Recent Posts11
/dev/random / Re: The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 (and forever) Thread
« Last post by |iR|Focalor on December 01, 2025, 06:23:10 AM »Note:
It was called "The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 Thread (and 2023)", but since the forums won't let me add enough to the Subject of the first post to just keep adding years every year (lol), I just put "and forever".
--------------------------------------------------------------
I've mentioned horror movies and westerns around here before. But I also like Christmas movies too, especially the classics.
Meh, I take that back. I guess I like them just as much. The older I get, the more I enjoy Christmas. These days, I go out of my way to decorate the outside of the house with lights and stuff (maybe I'll get some pics soon).
Anyway, back to movies...
I love all the various Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol movies - Reginald Owen version, Alistair Sim version, George C Scott version, and the Patrick Stewart version. There are others too. Most people think the one with Reginald Owen and Gene Lockheart is the oldest one (1938), but there's actually an even older but lesser known British-made one from 1935 called Scrooge starring Seymour Hicks. For the longest time, the only surviving copies available were all no bigger than about 360p and in pretty bad shape with cloudiness in some parts and LOTS of scratches on the film. People did their best to clean it up and piece together the most viewable version possible from several different sources. And alas, finally a couple of years ago, a professional outfit got ahold of some original film and remastered it to a very decent looking colorized 4K 2160p version. There are other "colorized 1080p" versions on youtube, but they look like crap. This is the best one to watch. I'm normally not a fan of black and white colorization (I prefer the original black and white version of It's A Wonderful Life), but with the improvements and clarity in this version compared to the old commonly available versions, this one is far superior and I can gladly overlook the colorizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eotS-FnRJE
In some ways, I think the 1999 Patrick Stewart version might be the best version in that it follows the actual Dickens story the closest. A few years back, I was at Barnes & Noble and picked up a book that was a collection of Dickens' Christmas stories, including A Christmas Carol, and I actually read A Christmas Carol in several hours start to finish. All of the movie adaptations follow the biggest points of the story, but there are a few small details that you don't see included... the biggest one I can think of is when Scrooge arrives home, he sees Marleys face on the door knocker. Usually you see him go up the stairs to his room... and thats it. But in the story, as he is going up the stairs, he is terrified to see the ghostly apparition of a horse-drawn hearse going up the staircase. Dickens clearly intended the idea of ghosts and haunting and terror to be a theme throughout the work, and I don't think any of the adaptations do a good job of reflecting that. Anway, back to what I was saying about the Patrick Stewart version...
I believe I have the original DVD version somewhere in the basement in a box of christmas movies, but I never dig the DVDs out anymore - I have everything on MP4's on a portable hard drive. I can transfer them to a USB stick and then pop that in my mini blu ray and MP4 player in the living room, or I can transfer them to the video folder on the pc itself and then stream it any other tv via the media player app on my XboxOne. But for a long time, the only version I could find was the 480p version that someone copied from the DVD. This year I've found a 1080p version that was apparently ripped from the TBS streaming app, and it seems to be 4 minutes longer than the DVD version... so maybe it's got some bonus scenes, I dunno yet. I also found another version where someone AI upscaled it to 4k from the 480p DVD source. Both look much better (obviously the 4k one looks more well defined), but they both have frame rate issues. There's a very small bit of choppiness to the frame rate, whereas the old 480p version is very smooth with a constant steady 24fps. Perhaps the original files were MKV and someone encoded them to MP4 poorly.
At any rate... I've found this particular version that also seems to be remastered or upscaled to 4K from the original 480p DVD source, and this one has a nice and smooth frame rate. Note that this is not the TBS version with 4 additional minutes. I'll try to watch both versions at some point this month and figure out where the extra 4 minutes are coming from. I can already tell that the TBS version is definitely different because the font for the opening credits from the DVD source is a yellow script style font, and the TBS version has white plain letters similar to Arial or Helvetica font.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qrGM1Nx5k
I started to rename this the "Christmas in perpetuity thread" but... whatever.
It was called "The Official Inclusive Non-denominational Holidays 2020 Thread (and 2023)", but since the forums won't let me add enough to the Subject of the first post to just keep adding years every year (lol), I just put "and forever".
--------------------------------------------------------------
I've mentioned horror movies and westerns around here before. But I also like Christmas movies too, especially the classics.
I love Christmas movies. Maybe not as much as I love horror and Halloween movies.
Meh, I take that back. I guess I like them just as much. The older I get, the more I enjoy Christmas. These days, I go out of my way to decorate the outside of the house with lights and stuff (maybe I'll get some pics soon).
Anyway, back to movies...
I love all the various Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol movies - Reginald Owen version, Alistair Sim version, George C Scott version, and the Patrick Stewart version. There are others too. Most people think the one with Reginald Owen and Gene Lockheart is the oldest one (1938), but there's actually an even older but lesser known British-made one from 1935 called Scrooge starring Seymour Hicks. For the longest time, the only surviving copies available were all no bigger than about 360p and in pretty bad shape with cloudiness in some parts and LOTS of scratches on the film. People did their best to clean it up and piece together the most viewable version possible from several different sources. And alas, finally a couple of years ago, a professional outfit got ahold of some original film and remastered it to a very decent looking colorized 4K 2160p version. There are other "colorized 1080p" versions on youtube, but they look like crap. This is the best one to watch. I'm normally not a fan of black and white colorization (I prefer the original black and white version of It's A Wonderful Life), but with the improvements and clarity in this version compared to the old commonly available versions, this one is far superior and I can gladly overlook the colorizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eotS-FnRJE
In some ways, I think the 1999 Patrick Stewart version might be the best version in that it follows the actual Dickens story the closest. A few years back, I was at Barnes & Noble and picked up a book that was a collection of Dickens' Christmas stories, including A Christmas Carol, and I actually read A Christmas Carol in several hours start to finish. All of the movie adaptations follow the biggest points of the story, but there are a few small details that you don't see included... the biggest one I can think of is when Scrooge arrives home, he sees Marleys face on the door knocker. Usually you see him go up the stairs to his room... and thats it. But in the story, as he is going up the stairs, he is terrified to see the ghostly apparition of a horse-drawn hearse going up the staircase. Dickens clearly intended the idea of ghosts and haunting and terror to be a theme throughout the work, and I don't think any of the adaptations do a good job of reflecting that. Anway, back to what I was saying about the Patrick Stewart version...
I believe I have the original DVD version somewhere in the basement in a box of christmas movies, but I never dig the DVDs out anymore - I have everything on MP4's on a portable hard drive. I can transfer them to a USB stick and then pop that in my mini blu ray and MP4 player in the living room, or I can transfer them to the video folder on the pc itself and then stream it any other tv via the media player app on my XboxOne. But for a long time, the only version I could find was the 480p version that someone copied from the DVD. This year I've found a 1080p version that was apparently ripped from the TBS streaming app, and it seems to be 4 minutes longer than the DVD version... so maybe it's got some bonus scenes, I dunno yet. I also found another version where someone AI upscaled it to 4k from the 480p DVD source. Both look much better (obviously the 4k one looks more well defined), but they both have frame rate issues. There's a very small bit of choppiness to the frame rate, whereas the old 480p version is very smooth with a constant steady 24fps. Perhaps the original files were MKV and someone encoded them to MP4 poorly.
At any rate... I've found this particular version that also seems to be remastered or upscaled to 4K from the original 480p DVD source, and this one has a nice and smooth frame rate. Note that this is not the TBS version with 4 additional minutes. I'll try to watch both versions at some point this month and figure out where the extra 4 minutes are coming from. I can already tell that the TBS version is definitely different because the font for the opening credits from the DVD source is a yellow script style font, and the TBS version has white plain letters similar to Arial or Helvetica font.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qrGM1Nx5k
Welcome, Guest. Please 
January 15, 2026, 01:46:20 AM