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Video: This Is A Hard Day's Wonderful Night To Remember

🕑 Added 2025-01-22 20:06:11 +0000 UTC

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While in the shower, I had some thoughts about the intended audience, and what the larger impact of these releases might have been. For Kinnesoft, I think they were just throwing spaghetti at the wall. For the others though, there might have been some actual thought put into it. Their ideal consumer would be someone who is into movies, owns a PC, but doesn't own a laserdisc player. I think people like that did exist, most commonly people who are just starting to get into movies. Critereon may have thought of these CDs as a cheaper entry point, and hoped that people who enjoyed the extra content on the CD would then go purchase a laserdisc player and laserdiscs. In the long term, as noted, they may have created the common styling of DVD menus we would come to know. However, having no familiarity with laserdisc, I would be interested to know if full menus, or even chapter skip was possible on them. Given what I've read online, it sounds like they do support skipping to specific chapters, but the concept of graphical DVD menus may have been invented by these CDs.

Cathode Ray Dude

Ah! You're right! I should have known that, I've read about this stuff a dozen times. Thanks for the correction.

Blair Durkee

Incredible video, absolutely one of your best. Small correction at around 1:19:08 in the video. You say that MP3s didn't exist in 1993, but Audio Layer III was included in the original MPEG specification released in draft form in December 1991 (and finalized the following year). Of course, it wasn't really used for the reasons you go on to describe, but it did exist.

Danny Forche

I'm watching this video now, and I got to your part about The Abyss having a pan-and-scan laserdisc. James Cameron shot all his films in Super35 (besides the first Terminator), which is actually a 16:9 ratio. Both the theatrical matted version and the home video versions are cropped, differently, from the raw camera negative. https://www.widescreen.org/images/terminator2_super_35_exampl.jpg There's a video on YouTube about it too (taken from one of the T2 DVDs): https://youtu.be/ZVJHTVvnJ9k So considering the top and bottom of the picture got cut off (pretty noticeably) for theatrical viewing, why not use expanded height instead of black bars? They could have compromised with an anamorphic 16:9 picture, but I don't think very many laserdiscs did that. I actually got myself the 4:3 Terminator 2 DVD so I can get the expanded height transfer - that's one of the James Cameron movies that is not available that way on DVD. (PS, if you ever see the fullscreen Titanic laserdisc around, a bunch of collectors are after a good rip of it, since that's the only way to get the open-matte besides VHS. I've had it on my LDDB watchlist for years and it never shows up for sale)

Darius

Really looking forward to the video on the MPEG acceleration card! This video was good as well, and I had no idea this curious niche of CD-ROM movies existed.

Stuart Rose

no, thank you! someday i'd love to hear more about your movie tastes and "cinephile" journey. i feel like i've seen a lot of hong kong action DVDs in your videos but i'd be curious to hear what else you like

Cathode Ray Dude

But if I'm going to supersede the video, then nobody's going to see it after I release the new version anyway.

Cathode Ray Dude

Thank you, I'm so glad you enjoyed it!

Stuart Rose

i deleted my comment that was made before i actually watched the whole thing lol but i just wanted to say this is one of my absolute favorite videos of yours (which is saying something! you have so many great videos that are extremely my shit)

adorfer

I do not like commenting here, since in a week, hardly anybody will come back here, but read in YouTube.

Dawn Anthes

I came here to mention that. I wonder if it was a case where the Windows version was released first and they had to negotiate separately later to release it on Mac.

Cai Tastrophe

Did anyone else think the reason the Beatles movie was (seemingly) Windows only was gonna be because of the whole Apple Computers vs. Apple Corps thing?!

Alex Cruise

Trident 8900C crew represent or whatever the kids aren't saying these days My third computer (purchased in fall 1991, after an extremely obscure NEC 8-bit, and a generic 8MHz Turbo XT) had one of these 2D accelerators in it. Extremely speculative, but I'm not about to Google this: My guess is the Oak ASIC could draw rectangles, lines, polylines, ellipses, arcs etc., with your choice of outline and fill colours, and maybe dithered fills, but either had no blitter (*BL*ock *T*ransfer => BLT => "blitter") or its blitter couldn't barf out enough per-frame data and/or aggregate bandwidth to handle 12fps x 640x480 x 1bpp (3.68 MBps!) so there was no choice but to have the CPU bitbang every pixel (perhaps in small artisanally crafted batches) into the framebuffer. I suppose similar problems could also be caused by a lack of DMA support; it would have required quite a few cycles to shovel even a single frame across the bus. Lest I sound like a complete asshole, I think "fill rate" is a perfectly cromulent way to talk about this! 😅

Cathode Ray Dude

Oh duh, yeah. I don't know why I never do it that way - the steps aren't really any different, but it feels faster in textmode I guess, heh.

Eugenio Dorigati

I remember when I found the weezer video in the Windows 95 disc and I was amazed that my pc can play videos!

Urja

A quick note on about 1:10:40, you can actually change the display drivers (and thus resolution) in Windows 3.1 from within Windows 3.1 (Main Group -> Windows Setup -> Options Menu -> Change System Settings). Does still need a driver install and windows restart of course, but if your graphics is working using the text mode setup is not mandatory.

sdomi

watched half of it for now (leaving rest for tomorrow ^^) and it's absolutely wonderful. good job getting me excited about a 1993 release of a film I've never heard of (I'm not from the US, and not from an english-speaking country either). gj!

Sir Alister Octopus says Form a Union!

Just thinking that 3 of these 4 titles are black and white. Another reason for choosing It’s a Wonderful Life might’ve been that it was a still celebrated B&W film, making it easier to compress: only needs greys not full RGB. People notice luma compression more than chroma so Cinepak might be able to compress the colors meaning we can’t assume that B&W would give 3x the quality of a color video for the same space but still, every little helps at this point. B&W cinematography lends itself to high detail high contrast video which compresses better. I found the color dithering in SpinalTap to be distracting and noisy. Weird that A Night to Remember clearly is 256 colors, as it has that occasional yellow pixel artefact, which a forced grey pallet would’ve fixed.

Jonathan V

25:45 "I'd like to say that Blu-Ray is equally limited..." - Pretty sure since the menus are Java, you could totally implement the script to timestamp and back feature, but you'd have to implement your own on-screen keyboard and it would be awful.

Alexandre Richer

Aren't most wikipedia articles on movies absolutely awful? I find it really hard to read them because they almost never include a synopsis of the movie, and instead just expose the whole plot in a wall of text

Xaviette Katzenfrau

that music had me fucking dead. crippling alcoholic national anthem.

FlatFootFox

The "We Didn't Start The Fire" joke at 1:46 made me so happy. This video was a really fun exploration of a very specific moment in video history.

Mitchell Pasztor

Criterion goated

Xaviette Katzenfrau

Thanks haha! It was kind of just serendipity, long ago I had a character named simply Xavier, who became way more interesting as a woman Xaviette and stayed that way (trans rights btw) and since the character is an orange cat I thought it would be funny if her last name was some foreign language variation on "she's a cat", and "cat woman" in German is Katzenfrau. Put them together and it just has a really nice rhythm! Better than the first character name I ever came up with when I was like 8 that's been stuck in my head ever since. Alamafarnia Eurokishan Pendelleciphinexpholiashodis just doesn't roll off the tongue as well 🤣

goatgirl

I just wanna say your name is so sick, thank you for having a cool name

Cathode Ray Dude

Yeah, I hadn't thought about that but it makes sense. I can't find any footage of what the LD features look like though!

Xaviette Katzenfrau

The Spinal Tap disc having its picture gallery be a video file of still frames bundled together is how every DVD and Blu-ray with a photo gallery did it, but I'm sure you already knew that lol. I have bought a couple of the Doctor Who: The Collection blu-ray box sets, which besides being absolutely stunning restorations of old PAL videotapes that are absolutely Reference Quality "This Is The Bar Everyone Else Has To Meet", also often include several of the things you described - besides PDFs of episode scripts (often multiple revisions and even scans of contemporary documents with notes scribbled on them and such), lots of other internal BBC memos regarding production of serials, and many include optional secondary subtitle tracks for some serials that are just extra commentary which will appear under the relevant shots to describe how certain onscreen moments were done or just drop a little fun trivia about any given shot, like "Tom Baker tripped on his scarf unintentionally in this scene but they kept it in" sort of stuff. Really cute and worth having at least one of those box sets (I recommend Season 12). The US versions of these discs are standards converted from 50i to 60i but do still include all of those bonus contents, as far as I've seen. They also annoyingly rename them, so "Season 12" becomes "Tom Baker's First Season" because I guess Americans are really stupid (a fair assumption)

Pietro Gagliardi

My guess as to why the Spinal Tap bonus features disc works the way it does because it literally *is* the Criterion LaserDisc. The Technology Connections video on LaserDisc special features shows Disney's own Pocahontas special edition disc and it works in much the same way as this one. It would also explain the weird UI. But I can't check this myself for this one.

Stormcrash

You found that Packard Bell at RePC?! Man I'm so jealous! Though maybe a little less after the classic PB troubles it gave you, but still what a find!

Moshe Hyzon

I knew someone else would had to have caught this, too. I am not disappointed by the CRD patrons. ☺️

D. Roscoe

I'm ecstatic to see that the Microsoft Wine Guide made a triumphant reappearance after showing up, like, three years ago on a stream.

Shanix

Just finished watching. Another fantastic video about a piece of tech that I would've gone gaga for had I been aware of it. I think it was structured well! It was easy to follow and the chronological ordering helped emphasized the technologic and process improvements made along the way. My condolences for the... everything, apparently, that happened each time you tried to film this, lol.

Stuart Rose

"A company known as Voyager" aka Criterion before it was called Criterion

Xaviette Katzenfrau

I do have to say that It's A Wonderful Life /is/ a beautiful film if you truly haven't seen it. One of the most earnestly life affirming endings a film could have that works because of the preceding two hours of misery. Kind of like an extended one of those Twilight Zone episodes with an actually happy ending. It's also sorta anti-capitalist (the protagonist is just a "good" capitalist but still)

Cathode Ray Dude

I've done it on and off for many years but I recently played perfect tides which uses it to great effect and resolved that I need to do it forever

RavenWorks

Ah! If I'm wrong in my guess about the whole thing being clickable as a toggle, then yeah, I take it back. Weird!

Xaviette Katzenfrau

I am terribly sick this week and this video will save me I think

Xaviette Katzenfrau

Erik did this in his recent video on Letterboxd and it was very good

Xaviette Katzenfrau

"Copyright holders" aka parasites of the human soul will stop at nothing until all artistic expression they can't directly profit off of is ground into dust

Xaviette Katzenfrau

just wanted to say comments being off on the patron uploads is probably for the best going forward tbh, I remember the one where you politely asked people to not comment on it since it would be re-uploaded and they did anyways haha. People on the Internet never follow instructions if you give them the opportunity not to, no matter how polite or sensible they may be ;p

Cathode Ray Dude

I did consider that, but clicking the button twice doesn't do anything, it moves to whichever setting you point at. Plus, why would they have the frame counter as the default view? I'm pretty confident this is a bug. From the description by Andy, it sounds like they pushed this thing out the door the moment it was done and then moved on to greener pastures, so I doubt it got much beta testing.

RavenWorks

About the "Time/Frame" choices being bugged in "It's A Wonderful Life" -- I think that's just a skeumorphism fail on their part.... I don't think it's depicting a pair of radio buttons that pop in and out; I think it's depicting a *slider* being pushed back and forth between two positions, meaning that the part that looks like it's sticking out is the *slider* that moves to indicate your choice, not an un-pushed button. And as a result, when you were "clicking on the frame button", you were actually clicking on the entire slider UI element that spans *both* positions, which is probably actually a *toggle* (meaning you could have clicked either "button" to cause it to swap). Doesn't matter much, I just thought it was interesting...

Cathode Ray Dude

Trust me, this did not go unnoticed

nytpu

Gotta love content ID for public domain movies (yes I know it's very nebulous, and the soundtrack is apparently still copyrighted). Like content ID on people performing their own versions of classical music

Nick300

I would love to send you stuff. But I'm from Germany and I only have one thing. A very small Colour CRT. Nothing special Ik.

Christian Neville

Chose the movie "High Sierra" as a prop in a video about CD-ROMs. This is cinema.

Saoirse Ó Catháin

oh and also the fact that you seem to perpetually say "Name (year)" is hella validating. We have always, always, always, always said "War Games (1983)" or "Contact (1997)" or "Hackers (1995)", we always include the year. We don't know where we picked it up from but if we leave that out it feels *incomplete*, like a broken reference.

Cathode Ray Dude

Oh wow. Yes, probably! Send me an email? Cathode Ray dude at gmail. Thanks!

Adam C.

You want a Terapin VCD recorder?

Saoirse Ó Catháin

would just like to say that hearing your enthusiasm for this kind of thing, this reminds us very much of the video8 EVM with the Tyler tape in. Similar kind of nerdy filmmaking rambles and, well, if you can get a blind girl interested in filmmaking and shit like that, you got skills.

_Pai

Heck yeah Microsoft Wine Guide referenced

w7com

My Gawd! A Packard-Hell. I use to service those for WA DSHS over in Eastern WA back in like 1990. What a bunch of low powered non-standard kit those were!