Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.


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» Sunday, August 08, 2004
"Digitally Remastered" is The New Buzzword
We also went by Dollar Tree today...nothing much we needed, but they did have several racks of DVDs in plain paper sleeves. Mostly these were of old television series: Burns and Allen, Adventures of Robin Hood with Richard Greene, things like that. There were some old movies in the bunch, and some fairly new stuff, including the infamous 1968 Heidi that pre-empted the end of a critical football game. And of course, being at Dollar Tree, they were $1 each.

For a dollar each, you don't expect much, but for a dollar, you can take a chance. So I plucked up Mr. & Mrs. North, a 1950s mystery series about husband and wife sleuths that I've read a lot about, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and a copy of Tales of Tomorrow. (This ToT has an interesting history. It contains an adaptation of Frankenstein starring Lon Chaney Jr. The show was performed live, but on this particular broadcast, Chaney, who was apparently drunk at the time, thought it was the dress rehearsal, so he misses cues, lifts furniture instead of breaking it, and generally muffs the entire thing.)

I played the Sergeant Preston tonight. I must mention that all of these cheap sleeves are emblazoned with the words "digitally remastered." It's the standard promotion today to indicate to folks that a formerly bad picture has been cleaned, corrected, and generally made spiffy. Old television programs must certainly need a lot of this--a lot of them were filmed live and only kinescopes--copies filmed from the television screen itself--exist. Others--well, they were only old television shows, and in black and white to boot. Who cared about keeping good copies?

They care now, because the market for nostalgia is huge. So every DVD and its mother :-) is emblazoned "digitally remastered" so you'll think it looks the same as the day it was broadcast on NBC, ABC, CBS or Dumont.

If Preston was "digitally remastered," then I hate to think of what the original copies of these episodes looked like. The color has shifted so that yellow tinges the prints and blue is faded. The red of Preston's coat is red, but an odd red. The scenes are either dark or faded, or have a shadow in one corner of the screen.

Which is a shame because these were filmed in color, even though it was the 1950s, and were filmed up in the mountains of Colorado and California, so the snow scenes look authentic. I used to love this show, and although it has that 1950s early television stiffness, it was a cracking good adventure story (And, as a dog lover, Yukon King was a pretty big draw, too) unlike the garbage kids get to watch today--especially the girly junk like The Princess Diaries that tell you if you quit reading books and wear makeup and take off your glasses you will be able to have a boyfriend, or that stupid Disney Princesses stuff where they all dress up pretty to impress the guy.