SKot

Mocata said:

Putting a few disclaimers up on something that will get them more subscribers? That’s one thing. Putting up terrible Ewok movies they’d rather deny exist in their current Saga? That’s something else.

That may be the very reasoning behind their non-action. But, I expect we’ll see them pop up on there eventually. The Holiday Special…not so much.

–SKot

SilverWook said:

It’s only going to cost Disney the price of a new film scan and Lucasfilm may have done it already in the past decade.

Chances are good that they have. I’m not even sure what the hold-up would be, other than hesitation about the two TV movies not being considered good enough. They’re certainly better than a lot of the, say, B-grade 70s-80s Disney movies they’ve put up there (which I’m still happy to see made available!).

Dare I even ask what could be in The Muppet Show Disney feels they have to slap a disclaimer on?

Well, there are apparently some skits containing racial and/or cultural stereotypes that could be considered problematic. That was kind of standard fare for the time period, but as far as I know (I’ve only watched 2-3 episodes so far) there isn’t anything extremely bad - Marty Feldman in drag playing an Arabian Nights harem girl isn’t particularly culturally sensitive by today’s standards, but it’s not exactly blackface either. I think they’ve handled it the right way for today’s critical eye by not censoring the episodes and instead offering the disclaimer. I’m totally fine with that.

Disney did opt to leave particular episodes out: in particular, one episode featuring Chris Langham is missing. When you Google what he was convicted for in 2007, you will see that it was probably wise not to make it currently available for children to watch. I have to agree with this decision, despite my general feelings about censorship and desire for completeness of material. I believe the episode is/was available on DVD, so that satisfies the completeness aspect - but Disney+ is a more “living” sort of medium, and kids might tune in unsupervised. Again, I think they made the right call.

I guess copyright clearances are preventing other missing episodes from showing up, but they are working on that, and I expect they will show up eventually. That’s good news.

Overall, I think Disney has done well on this. It would be easier I’m sure to just say no to having The Muppet Show on there at all, so I applaud them for taking the more difficult road.

–SKot

Rodney-2187 said:

What are the chances these will ever be available again on disc or streaming? Zero?

I would have to think they are pretty good. The Ewok movies may not be the brightest points in the Star Wars galaxy, but they aren’t the Holiday Special, either. The fact that they finally put all of The Muppet Show up on Disney+ (with a disclaimer against stereotyping, even) is a good sign that they are finding ways to make this older content available.

They’d better do them in fully remastered hi-def, though. I’ve seen the Ewok movie fan-sourced upscales, and I am absolutely floored at how good they look. I have never seen any upconverted SD material look so sharp and clear before in my life, and my hat’s off to the guy responsible for those. Makes me wonder what else is possible.

–SKot

huemulin said:

I understand that Sullivan’s material was kept by his Australian relatives. there is a museum there … maybe they have information. I don’t think it all went to waste when Sullivan died

I do really hope this is true…although of course they aren’t too keen on the modern day feeling that the credit behind Felix the Cat is largely due to Otto Messmer, not Pat Sullivan.

In the meantime, wonderful news in the form of a new Blu-ray in the Cartoon Roots series that has just come out, with some very rare beautifully restored early Felix cartoons. These were mastered from Tommy Stathes’ own film collection, and they look absolutely fantastic: painstakingly restored, sometimes from just fragments, for the most complete version and best image quality. This is the closest thing to a restored Felix collection we have yet. I’m hoping Tommy will release some more Felix collections in this series while we wait for Steve Stanchfield’s definitive collection to come out…due to rights issues because he wants to do it right and include everything from the early days and not just the public domain material, it’s been delayed indefinitely. I really hope it does go forward eventually.

–SKot

ReleaseTheImaxCut said:

Thank you for this! I had a hard time watching the holiday special but it’s necessary.

Indeed; it’s not only necessary, it’s mandatory.

Every true Star Wars fan must endure the trials!

–SKot

SilverWook said:

Maybe it’s time to bribe Warwick Davis? 😉

Are there any action figures he’s missing?

–SKot

none said:
Seems like there were a bunch of others from the same time period:

http://threads.rebelscum.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=3348477&page=0&view=collpased&sb=5&o=all&fpart=1#3348477

Meccano to Tri-Logo by Stephane Faucort
Irwin Toys: The Canadian Star Wars Connection by James McCallum
Kenner Star Wars Commercials DVD by Chris Georgoulias
The Vintage Glasslite Commercial Collection DVD by Shane Turgeon

I was able to get my hands on the Kenner DVD at the time, luckily due to some people I knew that were more connected in the collecting hobby than I was. I found the quality to be superb on most of the commercials, and I still watch the DVD any time I get the itch to travel back in time. It’s a treasure.

However, I have never seen hide nor hair of any of the foreign commercial collection DVDs. Have these been shared anywhere? They deserve to have as widespread a release as the Kenner one.

–SKot

Ya know…

I can’t believe after all these years (we did this project in 2005!), no other camcorder copies of Return of the Ewok have turned up.

I mean, I saw in person myself two separate people recording it at Celebration II. One guy even had a tripod! I talked to both of them afterwards, but neither of them responded back to me when I wrote them. What did they do with their footage?!

We really hoped that we’d eventually be able to redo this project with a better copy of the footage than what we had at the time, which was artificially “cropped” in pseudo-widescreen due to the film being projected in full screen on a wide projection screen, thus cutting off the top and bottom. OCP is still out there, and I’m sure he would revisit this project in a moment’s notice if I gave him better footage. But no other copy has ever surfaced. And so, 15 years later, it looks like this is still the only complete version out there.

Sorry, guys. At least we gave you something!

–SKot

Mocata said:

They probably wont. Releasing a new series called Ewok Adventures is more in line with their model.

Given how great The Mandalorian has turned out to be, I would be totally on board with this if they followed the same model. As far as I’m concerned they can keep making Mandalorian episodes like they have been until the end of time.

I just hope they don’t kill the golden goose (again) with all these planned projects at once.

–SKot

bttfbrasilfan said:

Does anyone know if a good 1080p 60fps (deinterlaced) upscale of the EditDroid version is available anywhere?
A good BD compatible h264 encode like this one would be great: https://youtu.be/KxtSX1lg8rE

I’d sure like to know who did that upscale and YouTube upload, to get hold of the source. It really does a great thing for the material.

Also: happy belated Life Day! We may not thrive, friends, but we survive, friends.

–SKot

I was pretty sure when I posted this that there would be few, if any, who knew about the character Iznogoud…and few to none who knew anything about the animated series. Oh well, it was worth a shot!

–SKot

SilverWook’s earlier comment about Battle for Endor being the Alien 3 of this franchise is spot-on, and is what I’ve always said about it as well. These films committed one of the cardinal sins of filmmaking, which is this:

NEVER make a film that kills off the characters you spent the entire previous film searching for and/or rescuing, especially when you kill them in the first 5-10 minutes. It renders the entire previous film pointless, and makes the viewer not want to watch any more.

Apart from that, I find Battle for Endor to be particularly solid (and actually Alien 3’s extended version as well once I get past the anger over its cardinal sin, and even though I will not consider it part of the canon). I watched both Caravan of Courage and Battle for Endor again for the first time in quite a while recently, and I found myself enjoying both quite a bit more than I expected. I’ve always liked them to some degree, but this time around I found a lot more to appreciate. Maybe it’s the lack of things I dislike about the prequels and the sequels (which are completely different things). Or maybe it’s because it’s a little more like The Mandalorian in certain ways (which I just now realized), in that it shows the everyday life of nobodies on a backwater planet rather than the big name heroes of the movies. I also spotted quite a bit more Easter Egg material this time around while watching it upscaled on a 65" TV (Cantina band instruments, FX-7 in the background, etc.). Rather a fun romp.

It’s definitely a crime that these two films are not on Disney+, and not available on a better physical format. They are not problematic the way the Holiday Special is, so why the reluctance to make them available? Come on, Disney - these are your perfect kind of family fare! (well, apart from the family being murdered thing…)

–SKot

SF01 said:

I guess the sbtitles were hardcoded in the signal, right?

That would seem to be the case. I believe there was at least one Spanish-language broadcast with subtitles burned in as well.

While the Holiday Special was not aired in England as far as we know, it was apparently aired in the Republic of Ireland’s RTÉ 2 on Christmas Day of 1979…so that broadcast would have been PAL.

–SKot

Here is a listing of all 52 English-language Iznogoud episodes, which are usually shown in pairs:

1. The Hideaway Bed
2. Hats Off!
3. The Magic Catalogue
4. Hopping Back To The Future
5. Iznogoud’s Unlucky Star
6. Iznogoud’s Student
7. Big Eyes
8. The Time Machine
9. Croaking the Night Away
10. One For The Road
11. State Visit
12. The Mysterious Poster Hanger
13. The Pic-Nic
14. The Sultan’s Double
15. The Western Potion
16. The Genie
17. Goldfingers
18. Incognito
19. It’s a Dog’s Tune
20. A Wonderful Machine
21. The Curse of the Diamond
22. Close Encounters of an Odd Kind
23. The Challenge
24. Slip Sliding in the Sultanate
25. The Crazy Cruise
26. Watch Out! There’s a Fly About
27. Giant’s Island
28. Tall Tales
29. Elections in the Sultanate
30. The Wax Museum
31. The Genie of the Mirror
32. The Memory Potion
33. Sweet Dreams
34. A Fairy Tale
35. Musical Chairs
36. The Magic Puzzle
37. In The Summertime
38. The Sultan’s Sceptre
39. The Sheik’s Potion
40. Nut’s Day
41. The Sultan’s Portrait
42. The Mysterious Ointment
43. Iznogoud’s Nest Egg
44. The Road to Nowhere
45. The Invisible Thread
46. The Magic Carpet
47. Magic Memories
48. Souvenir’s Island
49. The Maze
50. Mean Genie
51. The Tiger Hunt
52. A Hairy Statuette

Okay, this is a bit of a stretch since Americans almost certainly won’t have heard of this character at all, but people in the rest of the world (particularly Europe) may have…

Iznogoud is a character created by French comic strip writer René Goscinny (he wrote the Asterix comics!) along with artist Jean Tabary. The character himself is a wicked Grand Vizier anti-hero trying to depose the good Caliph so he can become Caliph himself, but every cunning plan he hatches backfires on him - think Wile E. Coyote set in Arabian Nights-style magical Baghdad. His stories were chronicled in strip form in the pages of French magazines in the 60s and 70s, and then were later released in separate comic book albums. There are about 30 of these albums currently, but Goscinny only contributed to about 14 of those before he died in 1977, and Tabary himself died in 2011 leaving his children to carry on the work after album 28.

Anyway, in 1995 Saban released an animated series based on many of the early stories, 52 13-minute episodes in total. The series was shown in a number of different countries and had unique language tracks for many of them. However, release on video has been very spotty at best. A few countries (Germany, Greece, The Netherlands, Spain) have had a number of episodes released on VHS and/or DVD, but no country has had a complete run released apart from France, who only got the full series on a limited edition VHS box set. The series ran in English on the BBC, but apart from 3 DVDs containing a total of 12 episodes, no others have been officially released. At some point quite a lot of the episodes were available with English audio (but Croation subtitles) from a torrent that has long ago vanished.

This thread is an attempt to explore the preservation of the Iznogoud series, particularly the English audio version. The goal is to try and preserve all 52 episodes in English.

My website containing info on everything Iznogoud can be found here.

I have the 2005 Sony discs for the Batman and Batman and Robin serials, which were sold separately. It’s been a while since I watched them, so I can’t really comment on what the quality was like without watching them all over again (and I’m not quite ready for that yet).

However, I’m very curious about the 2014 Mill Creek Entertainment release with both together as a 2 DVD set. Were they upgraded/changed at all, or are they the same exact discs released by Sony back in 2005? One reviewer on Amazon says they look “just as good” as the 2005 Sony release, but another reviewer says regarding the 2014 release “as far picture quality, there seems to be not a drastic, but a more than slight improvement.”

I’d love to be able to compare the two releases against each other.

–SKot

SilverWook said:
And Kenner did do mock-ups for Chewie’s family. No idea if the people responsible were tossed out a window.

Ah, but that was Kenner (the REAL Kenner), and not Hasbro anyway!

Incidentally, though, have we heard from those people at Kenner that were responsible since then?

–SKot

There are no film reel copies of the Holiday Special to anyone’s knowledge - it only exists on video. But even if the guy somehow got hold of a master tape and transferred it to DVD…that’s already been done by EditDroid, and is available for free out there in probably the highest quality we may ever see. So there’s not likely any reason to give him any money regardless.

I don’t suppose he was able to show an example of the quality he supposedly has? Probably not.

–SKot

On that topic, there are no bad ideas at Hasbro…except for one.

–SKot

For various reasons, I never got to see the original Star Wars (or ESB or Jedi) in the theater, even though I was 7 in 77 and soon became the biggest Star Wars fan in my school (no hyperbole either, I was actually known for this, and not always kindly!). It wasn’t until the movies came out on video that I finally saw the actual films for the first time…but in pan and scan, cropped and crappy, likely with mono sound. Obviously I was still dying to see them in the theater, but they weren’t showing anymore.

In the early 1990s (1991 or 1992 I think?) an opportunity arose to see the original Star Wars at a one-time charity showing in my town of Portland, Oregon. I was overjoyed, but there were weird specifications for the tickets where they were $50 but you had to have five people. Believe it or not, I could not find 4 other people to go with me to see Star Wars at this point…“oh, I’ve seen that 100 times before”, etc. from every person I asked. I managed to find ONE other person who wanted to go, but that wasn’t enough. “Oh well,” I thought, “there will be other opportunities.” How wrong I was!

Obviously I went to see the movies in 1997 when they were released as Special Editions. But it was pretty apparent that I’d missed out on something, and when it was announced that this would be the end of the original editions going forward, my heart sank. In the years that followed, numerous theaters around the US announced they were going to show the “original” Star Wars, but in the end they were either mistaken or could not get permission. I vowed I would move mountains and go anywhere to see the original Star Wars. Of course, my ultimate dream was to see it in 70mm…but that idea just seemed preposterous.

So when I first heard about this showing at the Academy, I scoffed and said there was no way they were getting the original, because no one ever got the original. At the time I didn’t know about the 70mm factor. I watched the live stream video of the panel and enjoyed it. But then…then I heard that the print shown not only WAS the original edition, but it was also in 70mm! And I completely missed out on the opportunity.

Some day, universe. Some day.

–SKot

It is extremely gratifying, Ted, to see you finally lay your hands on that elusive Mexican VHS. I think I can safely say we’ve all been rooting for you on that. It’s amazing how hard some of these things are to find.

–SKot

Interested to see what you come up with for this. I’ll help if I have anything to add.

–SKot

SilverWook said:

An original 70mm Star Tours reel is in an upcoming Profiles In History auction!
https://profilesinhistory.com/auctions/animation-disneyana-auction-99/
On page 115 of the auction catalog. I fear it will fetch quite a bit though. 😕

Uh…whatever happened with this?

The auction site doesn’t list it in “Prices Realized”. Did it actually sell? This would have been worth trying to crowdsource the funds for preservation.

(BTW, it’s item #415 in the catalog if you’re looking for it.)

–SKot

oneweekonline said:

I didn’t find any info on that one. Any chance you could post a picture of the cover (and the back, if possible)?

I know this thread is old… but i picked this vhs up at a thrift store for 50cents today and was looking for info on it.
[IMG]http://i67.tinypic.com/m9sz2w.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i68.tinypic.com/sy9iq8.jpg[/IMG]

Looks like one of the many bootleg blooper VHS tapes that were on the market in the 90s, typically with a color Xerox or inkjet printed cover and everything but the kitchen sink thrown on the tape. There’s probably more variations of these than anyone could ever track.

As far as “official” or “semi-official” VHS tapes of the bloopers go, though, there seems to have only been around 4-5 versions.

–SKot

I had to respond to this earlier post, because…

SilverWook said:

Again, how do they get away with selling this? And what’s next, a live show in theaters?

Funny you should say that!

https://www.wired.com/story/star-wars-holiday-special-stage/?fbclid=IwAR1T8Jk0sCm48LYQyzVi430W7weqUjlq0263MvfxmBgVQGFCUV9UJUIpBvk

I guess this is the year for it!

–SKot