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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Apr 26, 2021 12:40:10 GMT -5
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Post by GarrettCRW on Apr 29, 2021 7:23:43 GMT -5
The problems here are twofold: Shout! Factory has been known to lie through their teeth when they don't have a particular episode/show/master tape/whatever at their disposal for any of a number of reasons, and Shout! also seems to think that absolutely NOTHING can be done to restore a video master. So, even if Ivan is telling the truth (and, on its face, why would he lie?), Shout! has a history that invites skepticism and claims of conspiracies. Combined with the already released clips from K03 from back when Jim Mallon controlled the tapes, this entire situation is unhelpful and does nothing to make ANYONE look good.
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Post by ds_36 on Apr 29, 2021 9:51:47 GMT -5
I've always found Shout Factory's (tiny) KTMA updates confusing and dishonest. There's probably a real concern with releasing KTMA content that they're not telling us. As far as Ivan I think he's about as far removed from this as you can get while being part of the team. I believe he's telling the truth as to not having access to the episode. We know that Mallon had been the guardian of the KTMA episodes until the transfer to Shout Factory so it's possible that Joel doesn't even really know what's there.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Apr 29, 2021 14:08:35 GMT -5
So some possibilities from this:
K03 was damaged somehow during or after the process of capturing the clips Mallon planned to upload there, whether it was during capturing or somehow the tape just got damaged one way or another later on down the road.
Or.....
It was misplaced or mislabeled. Jim could still possibly have it, or the tape was mislabeled when he handed everything over to Shout Factory and Joel. After all, it took them some digging to find the first two - who knows how they were even labeled.
I believe Ivan when he says a copy isn’t available. The tough to swallow pill is we don’t exactly know WHAT happened to the tape; all we can do is guess and assume, but as of now, we’re not getting a copy and it looks like we may never will.
Personally I was kind of frustrated that Shout just abruptly cancelled the KTMA bonus disc and then never spoke about it again. Basically had a “sorry, the quality is too poor to use, enjoy Play MSTIE for Me instead!” attitude with it. Seeing the bonus disc would have at least answered a question of which KTMAs actually still physically exist and which don’t.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2021 14:22:57 GMT -5
Knowing what we do about the format the KTMA masters were on, I think the former possibility is the more likely, but we'll never know for sure until an official explanation is offered.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on Apr 29, 2021 16:08:54 GMT -5
The frustrating thing is knowing we probably never will get an explanation. The only way I could see us even getting one at all is a second interview with Jordan Fields.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 1, 2021 7:50:23 GMT -5
Personally I was kind of frustrated that Shout just abruptly cancelled the KTMA bonus disc and then never spoke about it again. Basically had a “sorry, the quality is too poor to use, enjoy Play MSTIE for Me instead!” attitude with it. Seeing the bonus disc would have at least answered a question of which KTMAs actually still physically exist and which don’t. I think it's quite possible that the KTMA masters were just not stored very well, and there was a problem with 03 even back then. Look at the bad state of the episodes which were shot for a proper network with an actual budget. Then figure (1) KTMA tapes are older, (2) KTMA tapes were certainly stored at least as badly for the same number of years and possibly even worse early on, (3) KTMA masters were likely lower quality tape stock to begin with, (4) the process of transferring old KTMA masters to something more stable could have been mishandled. Like you say, we don't know, but that seems like a pretty credible theory to me. They could be intact, but the little evidence that we do have doesn't suggest it.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on May 1, 2021 12:06:49 GMT -5
There’s no doubt I’m sure the KTMAs probably suffered the same fate as the regular series master tapes. Even if Shout had to cancel I wish they would have at least been straight forward on telling us which episodes still actually exist and which don’t. (We only know at this point that K01 and K02 certainly do).
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Post by Diet Kolos on May 1, 2021 12:13:18 GMT -5
The problem with the theory that the KTMA masters are in a degraded state are K01 and K02, which both look great and are older than every other KTMA ep by at least 2 months (those and K03 were shot and edited in late October 1988). Why would those look pristine and for some reason the other 18 episodes degrade and look terrible?
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Post by mylungswereaching on May 1, 2021 12:31:02 GMT -5
The problem with the theory that the KTMA masters are in a degraded state are K01 and K02, which both look great and are older than every other KTMA ep by at least 2 months (those and K03 were shot and edited in late October 1988). Why would those look pristine and for some reason the other 18 episodes degrade and look terrible? Good luck. They could have been stored in the middle of the stack or in a different place. A different source for the original tapes. I've got lots of 30 year old video tapes and some of them look as good as the day I first taped them and others look terrible. Sometimes stuff just happens.
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Post by Diet Kolos on May 1, 2021 13:09:25 GMT -5
That's true, and I've seen it firsthand with your tapes, mylungswereaching Your 1991 tapes looked great, better than some of the 1993 ones.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on May 1, 2021 13:17:47 GMT -5
The problem with the theory that the KTMA masters are in a degraded state are K01 and K02, which both look great and are older than every other KTMA ep by at least 2 months (those and K03 were shot and edited in late October 1988). Why would those look pristine and for some reason the other 18 episodes degrade and look terrible? Good luck. They could have been stored in the middle of the stack or in a different place. A different source for the original tapes. I've got lots of 30 year old video tapes and some of them look as good as the day I first taped them and others look terrible. Sometimes stuff just happens. Some of my personal recorded MST3K tapes are just like that as well (most of them being 1991-1992 recordings that aged a little badly than others).
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Post by jocksinclair on May 2, 2021 11:20:43 GMT -5
Why would those look pristine and for some reason the other 18 episodes degrade and look terrible? I wasn't saying all 18 have degraded, just that any of them could have degraded. Shout has indicated that there was a issue with finding quality copies of the host segments when they cancelled that bonus disc. As for why -- I don't think anybody could tell you why certain episodes that Shout released look so terrible and others look good, because there's not a "chain of custody" documenting exactly what each individual tape was subjected to. To my eye, the released K01 looks sourced from a quality VHS professionally dubbed straight from the master; if that's true, I would assume that somebody made it for posterity some time early in the run, because it was the first episode.
My own personal "I have no proof at all for this" theory is that KTMA used some kind of strange formatting on the masters, and when the show took off and all of the tapes were collected and put onto a single standard format, there were issues that nobody noticed because nobody actually watched the KTMA episodes for years. It could be something simple, like KTMA's interlacing was top field first but the new master recorded it as bottom field first -- that alone can make video practically unwatchable but could also pass a not-thorough spot check.
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Post by CrowTrobotfan92 on May 2, 2021 13:09:24 GMT -5
I mean if the quality was bad to the point it looks like a really old VHS to the point you can’t make out the picture anymore, I could understand that.
If it was just a case of interlacing on the video that I can honestly put up with that.
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Post by jocksinclair on May 2, 2021 13:37:10 GMT -5
I mean if the quality was bad to the point it looks like a really old VHS to the point you can’t make out the picture anymore, I could understand that. If it was just a case of interlacing on the video that I can honestly put up with that. Interlacing isn't a mistake or problem that needs to be fixed, it's the natural state for a show which was shot on video where the characters spend most of the screentime watching interlaced video.
But if something is interlaced top-field first, and recorded bottom-field first, the result would be very unpleasant to try and watch for any length of time. The fact that the camera doesn't move during host segments would help obscure the problem, but any movement within the frame would be jagged and messy.
My expanded theory is that the KTMA for-broadcast tapes were done with different field dominance than the Comedy Central professional-master tapes, or possibly just inconsistent field dominance from episode to episode, but nobody changed the settings when going back and creating uniform standard masters all on the same format (I want to say it was digibeta but I don't remember, I know Kolos has said it in the past). And it was only caught when they were dusted off for a potential DVD release. I should say, I don't know if I believe it's exactly that, but I do believe it's something along those lines, a dumb technical error that happened because of lax public access standards that didn't get caught until it was too late to fix.
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