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THE X-FILES returns, in HD and widescreen


Werthead

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The first benefited from the fact that the show was at it's most popular so we all went into the film expecting to love it. The fact it was good meant it was excellent for the fans - I'm not sure how someone watching it solely as a film may have felt about it. The sequel was a couple of years after when pretty much everyone had stopped giving a shit about the show. I thought it worked fine as an episode of X-files but it was terrible as a film.

Yeah, if I had seen that on TV as one (or maybe a two-parter) episode (I could see it fitting easily in the darker seasons), I would've thought it was excellent. But 6 years after the show ended... not really.

Anderson was excellent, but Duchovny looked like he wasn't even trying to pretend to care about it.

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More screenshots from the HD version.



They've confirmed that any scene with CG effects in is upscaled, which is a bit shitty. There's so few episodes with effects (especially relative to ST:TNG) that it probably wouldn't have broken the bank just to have gone in and redone them.


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^Has there actually been any official confirmation of all this?

I was super excited, but after some a lot of digging, I couldn't find any official statement from Fox, nothing but rumors, those HD screens on those german forums and vague declarations from some guy.

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Some dude from Fox did say last year they were doing it. It's a surprise there hasn't been a big bells-and-whistles announcement from Fox about it, though, like CBS did with STTNG.



It's possible they're doing some testing of the waters, seeing how the un-remastered effects and stock footage is going down and so on, before deciding how they're going to handle the US and UK releases. But certainly they're not going to spend all that money and not get it back through BR releases or HD Netflix or something.


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Me and my sister loved this show to death back in the day. That episode with the living doll gave me emotional scars for years and disrupted my sleeping patterns for weeks. And let's not even mention "Home", with the incestual rednecks who kept their dismembered mother beneath the bed... :stillsick:



It did go downhill after a while, but closing scene to "Closure" in the seventh season, when Mulder finally reunites with the spirit of his sister is one of the most emotionally powerful moments I've ever seen on TV:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQy3_BQcCh4


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For reals.

As a nice bonus, The X-Files was filmed with widescreen cameras and the camera fields were kept clear, meaning that the new masters are in widescreen. ST:TNG was filmed with widescreen cameras but only the centre of the image (producing the SD, square TV image in wide use at the time) was kept clear, meaning that props, crew, edges of the stage etc. are visible in the widescreen images, so they couldn't be used.

Now that's some forward thinking. Amazing show and great that they figured "hey let's keep the edges clear bc you never know, in twenty years we might wanna release this mofo in widescreenz." So I'm happy to see it. I already own the first 5 seasons on DVD, but never purchased the rest since they came out on Netflix before I completed my collection. Probably give up what I have on EBay or something and go for the newer ones.

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Me and my sister loved this show to death back in the day. That episode with the living doll gave me emotional scars for years and disrupted my sleeping patterns for weeks. And let's not even mention "Home", with the incestual rednecks who kept their dismembered mother beneath the bed... :stillsick:

It did go downhill after a while, but closing scene to "Closure" in the seventh season, when Mulder finally reunites with the spirit of his sister is one of the most emotionally powerful moments I've ever seen on TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQy3_BQcCh4

The show still had the ability to do some incredibly emotional scenes even at its worst.

I still tear up a little thinking of the final scene of This is Not Happening

Badlaa, although creepy, is...not one of the best MotW episodes, but the scene where Scully breaks down and says that she can't be open-minded like Mulder was some of the best acting work Anderson did on the show.

Some dude from Fox did say last year they were doing it. It's a surprise there hasn't been a big bells-and-whistles announcement from Fox about it, though, like CBS did with STTNG.

It's possible they're doing some testing of the waters, seeing how the un-remastered effects and stock footage is going down and so on, before deciding how they're going to handle the US and UK releases. But certainly they're not going to spend all that money and not get it back through BR releases or HD Netflix or something.

Okay. It just seems odd that the rumor started in 2012 (from what I found) and there still hasn't been any official announcement yet and all we have is those german screenshots.

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Oh FFS. I hadn't seen the later developments.



So it was apparently filmed on Super 35, which gives up an aspect ratio of 1.33. 'Proper' widescreen (i.e. what most modern TVs are) is 16.9. The original, square TV image was 4.3. Simply putting the 1.33 aspect ratio on screen, which would give us 100% of the image, would still result in narrow black bars on the left and right of the screen which, to me, is easily bearable (especially given that TNG's 4.3 is very watchable still). For some reason, Fox decided this was unacceptable so have blown the image up to 16.9, which means losing relatively small amounts of info at the top and bottom to get the full width of the image onto the TV screen.



Bollocks, frankly. They should either go with the original 4.3 OAR or use the 1.33 one to give us 100% of the image. Chopping off the top and bottom of the image to give us more of the image at the sides is pointless, as you are then losing what was originally on-screen (and the image was composed with that in mind) to show us stuff that isn't. Pointless.



As the thread goes on to say, however, it is possible that this was done for German TV and the proper Fox image would be the full 1.33 image. It may even be possible to select which version to watch preferentially on the Blu-Ray. More intriguingly, apparently the same tactic has been used before with Friends (that powerhouse of visual quality), road-testing the HD version in Europe before releasing a 'best' version in the USA based on feedback. In that situation, apparently quite a few scenes on Friends which were upscaled in the European broadcasts were properly remastered for the Blu-Ray. So it may be the effects footage and stock footage will be proper HD for the US (and hopefully UK) release.



Oh, and people are going ape about them slightly changing the font for the establishing info and in the credits as well :)


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due to this thread i have started watching xfiles from the beginning on netflix. it really has held up well.

and i had forgotten that mulder and scully had an obvious sexual attraction even from the pilot.

It's funny how they played the sexual tension so very overtly in the pilot (almost shoehorning it) and from there, dropped it and built it up over so many seasons.

I personally think it's one of the best aspects of the show: that Scully and Mulder got together not because the plot needed them to, but because at that point in the story and after all they'd been through together, it was inconceivable that they could not end up together.

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  • 1 month later...

The HD release has also been apparently airing on the El Rey network in the States and according to viewers, the Season 4/5 episodes have 100% of the image shown and the effects have been redone as well, apparently with new CGI in a few scenes where necessary. So hopefully the final Blu-Ray release should be fine for all the seasons.



Latest rumour, unsubstantiated, is that Fox are holding back to release a complete series box set rather than releasing it season by season. That's an odd decision as they won't maximise profits: releasing a season set every 3-4 months (like STTNG) at £30-£50 a pop, and a complete series box set later on for £100+, makes much more sense than releasing a full box set from the off for probably around £100 maximum (and even that's a stretch).


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  • 10 months later...

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