Sat Apr 08, 2017 11:29 am
This restoration was released on DVD only in France, back in October. I had no idea about it until a few weeks ago. It took a bit of automatic translation and sifting through different French websites to figure out that this DVD does, in fact, have a new restoration, since I couldn't find any English coverage of it anywhere until a bit later when I found a tiny blurb about it on Robert Israel's website (he did the score). The Amazon.fr listing describes all of the bonus features from the decade old copy.
Anyway, my copy came in two days ago so here are my thoughts. The tinting is all digitally recreated and looks decent, but sometimes the brightest highlights are pure white on my screen. The speed randomly and dramatically changes, which isn't something I'm used to, and all of the titles were digitally redone without being noted as such (I guess for consistency purposes), but in general I was pretty satisfied with it. No revisionism either. There is a Lobster Films copyright claim on the opening title, but they redid that title anyway.
It appears that they would default to the American nitrate whenever possible, with the Czech 35mm copy being the primary backup and 16mm Kodascopes being secondary backups. Once again we have the newsreel footage of Conan Doyle at the beginning, the map animation from the trailer, and apparently the dino outtakes (which I'm not as familiar with).
The booklet that comes with it said the American nitrate fragment was composed of reels 3, 5, 6 and 9 from Adamitis. The coverage begins during the scene of Ed finally being welcomed into Challenger's home and ends during Challenger's final presentation at Zoological Hall. The new footage appears throughout this long span of the film in large chunks and it all looks great. There's more wildlife footage, A-takes/angles of scenes formerly present only in the Czech copy, a lot of extensions of various scenes (including extensions of previously Czech only fragments of scenes that now make more sense), and a good bit of comedy relief. The new material gives the human scenes a more lighthearted feel, in general, which doesn't surprise me since some of the Czech only footage, too, was pretty lighthearted.
The tinting is, I assume, derived from the Adamitis reels, and there are some nice combinations of tinting and toning in a few scenes. The burning log in the dinosaur's mouth is in glorious Handschiegl color.
Last edited by
Allen Perkins on Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
Class of 2017