bg tv movie tapes

[skippercollecto]

I realize that this question is about bootleg tapes, so if you have to delete this, that’s fine.
In the 1980s, as some of you know, Universal re-released its episodes of Galactica into two-hour TV movies. These movies showed up in syndication from, I think, 1981 to 1987. I didn’t acquire a VCR until 1986 or so, so I did not get all the movies taped off the TV. Just three.
This is what I did:
Over a several month period in 1987, WXIX in Cincinnati (now the Fox affiliate), had its final airings of the revised pilot, The Gun on Ice Planet Zero and The Living Legend. The revised pilot is NOT the same as the theatrical version of Saga. If you took all the scenes from the theatrical version and merged it with the scenes from the revised pilot, you would come up with what originally aired on Sept. 17, 1978. In other words, both shortened versions have scenes that the other one didn’t, and vice versa. Meanwhile, in order to fill up the time to create two-hour movies of Legend and Gun, there were scenes added to each of them that had been filmed but not originally shown in 1978-1979. (Some of those scenes show up in the bonus materials on the DVD set of the series.)
My first VCR was a lot more primitive than later VCRs, much less compared to today’s DVD players. There was no remote; I had to press the button on the machine itself to start and stop a tape. So, my effort at not including commercials was 50 percent accurate, at best. In other words, you see portions of some commercials, but when they stop, I might not have gotten the first second or two of dialogue when the movie started again.
I also squeezed all three movies onto one tape, using SLP mode, which means that the picture when replayed is grainier than if I would have taped in SP mode.
The last problem is that WXIX’s logo shows up in the corner of the screen during the movies.
Obviously, the VHS tapes from the 1980s are slowly starting to decay. It’s worse for handmade tapes than for pre-recorded tapes.
So here’s the question, and it’s a biggy:
Do any of you have the equipment to transfer this to DVD? I’m not talking about simply copying the tape.
Okay, so now my ethical/unethical questions start:
I’m asking about cleaning up the graininess, removing the WXIX logo and removing the bits and pieces of commercials. I suspect that doing so will require a frame-by-frame job on a computer and I have no idea how long such a project would take. Obviously, I can’t take this to a video store for a transfer, because I am well aware that this is copyrighted material.
I suspect that the Galactica TV movies are long gone and will never be shown or released on DVD. The original master tapes are probably buried deep in a file cabinet at Universal. It’s very likely that none of the current Universal employees know about them, much less would ever go hunting for them, and we know perfectly well that Universal management and Glen Larson are snubbing/ignoring us.
So here are my final sets of questions. Would one of you who has the knowledge and equipment to do this be willing to do it for free? You can make me a copy and make yourself a copy. I would send my VHS tape via registered or certified mail, because if it disappears in the mail, the contents will be lost forever to posterity.
Now,
(whispering) What you do with your copy of the remastered DVD is your business.
(Yelling) If you make other copies of this for whatever purpose, I DON’T WANNA KNOW ABOUT IT!
Mary
P.S. I still live in Ohio, if you are wondering about taping capabilities and/or postage.

[KamikazeAthena]

Hey Mary,

What you are talking about is a HUGE amount of work and I do not know if it is doable without major equipment. I do know that one of the films, Mission Galactica, was released on video as was a G80 film that I was also 2 episodes merged. Both of these can be found on ebay and they were legit VHS releases.

Dy

[Eric Paddon]

There's no way you can remaster an image without access to the original film stock. So the best your VHS recording can look, I'm sorry to say, is to just get it transferred to DVD and preserve it at the level you first recorded it in.

The telemovies do circulate widely and I have all the two part episode ones (I never want to the see the ones that spliced two separate episodes together). All of the extra footage used in them is part of the deleted scenes supplements in the DVD set (save for one scene from "Lost Planet Of The Gods" where Adama describes the fall of Kobol) and that's really the better place to see them IMO. It's worth noting that the film stock of those extra scenes was fairly degraded meaning I doubt that there's a good master element in the vaults that's left. The only advantage to those scenes over the raw outtakes is that we saw them with a final sound and music mix added which the raw outtakes do not have.

[skippercollecto]

Thank you for answering my long question. It sounds like there are others out there who have better quality bootlegs of the two-hour movies already, so that answers my question as to their circulation.
I really don't know how remastering works, and I'm not planning in my lifetime to learn how to do it or to buy the equipment to do it. From what I've read about bootlegs in discussion groups on ebay and the IMDB, there must be people with the time, money and patience (or maybe just totally no social life whatsoever and living in their parents' basement) who do this. How they make a living off of it, how they don't get caught, etc., is beyond me. I'm not going there!
I do have an option now to get the VHS transferred to DVD. My new brother-in-law (he and my sister were married last month) is a computer expert and perhaps he would be willing to do the simple VHS-to-DVD copy, but not all the cleanup work needed.
Before any of you get worried about me, I just wanted to make sure that my movies didn't totally disappear one day. I never meant for this to be a monetary venture--I'm not that desperate for money and I have a little bit of a life!
Mary

[Eric Paddon]

Well just to clarify, the only way you can ever do remastering of the original image is to have access to the original film itself from the vault, and that's a process that would only cost you the order of maybe a few million dollars.

[BST]

Mary,

Eric' s right about the re-mastering. To have a 'clean' version on DVD, you would need to start out with a 'clean' source, i.e., the original master footage. That is probably locked away in Universal's film vault. So, in your situation, the VHS tape that you have would be the 'source' and whatever the condition of it happens to be, is the best that the DVD would be.

It might be worthwhile, though, to simply just dub the VHS tape to DVD, so that you can preserve the copy that you have, on a more durable medium.



BST

[Galactifan]

These Battlestar Galactica "TV Movies" were released officially overseas and were available on VHS in the PAL version.
You can still purchase them here...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Battlestar-G.../dp/B000050YLD







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