The Wizard of Oz (1939)

I love how all the CGI in the world couldn't make the tornadoes in Twister half as menacing as the swirling fabric one in this film. Sometimes a little winking theatricality works much better than exacting realism.

Wait, what? Fabric? Really?

That sepia vortex scared the shit out of me as a kid.

Really.

What truly makes the Munchkins creepy are their altered, high-pitched voices.

I maintain that the cut from Auntie Em to the cackling Witch in the crystal ball and Judy Garland's reaction to it make for a truly horrifying moment.

I've never like the munchkin sequence. I'm glad when that part is over so the movie can really get going.

One of my sister's friends bought a little doll of one of the Lollipop Guild guys, complete with opening and closing eyes, for my sister's birthday. It's the creepiest thing I have ever seen, and sheroutinely hides it in places so I have minor heart attacks when I open drawers and perform other everyday-shouldn't-be-horrifying-but-totally-are-activities.

I like your sister's style. That's the same kind of immature prank I tend to pull on my more sensitive friends.

This is of course one of the greatest movies ever made. The blu ray is insane. I honestly couldn't believe the quality of the image. It looks like it was made yesterday and it's fucking 70 years old.

Anything shot in 3-strip technicolor will continue to keep pace with home video for a very, VERY long time. The digital scan for this and Gone With the Wind were 8K. Current home video is like 1.5K

Yeah, it's stunning. Have you seen THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD Blu? It's just as gorgeous. The colors, man, the colors...

What's sort of amazing is how so many young people think that older movies don't benefit from HD. I mean, do people really think that a film shown on a 3 story screen in a 4,000 seat theatre back in the 30s had less visual resolution than their TV?

I'm waiting patiently for LAWRENCE OF ARABIA to hit Blu and fortifying my eyeballs for the experience. I'm getting as much, if not more, joy at watching older films on Blu than most new releases. Oz's jaw-dropping picture quality just continued the trend.

Really itching for Universal Horror to get upgraded. M looks insane.

It will be interesting to see just how good they can look. The advantage of the 3-strip process really shines with these new transfers, in both resolution and colour fidelity. 30's black and white films were the bread and butter of the industry. Universal has wavered between pride and indifference of their horror library over the years, so let's hope that good source materials exist and they've been kept in good shape.

Oh, yes, Frank and Bride on Blu. Yes, yes.

This is one of the reasons I'm making the switch to Blu Ray this Christmas. DVD is fine, but I'm a total film restoration nut, and many of the images I've seen over on www.blubeaver.ca have been nothing short of breathtaking. So comforting to know that these films will be preserved forever looking like this.

I've never owned Oz before, but I figure Blu Ray is a good place to start.

I love how Glinda tells Dorothy that only BAD witches are UGLY and then proceeds to ask the bewildered girl if she's a "good witch or a bad witch". Talk about an insult. Glinda's kind of a jerk. Didn't tell Dorothy about the power of the ruby slippers and didn't even offer her a lift in her bubble to the Emerald City.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6exm2Hi28Xw

But having just read the Baum book to my daughter over a series of nights, I have to say that this is a great adaptation. Trims so much of the fat. It loses some of its tooth (book has some disturbing passages), but is a stellar example of economical storytelling.

There are many reasons this has remained an icon for decades. Can't wait to crack open the massive Blu set I just got at B&N (for $30 with a coupon!).

Universal still seems butthurt over the fact that Blu-Ray triumphed over HD-DVD, so they have been slow about releasing their catalog titles on the format. There's no Hitchcock (sans Psycho), Spielberg, etc... Get on the ball, fuckers.

I didn't know this movie was made in 1939 until some embarrassingly late time in high school, and I think that's a testament to its greatness. It's timeless. I didn't think it was new or anything but my guess would have been off by at least 30 or 40 years. (I wasn't a bright kid, okay?)

Side note: That reminds me of another time in high school where I listened in on a conversation between two kids who thought Snow White was made in the 80's or early 90's. That makes me feel better about my first story.

Yeah I never understood that either. Every so often on this site I hear people explain that this film or that film won't look good in HD but isn't film resolution actually more than 1080p?

As if young people who would make such a comment would bother with such information. Film resolution!? 1080p!? Shutup!

Patrick started a thread about films that didn't NEED to be in HD. The only place that's really true is old TV shows like Star Trek and Twilight Zone, but seeing them in high def gives you a different appreciation for them, seeing all the seams and such. And getting any kind of new appreciation for the content is the primary reason for upgrading to HD in the first place.

WAAAAAYYYY MORE. As I mentioned above, Wizard of OZ was scanned at 8K for archival purposes, and then downconverted to 1080 for BluRay.

Here's a great illustrative chart. See how film laughs at your puny BluRay




Not all films would benefit equally from higher and higher resolution scans. Cheap film stocks used in low budget movies from the 60's through 80's certainly have a threshold after which you won't be gaining any more detail. Though even that can be enhanced with post noise reduction and sharpening- but that's dangerous territory.

Whoa.

I always thought the argument wasn't that the film will look bad because it's "blown up," so to speak, but that all kinds of detail will be visible that you wouldn't have seen before. Like, as someone mentioned in the Flash Gordon watch-along, in HD you can totally see the wood grain on some of the supposedly metallic set pieces. And the caked-on TV make-up on a lot of older TV shows (like Trek).

Yes, with old TV shows you're seeing more detail than originally intended. In Trek's case, it's still a "new" way to experience something I've seen dozens of times, so it has value to me.

With films like Flash Gordon, if it's there in HD, it was almost certainly there in 35mm. The difference is we're 40, not 10.

Did I really? I have absolutely zero memory of that. In any case, that was a dumb thread idea. I was probably just trying to make myself feel better about the fact that I can't afford an HDTV or Blu-Ray.

My mistake - you didn't! But you made a case for Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not needing to be in HD. It was an interesting discussion.

As for the graph posted above, why is film not included for comparison?

I believe the most appropriate answer would be because it's not a specific number, but a range.

Let's put it this way. Take out a piece of paper and draw on it. Now, what dpi is that drawing? Really, it's as high as you want to scan it. But how high a resolution can you scan it before there's no more detail to be dragged out?

So the operative "resolution" of film is going to depend on the size of film [super8, 16, 35, VistaVision, IMAX], the quality of the film stock, and the general quality of the production.

WIZARD OF OZ, scanned at 8K, revealed all sorts of new detail. You could scan the super8 Zapruder film at the same resolution, but there's just no more details to pull out after a certain point.

A more practical answer. Digital cinemas show movies using 4K projectors. Some digital effects for movies are done at 2-3K to save time in rendering.

And the truth is that as technology improves, we'll be able to get better scans out of these films. So I don't think there'll ever be a "definitive" scan of a film like WIZARD OF OZ. The one they have now will certainly serve them well for the next few years, especially since I can't see a home video standard above 1080p for a while. But I'm sure down the road there'll be another restoration of OZ, scanned at 20K.

Though old TV shows like STAR TREK might show their seams a bit in HD presentation, they CAN be released that way, since they were shot on film. Whereas there's a whole raft of shows from the 70's through the 90's, shot on Video that will be forever stuck where they are at non-Anamorphic Standard Definition.