Great Idea! - Please Read!

[Pietro]

I have this great idea! What if we send Cartoon Network.
Public Domain cartoons to show?! But, we only can submit clear
prints of the cartoons (not old, dark, scratchy, prints - unless
cartoon is extremely rare). Hey, it may sound stupid or dumb,
but, it's worth a try. What do ya think?

-Pietro

[Nelson]

I say....Lets give it a try, we have nothing to loose by it:)

[Pietro]

Oh, come on!
There's gotta be more people who want
to try this idea besides me and Nelson.

-Pietro

[Argus Sventon]

We could try, but it won't work out like we hope it will. The cartoons that we send have probably a 5% chance of getting on CN. CN probably won't air the cartoons because of fears of legal action.

You've got the right idea, but you're going about it in the wrong way. Let's send them to TV Land as well. Since the majority of PD cartoons are Paramount cartoons. We could put a post-it note on the tapes, "We found these cartoons in Dollar General. Are they yours?"

[Pietro]

Maybe we could just send Felix the Cat cartoons -
they're in the Public Domain and nobody will have any fears of legal action. Anyone with me on this?

-Pietro

[Pietro]

OK, forget this idea!
Jerry Beck just e-mailed me and told me that CN
uses high quality digital (digi-beta) tapes that
have special codes built in for cablecast.
Plus, also, it costs hundreds of dollars
to transfer VHS to Digi-Beta. This is why
Warner Bros. hasn't upgraded or
restored the pre-1948 Warner Bros. cartoons.
In that case it would take thousands,
per cartoon, to restore from original negatives.

-Pietro

[Vdubdavid]

That just put a little damper on my hopes that Warner is going to follow through on their statement that they're restoring ALL lt/mm's

[Mibbitmaker]

That may be another reason there are so few Betty Boops on CN (besides rejecting some of the best ones due to pre-code naughtiness)(At 1 AM????????) They DO show them, it seems anyway, from a PD source.

[J Lee]

CN uses high quality digital (digi-beta) tapes that have special codes built in for cablecast.

Too bad Beta didn't win out over VHS in the 1980s -- if it had there would probably be home digital Betamax systems now that would have been compatable with the digital Betacam systems most of the network use, and sending home VCR tapes to Cartoon Network wouldn't be such a mismatch of incompatable formats.

[Patrick McCart]

WB is remastering ALL of the cartoons for DVD release. This means re-transferring, restoring/color correction, sound restoration...etc..

Some reports say that they restored some before remastering...and WB has some really spiffy digital restoration software that can fix film defects. (Check out WB's DVD of North By Northwest or Ben-Hur and you'll see what I mean.)

The ones that most likely needed restoration are just 1930-1948 cartoons since it's obvious that most post-1948 cartoons on TV look pretty good.