BEST Super 8mm Sound Digests ... ?

[Tom Photiou]

I am certain the 200ft muppets was Walton's last release. It fits in perfectly within the 400ft version and both do stand well on there own as excerpts, well worth picking one or both up if you can.

[Edward Nicielnik]

I Have both of the Muppett Movie still nice Colour

[Rob Young]

The 400ft Universal 8 version of Spielberg's "Duel".

A perfect subject to be edited down as the plot is pretty straight forward and all the editor had to do was choose some coherent set-up and action scenes, which they thankfully did.

[Philip Hamilton]

The 400ft Universal 8 version of Spielberg's "Duel".

A perfect subject to be edited down as the plot is pretty straight forward and all the editor had to do was choose some coherent set-up and action scenes, which they thankfully did.

Yes! I figured this would be a good one just waiting to see if one pops up that has not turned so RED. Don't know if that is possible...

[David Skillern]

Derann's 400ft cutdown of The Humphrey Bogart thriller - Key Largo - is an excellent cutdown and well worth looking out for.

[Matthieu van der Sluis]

Funny,... when I read the title, I directly thought Superman - The movie 400", because the whole story is in it with all the spectacular scenes.
The first reply said the same thing hahaha.
My version is very reddish and lost blacks, so al contrast is lost.
Would be nice to find a clean version of this one back.

Same with the film Matcjh of the Century 200", which was my first Super8 experience, so I bought that one 4 times now, but all very bad.
So sad.

Digest versions for the older movies is great.
The Super8 digest is much more MTV like with faster action and for those very long and slower evolving stories in those older movies from years ago, this is a nice way to get my family watch it.
For example:
I have a 800" film of Perix und the 3 mausketeers, which is a great cartoon, but I recently tried to watch the complete long version on You Tube and it is realy boring.

[Adrian Winchester]

Yes! I figured this would be a good one just waiting to see if one pops up that has not turned so RED. Don't know if that is possible...

I regret you can probably only hope to find one with relatively acceptable fade as opposed to unwatchable fade! Although it's not unknown for Universal 8 prints to very occasionally turn up with with surprisingly good colour - possibly due to storage in cool conditions - the Eastman stock they were printed on almost guarantees a degree of fade, which may have started before the end of the 1990s. There are a few hard to find exceptions, due to a small number of 2 x 400' titles that Red Fox gained permission to reprint, and these appear to have all been low fade.

[Philip Hamilton]

I just picked up a Universal 8 400 ft digest of PSYCHO. This is actually a very decent edit with a few quibbles here and there but overall ok.

But the one thing I found odd is how they framed certain scenes in the shower sequence. Up until Norman comes in some of the shots seem to have reverted to widescreen with a cropping across the bottom of the frame. It looks like they were trying to cover up nudity which is not there - really. So i don't understand why it was presented this way. The stabbing sequence appears intact and is shown flat (4:3) like the rest of the film. The only time it converts to a cropped widescreen after this sequence is at the end as the end titles appear over the car being pulled out of the water.

Anyone notice this or have ideas as to why it was done this way?

[Brian Fretwell]

I have a feeling I have seen this in other versions of the film. Maybe a different camera, which happened to be hard matted, was used for some of the shots, possibly due to needing more protection against the water used.

The titles would have been a process shot to superimpose them and may have been done like that as routine at the time.

I've just checked the case of the Blu Ray and it is 1.85:1 so it looks like the digest may have been an open matte version.

[Philip Hamilton]

Thanks Brian but what is weird in how it is framed is this -- only the BOTTOM of the frame is matted/cropped - the result is a 1.85:1 image with no matte or crop at the top. If it was open matte could it be that this was added to cover up Janet Leigh's breasts? Because in these few shots if the crop were not there we would certainly see them.

[Paul Suchy]

Hey Philip, regarding "Psycho": if the matte wasn't there, you would probably see the moleskin that was adhered to Janet's breasts and that would spoil the illusion. As long as I've got you, I agree with you on the poor cut of the "Sweet Charity" digest; I purchased my print when it was originally released and was disappointed. 17 minutes can hold a good amount of music, yet they decided to tell the end of the story (I've had enough bad breakups in my life, and I don't need to sit through Charity and Oscar's over and over again). Universal 8 made some great digests, but the only decent musical digest they did was "Jesus Christ Superstar". Ken Films made sure that we got as many musical numbers as possible in their MGM releases with only a bit of plotline (you'd be surprised at how many musical numbers they crammed into the "Gigi" digest). I have a scope print of "Charity" on 16mm and I don't run my super 8 digest anymore.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Paul,

I would add Flower Drum Song to the short list of U-8's decent musical digests. They wisely featured 3 songs in their entirety. No narration, no plot!

[Paul Suchy]

Good to hear, Doug. I never had that digest, but I'll check it out sometime. Thanks!

[Philip Hamilton]

Has anyone seen the Ken Films PATTON 400 foot digest?

I just purchased this and what I have is the full speech in front of the flag spliced onto what appears to be the selected scenes digest. At the end of the opening speech in front of the flag as Patton leaves the stage it fades out and there is a THE END card with trailer and then a countdown to the opening titles to PATTON the dgest.

It seems to me that someone just spliced this on to the regular 400 foot version. Was it released this way as a more complete digest? The flag speech is in its entirety. Thanks.

EDIT: Never mind. Just found another post on this subject. The speech was released separately so the version I purchased has BOTH on one 400' reel - it barely fits on that reel by the way.

[Melvin England]

Philip - I hope you got it for a good price as I have found that the the 200' Patton Speech is quite an elusive reel, so getting them both together was quite a find.