[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"$f1hi6hh40csdmr":3},{"_id":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"subtitle":7,"kind":8,"cards":9,"tags":58,"categories":59,"source":60,"lang":63,"author":64,"audioState":67,"stats":68,"publishedAt":71,"renderer":72},"6abaaa1fca21c797c7e9a23c","pirating-the-pirates-cf35c592","Pirating the Pirates","Home video release images from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966).","news",[10,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,53],{"headline":6,"body":11,"imageUrl":12,"sourceImageUrl":12},"Home video release images from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). Clockwise from top-left: Arrow Video (4K UHD, 2025), Kino Lorber (4K UHD, 2021), MGM (4K Blu-ray, 2014), MGM (DVD, 1998).","https:\u002F\u002Fimages.mubicdn.net\u002Fimages\u002Fnotebook\u002Fpost_spotlight_images\u002F11642\u002Fcache-11642-1788879178\u002Fimages-w1280.jpg",{"headline":14,"body":15,"imageUrl":16,"images":17},"“People who alter or destroy works of art","“People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society. ”","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F1.webp",{"local":16},{"headline":19,"body":20,"imageUrl":21,"images":22},"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy]","“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.”","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F2.webp",{"local":21},{"headline":24,"body":25,"imageUrl":26,"images":27},"Vancouver, 2011: My then-roommate Willa Ross and I","Vancouver, 2011: My then-roommate Willa Ross and I are at our wit’s end in one of Simon Fraser University’s characteristically antiseptic editing suites, having just spent the weekend hacking together three distinct copies of Sergio Leone’s 1966 western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, all illegally ripped. The film had fallen victim to an MGM “restoration” in the early 2000s: Scenes Leone cut were reinstated, inflating the English-language runtime from 161 to 179 minutes, with Eastwood and Wallach dubbing the missing dialogue and a soundalike standing in for the late Lee Van Cleef. The mono soundtrack, meanwhile, had been reworked into a surround mix with jarringly modern gunshot effects. This “extended” cut was the only version commercially available for nearly a decade, an all-too-common fate in an era of revisionist studio reworkings.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F3.webp",{"local":26},{"headline":29,"body":30,"imageUrl":31,"images":32},"Our goal was simple: undo this butchery. We","Our goal was simple: undo this butchery. We planned to combine sound from an out-of-print 1998 DVD (an approximation of the 1967 international release) with video from a recently imported Blu-ray of the Italian cut. After successfully navigating the various pitfalls of late-2000s home video ripping, our hopes were dashed by a catastrophic realization: The Italian cut was even more dissimilar to the international cut than the extended cut, the infamous torture scene entirely restructured and various shots missing heads and tails. We gave up for nearly a decade.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F4.webp",{"local":31},{"headline":34,"body":35,"imageUrl":36,"images":37},"Publicly accessible versions of major works of cinema","Publicly accessible versions of major works of cinema are often wholly inadequate for reasons as diverse as the resultant shortcomings. A major studio’s home video arm might “expand” a film, remix a monaural audio track, wipe away digital grain, oversaturate or oversharpen the image, or even change the aspect ratio for the sake of an attractive sticker promising a new-and-improved experience.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F5.webp",{"local":36},{"headline":39,"body":40,"imageUrl":41,"images":42},"At other points, low budgets and corporate apathy","At other points, low budgets and corporate apathy lead to corners being cut. Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review—characterized the attitudes of negligent studios harshly in my recent interview with him: “‘Oh, you got a problem? The Kino [an American boutique label] disc is defective? So what.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F6.webp",{"local":41},{"headline":44,"body":45,"imageUrl":46,"images":47},"So what if it uses a defective Paramount","So what if it uses a defective Paramount master with frozen grain and [has] problems throughout.’ [The studios] don’t care that any given audio file is 30 years old and the channels are reversed.” Sometimes, this persists for decades: Every copy of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)released since its 1984 reconstruction has featured a major soundtrack mistake during the end credits brought about by a botched attempt to fix another error introduced in 1970, one example that particularly rankles Draper.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F7.webp",{"local":46},{"headline":49,"body":50,"imageUrl":51,"images":52},"This is where boutique labels come in—companies that","This is where boutique labels come in—companies that independently license and release archival titles, in something like the spirit of Criterion’s founding aim: to gather significant films from around the world and present them as close to a filmmaker’s intent as possible, in the best technical condition available. Outfits like Arrow, Kino, and Eureka operate on a version of that premise. What any given label actually restores versus what it merely receives is a separate question, running a wide spectrum. Sometimes a label might receive a fully mastered digital file and find themselves contractually obliged to release it as-is; at other times, they might receive raw digital scans with partial or no cleanup; or they might be required to source, scan, and restore a film by themselves.","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F8.webp",{"local":51},{"headline":54,"body":55,"imageUrl":56,"images":57},"James Flower, director of production at Arrow Films","James Flower, director of production at Arrow Films, a British boutique label renowned for its rigorous approach to preservation, raises a different culprit for historical inaccuracies: living filmmakers. The revisionist impulse is nearly as old as cinema—from Charlie Chaplin modernizing his silent classics in later years to Wong Kar-wai radically altering the color grading, aspect ratios, and soundtracks of his back catalog for a 2021 Criterion box set. In his note accompanying this set, Wong Kar-wai justified his alterations with a simple philosophy: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”","\u002Fapi\u002Fmedia\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates-cf35c592\u002F9.webp",{"local":56},[],[],{"name":61,"url":62},"Hacker News","https:\u002F\u002Fmubi.com\u002Fen\u002Fnotebook\u002Fposts\u002Fpirating-the-pirates","en",{"handle":65,"displayName":66},"spots","Spots","queued",{"views":69,"likes":70,"saves":70,"shares":70,"completions":70,"opens":70,"skips":70,"depthSum":70},3,0,"2026-09-28T17:55:43.026Z","local"]