Gulliver's Travels coming to Blu-ray! (Fleischer)

Post by **Ben** » March 10th, 2009, 11:58 am

UGH!

We did not get this in from Winsta...oops, Koch, and with good reason because it seems any review is going to expose this for what it is.

HORRIBLE!

What looks like to have happend is that they squeezed a little and cropped a little - NO WAY!

I can't believe they seriously did this for this release...how awful. And how blurry and smudged do those frames look? Upscaled standard def would look better than that. This looks like a 16mm dupe, transfered to video, copied by one generation and given an HD clean-up with full DVNR.

Gawd, just simply horrendous!

Here's hoping WB, or whoever can, rescues this from PD Heck, and gives us something closer to the Image LD (and "Hal Roach" DVD).

This is a travesty and without even reviewing it I ABSOLUTELY WARN PEOPLE TO STAY AWAY FROM THIS RELEASE.

Koch should be ashamed...

GeorgeC · Post by **GeorgeC** » March 10th, 2009, 1:52 pm

I take it this is a recommendation for a pass on this release?

Post by **Ben** » March 10th, 2009, 2:37 pm

Somthin' like that George!

Post by **EricJ** » March 10th, 2009, 2:49 pm

Told ya.

(It took longer for PD-vultures to leech on to Blu-ray as it had for them leech on to DVD, because it took them longer to afford the mastering equipment...But that didn't last long, did it?)

Post by **Daniel** » March 10th, 2009, 9:23 pm

I saw this at Best Buy earlier today, I think it was priced at $15. Man, was it hard to fight temptation. It looked so nice. Darn you Koch!

Nicely put Ben, and nice warning on the front page. It was kind of funny, actually! I've heard the DVD version fairs better, but not by much. Still such a shame.

Post by **Randall** » March 11th, 2009, 1:39 am

Stick with either the Image or Winstar DVDs. I have the Winstar one, and it's certainly nicer than any VHS copy I used to own.

Post by **Ben** » April 30th, 2009, 2:39 pm

Well, we've officially reviewed this awful disc, so please spread the word to other boards you may frequent: we MUST put people off buying this edition if we are to protect the legacy of film for the future:

http://animated-views.com/2009/gulliver ... -ray-disc/

(Seems to be an image problem on this at the moment, which is kind of the point of the review...some 40 odd comparison shots between the 60th and the BD, but we're working on the issue).

Post by **Daniel** » April 30th, 2009, 3:09 pm

Awwe, got me all exited. Hopefully that's fixed soon. From what I read, it's a very good review! Shame the same can't be said for the actual disc itself.

Post by **Ben** » April 30th, 2009, 3:50 pm

Sorry Dan! We've been holding back these Fleischer posts due to some weird things going on with the site, and all looked fixed until I hit "publish" today. The front page, whose image wasn't showing before, and the Superman review were all fine, and so was Gulliver last night and earlier today. I hit publish and the images disappeared again. They're there...it's just that we can't see them - frustrating when that's really what the crux of the article rests on!

But basically my earlier assumption from the DVD Beaver shots was right: the images have been stretched out a little, but not quite full width, with the tops and bottoms cut off. Kind of like if you have a 14:9 stretch mode on your LCD or Plasma screen and fill it out with a 1.33 disc.

It's just really, really bad.

Post by **Daniel** » April 30th, 2009, 4:13 pm

Oh hey, if you click on the properties and load it on a separate tab the pics show! Too time consuming though, so I shall wait till the problem is fixed.

I did however see the two title pic comparisons and wow, that is bad! So dark and the stretching makes it look a little blurry. Just ugly, very poor, I shudder to think how the rest of the film looks.

Post by **Ben** » April 30th, 2009, 4:57 pm

It's odd because the standard def actually has more definition, even when stretched out. Goodness knows how they got to where they are with this BD transfer. But as anyone knows, stretching out an image will always make it look more blurry, because you're essentially blowing it up.

Since they're doing that horizontally and vertically, they're really messing with the clarity. Added to that is a filter which they're trying to "smooth" over the nature of the blown up image and reduce film grain, and it's like bad DVNR but not removing actual animation lines, like that does, but just this weird wash of removing the definition of the entire image.

But this is different to the 60th release, because the colors are changed. Some scenes - mostly all the dark ones - have been artificially lightened up, while the light ones have been made darker. And there's more of a "smudging" going on on the right of anything bright, which says to me this comes from a video master. I can't believe they took their 1999 transfer and tried to scale it up, but anything's possible.

They claim this is closer to the "original Technicolor palettes", but clearly the 60th disc looks much closer to the negative colors if the coloring on Republic's excellent Hoppity Goes To Town disc is anything to go by. And I can't believe the Fleischers would have made a film with backgrounds that are just shapes and odd colors instead of their usual attention, which we know are there in this film but have been smudged out.

Seriously...spread the word that this release is trash.

Post by **Daniel** » May 2nd, 2009, 2:32 pm

Now I can't even see the review, it loads up an error page with this: "The page cannot be found 404 Error".

Post by **Ben** » May 2nd, 2009, 3:01 pm

You probably caught me testing. I've found the solution. It's the freakin' URL.

Added to our review:

Furthermore…all attempts to post this review with the words “gulliver” and “blu-ray” in the URL led to a bandwidth error from a site called “spiz.biz”, blocking our images from appearing within this review. In all preview modes these images appeared correctly, but when published - and several separate attempts were made - the images vanished. It was only in testing that we found whenever the title character’s name and disc format featured in the URL, the page would be led to the “spiz.biz” domain.

Could this really have been the proprietors of this title trying to block our honest review from appearing? We may never know, but as you’ll see from the images below…they do have a lot to hide. Hence our review now appears without the name “gulliver” in the link and, now for several more reasons that we even already had originally, we certainly recommend that you stay away from this disc.

SURELY this is illegal?

I've backed this up by trying to post ANY new test with "gulliver" and "blu" or "bd" in the URL and it blocks the images first off, switching to the spiz.biz bandwidth exceeded notice on any next click. That's not even on anything to do with Gulliver's Travels, just featuring those words in the URL.

My guess is that they're so afraid of the comeback on this that SOMEone out there is blocking images from anywhere trying to be negative about this title. I am actually so shocked on this that I have written a comment on the Amazon page...let's see if it is published!

So...the now working gulliver-free URL is: http://animated-views.com/2009/fleische ... -ray-disc/

Let's see how long THAT stays up before it stars diverting to spiz.biz...

Post by **Daniel** » May 2nd, 2009, 3:16 pm

That's a thinker right there. I can see your reasoning, but it may just be one of those freak things... but it does make a lot of sense, very strange. Although the review I posted a while back didn't have any image problems.

Hope to see your comment on Amazon!

Post by **Ben** » May 2nd, 2009, 3:51 pm

Hmmm...you're right.

Maybe this is a new tactic that they've put in place since the bad words started coming back? The Beaver review would have been among the first so maybe they couldn't catch it in time as they didn't anticipate the comeback?

All I know is that ALL our links and new stories work fine, but add an entry - even without any of the archived Gulliver images - with "gulliver" and "blu" in the URL and the link won't display any images and then diverts, on any click, to the spiz.biz page that tells us the bandwidth has been exceeded, which we know hasn't been (and is indeed off shore from our domain).

Please do spread this around the web...we can't let them sell junk like this.