Media Blasters 2006-2007 Release News

[GFan]

[JimPV]

[Baradagi]

[MouthForWar]

[Robert Saint John]

[Gwangi]

[brianc]

[OtiGoji]

[armandv]

[gojira_fan]

[Sparvid]

[Gwangi]

[GFan]

[Benjamin Haines]

Latitude Zero shouldn't be a problem for MB. With Toho releasing their 3-disc box set last year with all three versions of the film (Japanese-dubbed theatrical version, uncut English-language international version, and the even-more-edited-down Japanese-dubbed version from some old film festival), MB has all of the source material they need. I e-mailed them late last year encouraging them to just completely port over the 3-disc set and subtitle everything where applicable and release it like that on R1, but I urged them if they refused to do that and would only release one version of the film to make it the uncut, undubbed English-language international version.

In the case of the US version of Frankenstein vs. Baragon, it was a matter of the footage exclusive to the US version simply not existing in scope anymore. The materials for that footage have simply been lost over the decades, as even Toho didn't have it in anything better than cropped 1.33:1 when they released both of their R2 DVD editions of the movie. MB obviously couldn't conjure up material that simply doesn't exist anymore. But for Latitude Zero, everything MB could possibly need is there, thanks to Toho. They have absolutely no reason not to utilize it.

[SeaHawk]

I don't think Media Blasters would port over the Champion Matsuri version of Latitude Zero. They didn't do it on the Atragon disk, so I doubt they would do it on the Latitude Zero disk. Besides, the Champion Matsuri versions are worthless.

[Joseph Goodman]

[OtiGoji]

[quote="Joseph Goodman"][/quote] Not to be Captain Pedant of the "Actually..." Brigade, but THE SEARCHERS wasn't really "reconstructed from extant prints". The original negative was too faded to be usuable, so the the black & seperations (positive b&w prints of the cyan, magenta, and yellow records) were scanned at full resolution and re-aligned digitally.

Here's a good interview on the most recent DVD of THE SEARCHERS:



So, I'm all:
"I'm pedantic, he's supercilious..."
I WAS WRONG. My point, (and I think I had one; from a contaminated memory) about THE SEARCHERS, was the original elements were unusable and I mistakenly thought they had to use a 35mm print copied from the original VistaVision theatrical print. I was wrong! But I remember the colors had to be approximated, I think...
And so what I'm getting at is, if all that work had to go into restoring a major studio classic, I can imagine the difficulty in restoring FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD.

[gojira_fan]

[GFan]

[Lord Hastur]

[Legion]

[Baradagi]

[Joseph Goodman]

[Baradagi]

Toho Kingdom has just reviewed the disc-



Does the cropped version Toho put out at least have the original English title sequences?

[Robert Saint John]

^ Ewwww, haha, that *is* pretty lame! Looks like someone at MB just booted up their old Video Toaster, circa 1993!