| QUOTE (Brian C.) |
| I got my copy today and made it through the "US Version" in order to report on same. The good news is that the AIP credits look great, they fixed the audio synch in the early scenes so that the Nazi jackboots click on cue, the erroneous caption "MID-PACIFIC" has been lovingly recreated over a map clearly showing the Indian Ocean, and the last half of the film is flawless save for a.) failure to recreate the US "MT. SHIRANE" caption following the first Baragon attack and b.) the video generated UPA TV "The End" card (in a slighlty different aspect ratio) is used instead of the original AIP one. The first half is fraught with problems, two of which are very serious IMO and could have been avoided with the right fan input. For the time being I am going to give Media Blasters the benefit of the doubt and assume that the errors here were the result of using the Monsters HD transfer (which I still haven't seen) as a template. The most serious problem occurs during the hospital breakout where the less violent Japanese Frankenstein footage has been reinstated. Instead of doing the logical thing and defaulting to the Japanese audio as well, an attempt has been made to edit the US audio to fit. This results in audio jumps that make it seem the film has been cut. I compared the running time of the Japanese version and confirmed that both sequences are equal in length and that the Japanese version audio would have covered this goof up seamlessly. Another big goof is the deletion of the entire "Map Montage" sequence, where the superimposed map graphic depicts the search for Frankenstein as the Ifukube march plays. Anybody looking for recreations of the US captions for that are going to be sorely dissapointed. At least this isn't obvious if you haven't seen the film. Beyond this I caught 8-10 audio irregularities, a couple of which may may have always been in the US version. Two of them duplicate instances in the UPA TV version where dialog is cut off that was intact in AIP prints. This and a couple of other places where the audio is off leads me to believe that this reconstruction was done using the UPA transfer for the audio. |
| QUOTE (Jeff Nelson @ Jul 1 2007, 12:43 PM) |
| however, problems remain, as detailed in this post by Brian C. (Brian Camp?) from the Monster Zero forum: |