Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The New York Ripper in mono

8:10 PM / Blu-ray / Comments7 Comments

Blu-ray
Blu-ray

A big thank you to Land of Whimsy visitor George for pointing out that Blue Underground's upcoming Blu-ray release of Lucio Fulci's notorious The New York Ripper will in fact have its original mono audio mix intact, as per Blue Underground's web site entry for the title. This breaks with the studio's tradition so far of excluding films' original audio on BD and only providing remixes - a major point of contention for purists like myself.

It remains to be seen precisely what language options will be provided for the release. The previous US DVD, released by Anchor Bay in 1999 and then repackaged by Blue Underground in 2008, contained only the English dub. If Blue Underground have managed to secure the rights to the Italian dub for the BD and present both it and the English track in mono, then they could very well deliver the definitive version of this film. At the moment, the web site only lists English audio, but for the time being I'll keep my fingers crossed. I feel pretty confident about the video side of this release, given how good Blue Underground have been so far with regard to presenting their films in HD without any unpleasant digital de-enhancement.

The fact that they are revisiting an older title from their catalogue of acquisitions from Anchor Bay also gives me hope that, somewhere down the line, we may get our hands on an HD Profondo rosso or Inferno. Keep up the good work, guys!

 
7 Comments

1. BobaFett said:

Great news! I e-mailed them about the missing mono track on Crystal Plumage, but didn't receive an answer. But new releases with the original sound mixes on them are the best answer anyway. :)

Two thumbs up for Blue Underground! Or... one thumb up for now... they'll get the second one, should English and Italian mono tracks be included. ;)

(Posted on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 8:57 PM)

2. Bleddyn Williams said:

This sounds like great news - Blue Underground seem to be listening!

(Posted on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 9:44 PM)

3. Kentai said:

Excellent news! And from the camera negative at that? I can't wait to pick this up now. Now, let's just hope that negative is uncut and has everything where it's supposed to...

It's also good to see BU moving away from including both DTS-HD and TrueHD tracks for the same language. Either one would be fine, but including both is just silly.

(Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 4:45 AM)

4. George said:

http://hkfilmnews.blogspot.com/2009/06/upcoming-blue-undergound-blu-ray-titles.html

a list of titles in the works.

(Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 5:21 PM)

5. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

Perhaps they're listening to us. I hope the mono track will be uncompressed, and that they'll also include an uncompressed Italian track. Asking too much? Maybe.

(Posted on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 at 8:18 PM)

6. Bleddyn Williams said:

The Toolbox murders on blu-ray. My god, who'd have ever thought?

(Posted on Thursday, June 11, 2009 at 12:04 AM)

7. Griff said:

Did you hear that? NEW YORK RIPPER is being released in mono. Mono! Hallelujah! Rejoice!

It seems almost absurd that we'd be celebrating such a seemingly non-event but it just goes to show how tired we've grown of this incessant digital tweaking of stuff unbroken.

Let the purification commence...

(Posted on Friday, June 12, 2009 at 3:08 PM)

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.

 
Archives
Categories
Recent posts