The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"

I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.

Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”

I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)

> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music.

Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.

At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?

It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).

That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.

> It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel,

I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible

There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video once about the growing trend of analog horror where people intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie

Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original music.

agree to disagree

Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments the moment I saw it.

Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the same as changing music.

But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie. The people who made this particular cut for this particular release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem surprising to a naïve viewer that it's not the director the movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast knows it all too well anyway.

(But then I should probably mention that my fundamental disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that, and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here, because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just think that too much respect for the great things of the past often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of thousands years later.)

The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made reflect the current political agenda in one way or another (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially different (I might not even notice), but unlike with remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was fine yesterday as is.

What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits made for 10 releases on different media in different countries are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies too.

You might be interested to know that in terms of editing skill, physical matching/continuity is the least important thing to get right:

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/

Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.

The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.

I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.

Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.

Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.

Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.

> Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.

Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.

I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container.

We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.

All of those are absolutely wrong.

In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense;

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...

Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.

George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the unaltered versions though.

By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.

It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well.

I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).

What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.

I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing.

The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.

Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.

Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.

This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!

It’s the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored figures from Soviet photographs.