Hello,
This has been brought up before, but the 20th Anniversary remix of Grease is utterly butchered, especially in the music. A lot of additional reverb, sound effects that are almost louder than the music, and it's just generally an overproduced mess.
For most films, it'd be easy to obtain PCM Dolby Stereo from laserdisc. Not so with Grease. You see, it only ever had an analog release in the U.S.
Supposedly, there was a stealth digital reissue, under the same catalog number, but SilverWook and I have come to the conclusion that the person who added this info to LDDB was mistaken, because we've acquired at least one copy that claimed to be digital, but it was just analog. The best copy we have is from the 1990 hi-fi VHS. (The theoretical PCM LD would probably have used the same master?)
There are only two known releases that do have the 1978 English mix in PCM: A Japanese reissue from the 90s, and a Dutch release. The Japanese one is exceedingly rare, so I'd like to put out a request: Can anyone obtain the Dutch disc, and do a bit-perfect transfer? It would just need a 4% slowdown to be able to do the sync work. (Then, the theatrical version could be preserved by taking the 2.35 Paramount logo from another contemporaneous release and putting it back at the head/tail to replace the modern logos.)
Here's the LDDB listing: http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/34199/21.04.002/Grease
(This post was last modified: 2016-01-21, 02:43 PM by TServo2049.)
This has been brought up before, but the 20th Anniversary remix of Grease is utterly butchered, especially in the music. A lot of additional reverb, sound effects that are almost louder than the music, and it's just generally an overproduced mess.
For most films, it'd be easy to obtain PCM Dolby Stereo from laserdisc. Not so with Grease. You see, it only ever had an analog release in the U.S.
Supposedly, there was a stealth digital reissue, under the same catalog number, but SilverWook and I have come to the conclusion that the person who added this info to LDDB was mistaken, because we've acquired at least one copy that claimed to be digital, but it was just analog. The best copy we have is from the 1990 hi-fi VHS. (The theoretical PCM LD would probably have used the same master?)
There are only two known releases that do have the 1978 English mix in PCM: A Japanese reissue from the 90s, and a Dutch release. The Japanese one is exceedingly rare, so I'd like to put out a request: Can anyone obtain the Dutch disc, and do a bit-perfect transfer? It would just need a 4% slowdown to be able to do the sync work. (Then, the theatrical version could be preserved by taking the 2.35 Paramount logo from another contemporaneous release and putting it back at the head/tail to replace the modern logos.)
Here's the LDDB listing: http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/34199/21.04.002/Grease