o.supreme wrote:Half Human was released on VHS by Rhino ( now S!F) almost 30 years ago, pretty sure Toho has that since it's under self-ban.
At one point semi-recently this was claimed by Wade Williams. In fact, he was the party who licensed the film to Rhino and later Englewood Entertainment for its VHS releases.
Gorath, The Human Vapor , and The Last War are probably back to Toho as well. If they ever got a release, it would probably be just Japanese with subs since the Audio elements of the English dubs supposedly in MGM vault are probably beyond preservation now, which is sad
These are still with MGM, which I think probably holds the rights in perpetuity through a long chain of acquisitions and mergers.
It's worth noting that there are two telecines of
The Human Vapor that have been released on tape: the first is from a 16mm print as would have played on TV (this is the Video Gems transfer), but other licensed releases used a new transfer that was clearly struck from a 35mm element. It's hard to pin down the date of the later telecine but it could have been done in the 1980s. That 35mm-sourced telecine played on TV in 2004 during a Quentin Tarantino-hosted marathon on the defunct TRIO channel. So at some point before MGM acquired the three Brenco-Toho films, at least one of them had a 35mm element in good enough condition for telecine.
mikelcho wrote:They are beyond preservation now. In fact, they're so far gone they're starting to turn pink. I found that out in G-Fan #121.
Can you elaborate on the context of that as mentioned in
G-Fan?
Even if the film elements had faded that much, that level of fading alone doesn't necessarily render the film unusable. For example, the 3D Film Archive restored the 3D elements of the 1954 sci-fi movie
Gog, which had experienced severe fading (although the left eye element, which was more faded, was restored from a 35mm release print). Incidentally, that was an MGM title.