Well I finally got the Blu-Ray and yes it's everything I had hoped for.
By the way, I want to first give respect to Marc Wielage and anyone who actually ever *worked* in the industry. We consumers would have nothing to talk about, negative or positive, without the efforts of those who have dedicated their careers to this.
Having said that, no matter *what* the original conditions were under which the DVD in the original boxed set was produced, the resulting DVD was basically a crime against movie history. Somebody somehow decided the only thing that could produce a watchable 480i movie from what they had to work with was to just low-pass-filter all the spatial detail right out. Which was doubly tragic because the "70mm" (65, whatever) negative should have had so much *more* detail than the 35mm cinemascope version, not less. The DVD was a blurry mess on a 25 inch tube. It was simply unwatchable on a 100 inch screen. And this from a movie that was originally intended to yield up fine detail even to those sitting close to 100 *foot* screens!
The DVD caused real suffering to fans of R&H, musicals, or home theater generally. This is not overstating the case. It made me angry every time I *thought* about it let alone *watched* it. (First world problems, I know. Maybe I took it a little too hard. ; > ) Imagine the disappointment of anyone who may have had actual personal memories of the glorious original theatrical exhibitions of the Todd-AO version when confronted with the miserable reality of the DVD.
Now that pain has been completely relieved. Like a dog that has been beaten, I would have been grateful if the Blu-Ray showed any improvement at all. And sure enough, the Blu-Ray is in fact quite detailed and finally rights some ancient wrongs just in delivering a sharp image.
Even better, it does successfully use the 1080i60 format to encode the original 30 fps material so that it plays back smoothly without any strange motion artifacts. On my setup at least, It.. Just.. Works. Not to belabor the point, but one should regard this film as a fairly rare treasure in cinematic history, one of only a handful of movies ever made at a frame rate higher than 24. I accept that the average person may not be particularly sensitive to the difference between 24 and 30, but to me 30 qualifies as almost "HFR". It's such a relief now to be able to finally watch the movie and enjoy the high *temporal* resolution without wincing at poor *spatial* resolution.
Plus some of the other minor irritations of the DVD (color breathing problems, some gate weave etc) are totally gone now. And the sound is very good.
It's like your favorite team going from worst to first. Not just glory, but *redemption*.
Thank you THANK YOU to everyone who has worked on bringing this movie to the home, in whatever stages along the way that ultimately led to this brilliant result.
