Those old silent digests - The Thing from Another World (Ken Films) 200' & 50'

[Joachim Schmidt]

The 200ft Ken version was sold by Inter-Pathé in Germany, and they added a magnetic strip and the sound for the German market. A rare digest in Germany.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Joachim,

That's fascinating! Were there any other silent releases that went the same route in Germany?

[Ed Gordon]

Here are two posters for The Thing. I get emails from Heritage Auctions which has links to high quality images of posters up for auction.





If you can't grab the files from this post, PM me with your email address and I will send the files. If you are interested in the auction (https://movieposters.ha.com) The banner poster current opening bid is $390.

[Burton Sundquist]

Thanks Doug! Excellent review! One of my favorites too! Just on the constant hunt for a decent release to replace mine, an obvious bootleg!

[Larry Arpin]

When John Carpenter's version was in production, Peter Kuran of VCE was in charge of the opening sequence with the space ship and the main title. I don't remember how he contacted me but I was selling the feature at the time and he asked me if he could borrow the first reel to look at how the main title was done since nobody in the production would get him an example of how it was done. So you can thank the super 8mm version for the 1982 title being the same as the original.

[Douglas Meltzer]

Larry,

That’s a great story! That opening title is a very strong start to the movie. It was an inspired choice.

[Joachim Schmidt]

Joachim,

That's fascinating! Were there any other silent releases that went the same route in Germany?

It’s a problem to answer that correctly, since I don’t have an overview of both release programs in total. What I can say is the following:
- the same company published in Germany also a 200ft sound version of The day the earth stood still. I am sure it’s the same editing as the original release digest.
- a massive amount of sci-fi/horror 200ft digests released in Uk/USA never made it to Germany. Most of them never made it. Maybe because they never made it to a German cinema release. So nobody knew them, and distributors decided often to publish movies on Super 8 that were successful in German cinemas - a guarantee for good sales
- nevertheless a small German distributor released in the 1970th a few digests of movies that never made it to Germany. So they had to synchronize them by themselves- a big additional investment. These rare digests are funny, since they are only “semi=professional” synchronized in German language. One of them is e.g. Destination inner Space - still the only available “copy” of that movie here, never made it to VHS/TV/DVD etc (except imports).
btw: The Thing and Earth stood still do not have “imprinted” English subtitles in the German copies.

[Osi Osgood]

There is a copy of the full feature on eBay right now, (although overpriced in my opinion). I am on my cellphone, so I can't make a link to it. If someone could put the link up here, that would be appreciated.