Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut
Garrett Gilchrist has taken the time to put together as much of the original footage as he could find to reconstruct Richard WIlliam's original Thief and the Cobbler. It's split up into 17 parts and I believe the below is a embedded playlist so one should play after the other. I believe Kaj screened this film thjis year but this is apparently a much better cut than the workprint version that was shown to us. Enjoy!
4 comments:
oh awesome! thanks for posting it! Yeah, Kai showed it to us a couple years ago and I was soooo glad, because the 1st time I saw Theif and the Cobbler was as a free movie in a cereal box, and the theif had this annoying mumbling voice ALL the time and these songs were added for no reason and... UGH... I'm just glad I got the chance to see it the way it was more or less meant to be seen.
Yeah, no kidding! I believe there's also a DVD-quality copy of this re-cut version floating around the net for those who want it. I think the person in charge wanted to do this to show Disney what it could really look like and spark interest into restoring the original version fully again.
Glad you liked it!
This version of The Thief and the Cobbler misses one of the most amazing scenes in the movie, which I saw on English television when I was visiting London in the fall of 1988. I suspect it was an episode of "The South Bank Show" hosted by Melvin Bragg. Anyway, the scene must have been an expanded version of the atmospheric but very short introduction that the recobbled version starts with. In it, one has the powerful, incantatory narration while looking from a distance at the golden city. The camera or shot moves into the city in an amazing, surreal, hallucinatory and spiralling way, as if created with the most complex dolly shot in all of history, although it's all done by animation, of course. It was absolutely magical. I thought the narrator for that scene was Vincent Price, which would explain the drawings of the wizard's hands which one sees in the recobbled version's opening.
If I had to review the film: First of all, it's great to see this masterpiece, or the remains of a masterpiece, in some sort of recognizable form. I saw the execrable American butchering in the 1990s, and every moment, every second of that made me squirm with displeasure. Here, I'd say that the best parts are the scenes of evil, with their deep, saturated colors and visionary power. The comical and heroic characters generally have a cutesy feeling, and a lot of the shots of the golden city, all candy-colored pastel and soft-focus drawing, look rather dated in a 1960s/1970s way. But the scenes of evil are undying classics.
If you are not burning a CD and you simply want to view the movie, you only need to download 4 .vob files from the numerous files in the bittorrent: vts_01_1.vob, vts_01_2.vob, vts_01_3.vob, and vts_01_4.vob. That should save you some on download time.
Then you might want to do what I did, which was to convert the .vob files to .mpg files. I used my free file conversion software from eRightSoft, and then watched the files with Windows Media Player, which all worked out fine.
If someone has better movie making software than I have, or is more skilled than I am, maybe it would be a good idea to make the four .mpg files, then splice them together and then post the film as a zipped file at Rapidshare.
Hey, there's the whole movie (I mean, not-cut-into-parts) on YouTube now and the quality is okay, too :) : The Thief and the Cobbler- Recobbled Cut (FilmFTW1 full-length 360p) .
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