ago
If you look close at the early silent movies: the campfires are burning the film from even older movies that are thus completely lost.
bredren 1y ago
Sometimes it happens by accident. See the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed music and film masters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
- bayindirh 1y ago
  ...and is covered up for years.
ornornor 1y ago
Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?
zimpenfish 1y ago
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head: re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0] "While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated." re: Dr Who missing episodes[1] "Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974." [0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adrian-maben-live-at-pompeii-2003-with-brain-d.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
- sumtechguy 1y ago
  Sometimes accidents happen for things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
toyg 1y ago
> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.
- wk_end 1y ago
  Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.
  - happycube 1y ago
    Yup, one would think the Simpsons would have been fully HD remastered by now.
- BHSPitMonkey 1y ago
  What you're referring to came before "the first few seasons". Season 1 and onward are the standalone TV show, spun off from the Tracey Ullman Show shorts.
dylan604 1y ago
>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain > Were studios really that reckless with their properties? yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.
- jboggan 1y ago
  This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    In the early days of streaming, content owners only had what they had sitting on the shelves. Most of those were SD masters that were formatted for broadcast. In the US, that meant 30i sources. Most TV was shot on 24p film, transferred to 30i in a telecine, edited without any regard to that film cadence, and that was that. The opening/closing songs were typically cut from that same footage, and doing an inverse telecine on that content was a nightmare. Everyone of us that dealt with that to supply the early days of streaming content had "so much fun". Content owners suddenly had a vested interest in making their content look better, and now there's a way to get compensated to have better sources made to provide to those streaming platforms. To find the original film from old SD TV shows would be very rare. Feature films have been scanned from negative many many times. I was part of scanning a studio's entire library to HD. They've since gone back and scanned (or are scanning) again for 4k. Each time the scan is done, money is spent (and it's not cheap). Now, the streaming platforms have the clout to refuse "subpar" sources now, and can demand that these restorations are the preferred source
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river. If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  We might need to build faster than light ships and great radio telescopes to get those broadcasts recorded.
Henchman21 1y ago
Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually… My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.
PaulHoule 1y ago
Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack. Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.
hylaride 1y ago
Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons. The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added. Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions. Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.
- doublerabbit 1y ago
  Does it need to be fixed though? If children got on with it then, why cannot we now?
  - happycube 1y ago
    Because children watched them on 13"-25" tube TV's that were designed to make those imperfections look acceptable (for the time), that a modern display blows up to proportions never seen during production even with the best studio displays of the era. semi-related: I'm visiting my parents with a Sony OLED, and the frame interpolation made parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like it was shot on an HD video camera.
registeredcorn 1y ago
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes. Let's say I do the following: 1) I take a photograph of a flower 2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production 3) I crop and resize it With each step, copies of the image are made. After that, I export to several file types. Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day. Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later. Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact. To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for > Were studios really that reckless with their properties? These corporations could not care less, it's just money to them. Streaming services will take your money and ship you "high definition" nonsense that's so horribly compressed it has artifacts in 90% black frames. If you want quality, you need to find the obsessives out there who will not be satisfied unless they have the absolute best version of everything. These are the people who will track down and scan the negatives the company left lying around to rot using equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars. https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ These people really put these billion dollar corporations to shame.
mannyv 1y ago
From a business perspective, each movie is generally its own LLC. So once everything's wrapped up the things need to be disposed, and where those things go is unclear. I mean, storage is forever...but who wants to pay for storage forever?

by xattt 1y ago

sgt 1y ago

Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though. The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?

bayindirh 1y ago
> But surely the film rolls still exist? I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money. So, I don't bet. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...
MrRadar 1y ago
A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films. Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.

esafak 1y ago

I recall reading that they assumed TV shows did not have as much long-term value as films.

itisit 1y ago

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties? The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0] [0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-circus-was-nearly-erased-by-the-bbc.html https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...

MisterTea 1y ago

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties? Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.

MrRadar 1y ago
It doesn't even take destruction of the property to keep media locked up forever, sometimes even just IP rights. For example original Brave Little Toaster film has never seen an official release in HD because it was produced as a joint venture and nobody has (apparently) been willing or able to hammer out a deal between the various rights holders for a new home video or streaming release. In 2023 a 4K scan of a theatrical print was uploaded to Youtube and despite the slightly rough state of the print it remains the best quality you can view the film today. There's even a pinned comment under the video from the original director thanking the person who uploaded it to Youtube for preserving their film!
bravoetch 1y ago
There are several Star Wars film projects that are collecting old film print, negatives, laser disc, etc and using that to remake the original releases. Gemini is very good at listing off all these projects, if you're interested.

gnomesteel 1y ago

Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.
- HideousKojima 1y ago
  Assuming the cels weren't lost or destroyed. Or auctioned off to fans/collectors, as was often done: https://www.animationconnection.com/original-production-cels https://www.animationconnection.com/original-production-cels In fact there's an episode of the Simpson's where Bart buys an Itchy & Scratchy animation cel and is disappointed when it's just a segment of Itchy's arm (or something like that). EDIT: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_cel https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Itchy_%26_Scratchy_animation_c... The cel had Scratchy's arm, and it was in the episode "Lady Bouvier's Lover" (S05 E21).
  - Stratoscope 1y ago
    Guilty as charged! This brings back a memory from around 1980. I ordered an animation cel from Original Animation Art (Starshine Group). You had to mail them a check and a description of what you were looking for, and hope for the best. The first one they sent me was a little bit better than Scratchy's arm, but not by much. I returned it and asked for something with the entire character in it. They sent Daffy Duck nearly off the edge of the frame with a nasty scowl. Not fun to look at. For the third try, I asked if I could please have something with the character smiling and in the center of the frame. And they sent a wonderful cel of Porky Pig from A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur's Court! It looks very much like this one, but only Porky and not the background: https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-in-king-arthurs-court-1978-directed-by-chuck-jones https://www.comic-mint.com/chuck-jones/a-connecticut-rabbit-... That cel must have been from the same scene as mine, as some elements of it are identical, particularly his right hand holding the torch. Many years later I bought the DVD of this movie, stepped through it and found the exact frame with my cel. Too cool!

al_borland 1y ago

I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.

etempleton 1y ago

Film begins degrading immediately even if well stored. Television was seen as largely disposable and was treated as such.

Aurornis 1y ago

The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV. I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.

bayindirh 1y ago
> The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time. BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.
- anjel 1y ago
  Residuals as quite lucrative potenial income stream argue to the contrary.
  - happycube 1y ago
    That made me think of Law and Order (since I remember reading that day players want to get on those shows for the residuals), and I saw a relatively early episode of SVU on a rerun that looked freshly shot.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  I work in gaming and this is very much the same attitude, though it is starting to change: with things like Xbox Game Pass, there are now theoretically revenues to be skimmed from older releases via subscription revenues, so there is at least lip service paid to proper archiving of working files and source code. It's still tough to make the case not to phone home or rely on publisher-hosted services.

bluGill 1y ago

If you look close at the early silent movies: the campfires are burning the film from even older movies that are thus completely lost.

bredren 1y ago

Sometimes it happens by accident. See the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed music and film masters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

bayindirh 1y ago
...and is covered up for years.

ornornor 1y ago

Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?

zimpenfish 1y ago

> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head: re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0] "While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated." re: Dr Who missing episodes[1] "Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974." [0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adrian-maben-live-at-pompeii-2003-with-brain-d.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

sumtechguy 1y ago
Sometimes accidents happen for things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

toyg 1y ago

> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.

wk_end 1y ago
Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.
- happycube 1y ago
  Yup, one would think the Simpsons would have been fully HD remastered by now.
BHSPitMonkey 1y ago
What you're referring to came before "the first few seasons". Season 1 and onward are the standalone TV show, spun off from the Tracey Ullman Show shorts.

dylan604 1y ago

>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain > Were studios really that reckless with their properties? yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.

jboggan 1y ago
This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.
- dylan604 1y ago
  In the early days of streaming, content owners only had what they had sitting on the shelves. Most of those were SD masters that were formatted for broadcast. In the US, that meant 30i sources. Most TV was shot on 24p film, transferred to 30i in a telecine, edited without any regard to that film cadence, and that was that. The opening/closing songs were typically cut from that same footage, and doing an inverse telecine on that content was a nightmare. Everyone of us that dealt with that to supply the early days of streaming content had "so much fun". Content owners suddenly had a vested interest in making their content look better, and now there's a way to get compensated to have better sources made to provide to those streaming platforms. To find the original film from old SD TV shows would be very rare. Feature films have been scanned from negative many many times. I was part of scanning a studio's entire library to HD. They've since gone back and scanned (or are scanning) again for 4k. Each time the scan is done, money is spent (and it's not cheap). Now, the streaming platforms have the clout to refuse "subpar" sources now, and can demand that these restorations are the preferred source

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river. If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.

rbanffy 1y ago
We might need to build faster than light ships and great radio telescopes to get those broadcasts recorded.

Henchman21 1y ago

Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually… My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.

PaulHoule 1y ago

Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack. Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.

hylaride 1y ago

Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons. The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added. Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions. Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.

doublerabbit 1y ago
Does it need to be fixed though? If children got on with it then, why cannot we now?
- happycube 1y ago
  Because children watched them on 13"-25" tube TV's that were designed to make those imperfections look acceptable (for the time), that a modern display blows up to proportions never seen during production even with the best studio displays of the era. semi-related: I'm visiting my parents with a Sony OLED, and the frame interpolation made parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail look like it was shot on an HD video camera.

registeredcorn 1y ago

> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes. Let's say I do the following: 1) I take a photograph of a flower 2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production 3) I crop and resize it With each step, copies of the image are made. After that, I export to several file types. Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day. Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later. Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact. To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for > Were studios really that reckless with their properties? These corporations could not care less, it's just money to them. Streaming services will take your money and ship you "high definition" nonsense that's so horribly compressed it has artifacts in 90% black frames. If you want quality, you need to find the obsessives out there who will not be satisfied unless they have the absolute best version of everything. These are the people who will track down and scan the negatives the company left lying around to rot using equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars. https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/ These people really put these billion dollar corporations to shame.

mannyv 1y ago

From a business perspective, each movie is generally its own LLC. So once everything's wrapped up the things need to be disposed, and where those things go is unclear. I mean, storage is forever...but who wants to pay for storage forever?