jpanimation wrote:Mr. Yagoobian wrote:After all your ranting about Beauty & the Beast, is fidelity to the original theatrical presentation only important when *you* decide it is?
I was wondering the same about you. I wanted
Beauty and the Beast to be presented as it originally was in theaters and you defended the new version that was altered to meet the directors' intention, that makes sense. I support the general release version of
Fantasia (the Director's Cut, as I call it) with the cut scenes included as bonus (or through seamless branching with an impersonator) and you support...I just can't figure this one out. You support the re-dubbing and censorship (I'm also not hearing complaints about the lack of intermission, so that rules out the Roadshow version) but you care about a small amount of footage Walt most likely cut himself (so wait, you do want the Roadshow version?)???
Anyways, one could consider the 'general release' the 'original theatrical' presentation and the Roadshow his Work in Progress version. As I said before, he added back around 30 minutes of footage (most of which was interstitial) but continued to leave out the 5-10 minutes of gratuitous narration. The intermission being left out makes sense, as not many films under 2 hours utilized those to begin with and I'm sure Walt wasn't going to fight for an intermission, since it serves absolutely no artistic purpose (only potty breaks during long movies).
I just think they belong in the bonus section, since I'm assuming Walt didn't want them in his film (the 5-10 minutes of footage wasn't going to make or break the film ticket sales wise, so I doubt that was left out for time). Adding in 5-10 minutes of footage Walt cut, claiming its to get closer to the Roadshow version is pretty disingenuous if you're going to leave out Sunflower, Deems Taylor's surviving audio and the intermission. That just seems like a step back, as we're getting neither the Roadshow or 46 release but some new creation.
Actually, you want BatB presented the way you want it presented because you think you know better how it DID look and how it SHOULD look than folks who've given over significant portions of their waking adult lives to producing the animation, the film, and every subsequent release, even though you haven't seen the original presentation in nearly two decades and you have yet to confirm that you've ever properly adjusted your settings to ensure that you've seen any single home media release as it was intended to be seen.
There's no real-world justification for declaring the roadshow to be a "work-in-progress cut" and the general release a "director's cut." The only reason the film was cut down in the first place was to get it in wider release. If the vision and the aesthetics of the original presentation weren't the paramount concern, then why in the world did the studio go to the effort and considerable expense of assembling it to make it the premiere release & play in fewer theatres than I have fingers & toes? (And since the only audio you seem to want to discuss is Taylor's, you still haven't addressed this question at all: you want mono with that reissue of the "definitive '46 release?)
I haven't seen any reason to believe that any of what remains of Taylor's dialogue is in any way usable---anyone got information to the contrary? Anyone? But it sure is a popular talking point among those who insist they're corporate Disney victims. For the sake of argument, let's say they actually have *all* of the audio & that half of it is audible: there's still no reason to believe there's as much as a single coherent statement that could be used. Where would the value be in including what they've got, either in the feature or as bonus material, if, on average, one can only understand half the words in a given sentence, or even in every <i>other</i> sentence?
I am no fan of revisionism, but I'm even less of a fan of those distasteful, offensive, abhorrent, racist caricature pickaninnies. Yes, the company should be transparent about the excisions. Yes, the footage should be included somewhere in the release. But in a time when, seven decades after the film's production, a disturbingly significant segment of the population feels comfortable referring to our sitting President as a "nigger"---and an even more disturbingly significant proportion of the population appears to be comfortable enough with that characterization that they do not volubly denounce such despicable behavior---I think it's completely inappropriate to include any implied endorsement of casual racism, even in period context, in family entertainment.
The intermission *is* included in the roadshow as presented on the Anthology release. No, it's not 15 minutes' worth of a static shot of a card and some closed curtains: that would be a stupid waste of disc space. But it's in the program, as it should be, and because it's home media I have the option of taking a break, or continuing on, or starting the film in the middle, or jumping around to watch my favorite segments first, or watching the whole film at double speed, just as you have the option of fast-forwarding or chapter-skipping through the Taylor narrations. If the listed running times for the Diamond release is accurate, the intermission will be included on this release as well...so I have no idea why you'd suggest the intermission's been cut. I can only assume that you haven't actually seen it, in which case I don't know how you can feel entitled to make any judgments about what constitutes Walt's definitive presentation...or you've seen it and you've misremembered, in which case I don't know why anyone should be impressed with your purportedly infallible 19-year-old recollection of BatB's color timing.
