"Cheers" season 4, episode 1 video quality - what gives?

I just got the Cheers season 4 DVD, and the video quality on all the episodes is just as great as in previous seasons, with one exception - the season premiere, "Birth, Death, Love & Rice." This is a very important episode, as it's Woody's first show and the first time Coach's death was addressed, but on the DVD, the video quality's pretty shoddy.

It's almost as if the original film elements couldn't be found when all the episodes were remastered a few years ago, and they just went with a videotape broadcast master. Here are some screenshots from the episode.













Does anyone have any theories as to what gives here?

 

It's just a bummer, especially when you see how great other episodes look.

For comparison's sake, I made these screenshots from elsewhere in the season 4 set.

 

It's weird that they'd lose or toss out the negs for only one show.

Wasn't that around the time that many TV productions moved away from film post production to video post?

IIRC, they would (and mostly still) shoot on film, transfer it all to video and edit there. Since we've come a long way in film to video quality, maybe that's the difference you see.

To bring everything up to state of the art standards, they'd have to get the negs, re-transfer to HiDef digital, and re-edit from scratch.

Apparently that's what they did with the Seinfeld DVDs.

dan c

 

It's my understanding that the series was done entirely on film for the duration of all eleven seasons (hence the "Cheers is filmed before a live studio audience" narration at the beginning of every episode).

Paramount gave the series a very expensive remastering shortly before Nick At Nite picked up the show a few years back. Just look at how great the rest of the screenshots look.

 

I remember seeing a handful of episodes on television after the series was restored/remastered that looked like they came from a sub-par source. I took a guess and figured the best elements might have gotten missing, but I've always wondered what exactly happened.

Maybe Andy Andy has the good stuff on those?

 

I'd ask him, but he seems to be busy cuddling up with Bart Simpson there.

 

I am sure you are right, that the film elements were not in the vault for that episode. Perhaps they were sent somewhere for remastering for a VHS box set....I have seen that happen more than once.

 

Yes, and it doesn't surprise me. It recently happened with the "Our Finest Hour" episode in the M*A*S*H Season 7 box set. The original elements had supposedly degraded in storage to the point where they couldn't be restored or used for the DVD. Fox ended up using a low-res syndication broadcast tape for that episode (edited!). Not that big a deal, though, considering that this 2-part episode is mostly series flashbacks. But I still hate it when this kind of thing happens.

 

yes, it does. Oftentimes, someone will request a clip from the archives for a TV show, they get out the 35 master, send it to the pro house, and when it gets sent back, it goes to the wrong facility. Or, someone purposely stores it in their studio, for whatever reason. In these cases, the syndication house has no choice but to use a video broadcast master to make their dub. hence the not so great quality.

 

Thanks, guys, for the explanation.

That also answers what I've been wondering about the M*A*S*H season 7 DVD.

 

I was looking at the screen shots (made me smile) and they reminded me how Cheers was truly a great show--especially compared to the sitcoms that are out now.

Getting back on the subject, do you think by the time Blue-Ray comes out, the powers that be will "accidentially" discover the missing film negatives for those particular episodes of MASH and Cheers (etc, etc) and re-release these TV box sets, again?! ON a similar note, the technoogy might improve by then for major restoration work on some of those older TV shows. I mean, look what at what Criterion has been doing lately by re-releasing some of their ealier titles in pristine condition.

Sidbar: We should maybe start a thread on the bonus features of these TV DVD sets. I think there's a few Websites out there that discuss them in detail. The reason I bring it up was the whole Jerry Orbach thing...I'm wondering if he did any audio commentaries for the L&O DVDs (didn't he start appearing around season 3 or 4?) before his passing.

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I thought of the same season 7 M*A*S*H episode when I read this. Since that episode was mostly flashbacks, you think they could have edited some of them in to restore it.

 

At least with the one M*A*S*H episode FOX did have a note on the DVD mentioning the quality.

FWIW I noticed the same lower quality on the Cheers episode as you did. Great show though!

 

Apologies if this comes across as a threadcrap, but how do you search for M*A*S*H on this website? I just tried it and got 16 pages of recent threads - I assume the asterisks confuse the search engine into searching for everything.

Seeing as I've posted this, I might as well ask anyway, with apologies if this has been covered at length before. Firstly, what happened to that one shot in the title sequence of M*A*S*H (if you've ever seen M*A*S*H, you'll know the shot - it's of an ambulance panning across the screen, that looks as though it has been trampled by a herd of elephants in every regular episode, but is in pristine quality on the pilot episode). I remember the poor quality of this shot as a child when BBC-2 showed the series in the early 1980s.

Secondly, any ideas why the sound is so variable on the DVDs of the series? It's admittedly better than the optical sound transmitted in this country (and the visuals are generally lovely on the DVDs), but the sound is sometimes very... pinched. I generally listen to the laughtrack-free versions, but the canned laughter versions are often worse, as though they've attempted to feed the sound down a telephone line.

And to bring this posting back on topic, Cheers was one of the first imported sitcoms shown on Channel 4 in the UK when it started in 1982. It was transmitted from optical VT conversions (cf. Taxi on the BBC - this was the way Paramount distributed as standard back then). The picture was smeary and yellow, and the sound seemed to have a bass cut at 400Hz! I still have examples on VHS here. Fortunately, Channel 4 started to receive improved sources later on, and we have been treated to proper PAL telecines since the late-1980s. The versions shown these days are pristine - presumably the same masterings as on the DVDs.

[To be irrelevant for a moment, the Bilko DVDs on Time-Life are NTSC-PAL VT conversions. The versions shown on BBC2 are proper PAL telecines from 35mm, and look glorious.]

Mart.

 

I've always wondered about this, too. And if memory serves, I think the shot looks okay on Hallmark Channel reruns. But on the DVDs, it looks exactly as you've described.

 

There are similar problems with the first season of "Murphy Brown." The last scene of the first episode has some pretty nasty scratches evident. One scene in another episode features close ups of two different actors; the shots of one of them look clear and the shots of the other are quite blurry.