Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/27/watch-a-4k-remaster-of-the-timeless-skeleton-dance-cartoon-from-1929.html
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why is it at half speed in the first place?
was there some technical limitation?
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You would think with all that techno wizardry they could figure out how to zoom into full screen.
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That drives me nuts, too. The out-of-focus background/margins/frame the media uses with phone videos is equally awful.
Fascinating to see this with sharpening and flicker correction. Are we seeing it ‘better’ than original audiences now? Does this mean that Ub’s animation has been changed in some way? It looks great, anyway.
Does this mean we can expect a new bout of colorized black and white cartoons to follow? There’s always someone who thinks it’s a good idea. (Edited to answer myself: Nah, the old cartoons are too weird for most people now anyway, and nobody gets the references any more.)
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Maybe they’re increasing the FPS to interpolate frames to increase resolution. Could be way off base though.
I don’t get it either. Why at regular speed at Bittube and half speed at Youtube?
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I’m wondering why it’s been flipped from left to right from the original…?
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Maybe to foil the copyright bots?
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Does that work? I didn’t know…!
Yeah. I watch a lot of old bbc documentaries on youtube, and a lot of the people who upload them do all sorts of tricks to evade automatic takedown notices. They’ll strip out the music, and they’ll edit some scenes with short bursts of zoomed in segments of the same scenes, just to defeat the checksums. Flipping the video horizontally is another method. If there’s no visible text, usually no one is the wiser.
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Ub Iwerks already made what was essentially a color version of this film, it was called “Skeleton Frolic” and was released in 1937 through Columbia. (This was after he left Disney following a falling out with Walt.)
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I imagine that’s why it’s slowed down too.
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Speaking of skeletons and music, in case anyone has memories of watching filmstrips in elementary school, here’s a blast from the past:
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It’s surprising how much you can alter a video and not have it be detectable. I know that some programs in syndication are sped up by 15 or 20 percent in order to fit in enough time for an extra commercial or two, and you probably wouldn’t notice it unless it was played back side by side with the original. I’m sort of convinced that the cable channel that seems to play almost nothing but Law and Order reruns back to back might also be dropping every couple of frames for the same reason. It’s especially noticable during the opening credits.
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It’s interesting in those early days how often they seemed to recycle so many of the exact same gags between different animated shorts. A number of shorts from the era featuring Mickey, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Flip the Frog have remarkable similarities, such as how all three of them once worked as hot dog vendors that had to chase down and punish runaway weenies.
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Indeed, yes. I smile to think that just in the time I’ve been paying attention, they’ve found and polished up the ‘partly lost’ HELL’S FIRE, a favorite Iwerks weirdity.
This print is smushed down, but you can get used to it if you just put your head in a vise the same way:
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“Hollywood icons unable to control their wieners” has been a running theme for over a century now.
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After looking into the site, they almost definitely dropped it half speed onto YouTube with the BitTube link because the latter site has better monetization but much less reach. Once again, the depressing capital driven answer to a technical question lol
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