Hachigatsu wrote:
Unfortunately, the likelihood of them working together is next to nil; because Universal would never spend the money on such an old title, and Toho would refuse on pride, because they are still kicking themselves for selling the worldwide rights (sans Asia) into perpetuity to John Beck (who then sold those rights to Universal). It's too bad that Toho just doesn't do what Celestial Pictures did with their acquisition of the Shaw Brothers' catalogue. They used Discreet's Smoke and Backdraft, Thomson's Spirit Datacine, da Vinci's 2K colour corrector, and Revival restoration system. An identical set-up was acquired by Imagica in Tokyo, which worked on the extensive restoration of the original Ultra Series catalogue for Pioneer and Tsuburaya Productions around the same time — Toho is just too cheap to care. Former Visual Effects Director, Koichi Kawakita, lobbied for an extensive restoration on THE MYSTERIANS, to correct the bluescreen shots and remove the optical printer scratches from the visual effects sequences, and other repairs and cosmetic repairs, and the Toho execs declined his request. They essentially told him that no matter what they did or didn't do, people would still buy the film, regardless — so, why bother?

When Criterion restored SEVEN SAMURAI for the first DVD release in the late 1990s, Toho conceded, but hit the ceiling when the disc's extras featured a restoration comparison which embarrassed Toho (because they let one of their premiere titles fall into disrepair, and an outside company — a foreign one at that — were the ones that did a restoration on their own. Toho made them pull all of the discs, and press new ones with the old print and the restoration extra removed. Toho eventually let Criterion release a fully-restored version on DVD only recently. Toho really doesn't care much for their back catalogue if they have to spend a lot of money restoring them, so they are just doing everything in-house, and with as minimal effort as possible just to squeak by. This is the unfortunate reality.
                 Unfortunate. That attitude will also ensure that we probably never get a good Godzilla film from them either.


                        Robert T.