Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sneakers-4K-Blu-ray/343185/

by bredren • 1 year ago

410 299 1 year ago

The link points to a Full HD Blu-ray review. Here is the review for the highest quality 4K Blu-ray review: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sneakers-4K-Blu-ray/343185/

pbhjpbhj• 1 year ago

I was surprised to read they're not affiliated with Blu-ray RTM (registered trade mark) - I guess Blu-ray RTM are unusually choosing not to bite the hand that feeds them.

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...

happycube5• 1 year ago

Fun fact, the DVD Forum just shut down so the DVD trademark is all but unenforced now.

gittes• 1 year ago

Great movie! So many big named actors in it! The director also did Field of Dreams!

BLKNSLVR7• 1 year ago

I'm not a fan of baseball, but I liked Field of Dreams (at the age I was back when it would have made it to Australian TV).

johnwalkr• 1 year ago

I am a fan of baseball, and in 2021, there was a real MLB game played at the original filming location. It started with Kevin Costner leading the players out of the cornfield.

pier252• 1 year ago

And the music is by none other than James Horner. He's a legend in film scoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Horner

dang3• 1 year ago

Related. Others?

Sneakers – The Team's Demands [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927 - Sept 2024 (2 comments)

Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213 - Dec 2023 (54 comments)

No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 - July 2023 (257 comments)

Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788136 - Sept 2022 (47 comments)

‎Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378418 - May 2022 (76 comments)

Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)

Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)

Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)

Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)

Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)

What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)

Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)

Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)

shelled• 1 year ago

Hey dang, do you do this manually or semi-manually or is it just automated from your a/c?

dang3• 1 year ago

Semi-manually, so I'm glad you included that option :)

This question comes up a lot - here's an answer that goes over it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40564558

jph• 1 year ago

Sneakers and Setec Astronomy became my go to for example encryption code for years. If you're not familiar with Setec Astronomy, you're in for a treat. <3

ghostDancer• 1 year ago

I think you keep too many secrets.

sixtram• 1 year ago

The question is, can you guarantee my safety?

glimshe3• 1 year ago

Setec Astronomy is also the name, obviously inspired by the movie, of a successful MIT Puzzle Hunt group.

jmuguy• 1 year ago

I think you mean cootys rat semen.

lantastic2• 1 year ago

Clearly you didn't read my socrates note.

dpifke• 1 year ago

"Setec Astronomy" is the SSID of my home wifi network.

The password is the missile launch code from War Games.

Bluestein4• 1 year ago

Featured here often.-

... particularly sadly, at Earl Jones' passing.-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927

Greatest movie :)

PS. The quote on "goowill not being something the government does" reads so poignant now ...

Karellen2• 1 year ago

Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)

Bluestein4• 1 year ago

That is just so spot on :)

(There's a whole James Earl Jones "pluriverse" out there, ain't it? ...)

tclancy2• 1 year ago

Same!

BLKNSLVR7• 1 year ago

Ironically, I think this movie is better suited to being watched on VHS quality.

beeflet• 1 year ago

I just watch it with my eyes closed

jpecar• 1 year ago

Indeed, sound mix is rather amazing. Incredible stereo picture and depth, something you seldom hear in modern movies.

legostormtroopr• 1 year ago

It sounds like a cocktail party.

tbyehl• 1 year ago

That was very good, Bish. Remind me to make you an honorary blind person.

InsideOutSanta• 1 year ago

If you have a high-quality digital version of a movie, you can use one of the CRT shaders from modern emulators to make it look like any old TV you want.

VMG• 1 year ago

the audio quality of the popular streaming versions is pretty bad

voxadam3• 1 year ago

My voice is my passport. Verify Me.

devoutsalsa• 1 year ago

This is always the first thing I remember about the movie...

COOTYS RAT SEMEN

"No, I don't."

"No. No."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c

sneak2• 1 year ago

One of my cover/shell companies for privacy purposes is an anagram of that phrase. :D

nullify885• 1 year ago

Heavily referenced in Uplink, the hacker video game by Introversion Software.

richrichardsson• 1 year ago

Just before I left the UK in 2018 there was starting to become this trend for voice verification on some services, in one particular one I had to go through the setup of (perhaps it was Virgin Media? I forget), they had me say "My voice is my passport" to train it on how I sound. I smiled to myself.

chedabob• 1 year ago

I had to do it on either Atom Bank or Starling (signed up for both at a similar time).

Monzo also have you recite something but it's something far less exciting like "My name is X and I bank with Monzo".

al_borland2• 1 year ago

Charles Schwab does this, but tweaked it to, “my voice is my password.”

https://www.schwab.com/voice-id

zehaeva• 1 year ago

I totally say this under my breath every time I have to enter sensitive information while other people are around.

ccheever• 1 year ago

I work at a company whose legal name is Monterey's Coast, Inc.

cantrecallmypwd• 1 year ago

oystermen coast ;)

amnesty scooter

coyote smartens

economy tasters

lantastic2• 1 year ago

comatose sentry

necessary motto

sneak2• 1 year ago

Here I was thinking I was clever also naming one of my companies an anagram of that phrase.

inanutshellus3• 1 year ago

1. relevant username ... since 2010. you found your thread for sure

2. hey man you can still be clever, you just... also have birds-of-your-feather out there. :D

nullc2• 1 year ago

And now we know who founded cooties rat semen.

aa-jv3• 1 year ago

I never understood the love for this movie, it just seems lame to see all of these caricatures being created that reinforce hacker stereotypes - and not even in a good way.

glimshe3• 1 year ago

The movie was partially responsible for creating the stereotype. This was 1992 and hacker culture wasn't yet mainstream.

aa-jv3• 1 year ago

Hacker culture was quite mainstream in the 80's, already. This was a refactoring of it. War Games and Tron and other movies got there first.

I think that's the reason I don't have the affinity for this movie that many do - it created incorrect stereotypes which still persist today.

duxup4• 1 year ago

Compared to stereotypes I thought it was an interesting mishmash of lively / different characters.

throw7• 1 year ago

Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).

BLKNSLVR7• 1 year ago

I love both, for similar but different reasons. Hackers captures the naive idea of the scene really quite well. It's goofiness allows the naivety to remain, past the overwrought characters and Hollywood's downright misunderstanding.

It feels like it's accidentally great.

But then again, maybe it just tickles to the surface the sense of wonder I had way back then.

icedchai3• 1 year ago

I enjoyed both of them. Also, War Games... That was the reason I wanted a modem in the first place.

nullify885• 1 year ago

There are some great stills from that movie. In particular the close up of a person's face with reflections of computer text in glasses often sticks with me. I know Timecop also has a similar scene just after the time jump. I think it looks really cool.

My brain is weird.

firefax3• 1 year ago

I always liked how they framed the gun being jammed into Gregor's back at the opera, the entire scene carries a certain tension that modern films often fail to sustain or rely on things like explosions or handcannons rather than a .38 and a well acted angry whisper that you will be quietly exiting this theater or your brains will be exiting your fucking skull that is a much more accurate depiction of what it's like to operate under non-official cover.

Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays.

To swing the discussion back to cinematography:

I'm going to avoid spoilers despite it being an older movie since a disturbing amount of folks in the hacker scene have not seen it but the later scene in the tunnel, arm extended was another great cinematic... shot :-)

peeters• 1 year ago

Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays

But it's set in the past, when relations between the countries were much friendlier. Do you have trouble suspending disbelief during fictional movies set in WWII, because the U.S. and Germany are now allies?

sgt9• 1 year ago

Anyone noticed that streaming services start to compromise on quality? With Netflix it's been like that for a while. Apple TV+ seems to be the best. I really want to get into Blu-ray now, looking for a decent player.

nullify885• 1 year ago

I mostly see a lot of stuttering. Either during high action scenes or when there's little happening at all. It's especially noticable on HBO / MAX at 4k DV. I assumed it was due to aggressive encoding.

voxadam3• 1 year ago

Life is great on the high seas. I've spent nearly 16 years "Passing the Popcorn" and couldn't be happier.

pimeys• 1 year ago

Some butter with your popcorn? Here let me pass.

dmos624• 1 year ago

Question: what's the streaming budget for the big platforms? Can they offer 50-100 mbps? For example, a 70 gb video for a 2.5 hour movie would need 67 mbps to stream. Having access to a rip like that for a popular movie (meaning new or classic) is normal "on the high seas" and it has a detectable difference on my budget-tier setup compared to a ~20 gb rip. I'm wondering if streaming platforms can afford to offer something like that.

sgt9• 1 year ago

How is the life on the private tracking seas? I mean, I'm asking for a friend.

sixothree• 1 year ago

I would describe Disney as barely 720p when used in any web browser.

foobarbecue2• 1 year ago

Seems to vary between shows. Been watching Andor on a good system (LG OLED 4K) and it's spectacular. No compression artifacts or splotchy dark areas.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 1 year ago

That might be a DRM thing, I know some streamers will only send 720 to Linux x Browser combos.

foobarbecue2• 1 year ago

Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.

dmos624• 1 year ago

In my experience, HDR format makes the most difference. There's a dramatic difference between HDR10 and DV.

sgt9• 1 year ago

And sometimes you just hear it. They compromise on everything, and a lot of people won't complain if the audio quality is low.

myself2485• 1 year ago

Disney's Coco did it for me. There were so many scenes with so much visual detail, streaming compression absolutely wrecked it. I've seen it on Blu-ray since and it's an entirely different experience.

How they allowed the release to streaming without manually adjusting the compression for those scenes, I don't understand, but someone was slacking.

theshrike79• 1 year ago

They all give you "4k", but ATV+ has by far the best bit rate.

hudo• 1 year ago

Netflix is "4K Ultra HD: Up to 7 GB per hour". Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers. Typical movies are 35-50GB. So, BR, and think even DVD still looks much better than any streaming service!

criddell• 1 year ago

Sony’s streaming service is 80 Mbps or 36 GB per hour.

We’re going to have to disagree about DVDs though. They look awful on modern (big) televisions.

alias_neo2• 1 year ago

Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers

Are pressed Blu-Rays limited compared to writeable ones?

I have 100GB BDXL blanks (single-sided) I use as one of the archives for my family photos/videos.

Couldn't a film BluRay also be 100GB on a single side?

sgt9• 1 year ago

And Netflix HD (1080) is hardly what one would expect. It may be technically 1080p but the bit rate is often quite low. Most people don't notice or care.

stuaxo• 1 year ago

"The dialog is clear, sharp, stable, and easy to follow." if we didn't already know it was an older film this would be the thing that nailed it.

b112• 1 year ago

That, and its cousin the shaky cam.

"Let's make things difficult to see and hear. That makes for better cinema!"

Jackie Chan once discussed action scenes in US movies versus his movies. Western films: cut before the punch lands, maybe cut a few more times. Hong Kong moves: just show the action in one scene.

nullify885• 1 year ago

A great example of this is Hard Boiled 1992, the Hospital Shootout.

I think audiences are beginning to appreciate continuous scenes and are becoming more frequent in western films. The most recent one I can think of is John Wick 4, when it goes top down.

Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts, the average shot length must be 2 or 3 seconds.

xattt2• 1 year ago

Gasland was unwatchable for me.

pragmatick• 1 year ago

What's the relevance of this?

mortarion• 1 year ago

The best movie about physical pentesting and grayhat hacking in general.

geerlingguy• 1 year ago

It was the previous generation's "Mr. Robot"

somat• 1 year ago

That first phone trunk scene in particular stands out as one of the finest hacking scenes in cinema.

duxup4• 1 year ago

Sneakers is a popular show with folks interested in tech.

If you haven't seen it I think it is worth a try. Great cast, from that exciting age of computers when everything felt like it was just on the edge of possible.

Even for folks not of that time, the cast and script are so good it's worth a watch.

inanutshellus3• 1 year ago

hacker movie news on hacker news. seems pretty straight-forward...

Minor49er• 1 year ago

It appears to be a subtle announcement that the film has been restored and will be rereleased on Blu-Ray soon

Cyphase4• 1 year ago

When I was a kid we had a VHS recording of Sneakers, with the beginning of an episode of Letterman at the end. I remember my mom liking it. Fond memories. I need to watch it again.

A couple of scenes:

    Carl: We've got customers.
    Martin: Shoes?
    Carl: Expensive.
    Martin: *fixes tie* Look busy, guys.

And another:

    *after apparently inconveniencing Liz, the group is walking out*
    Cosmo: We'll call you a cab.
    Liz: "Thank you. This is my last computer date."
    *Cosmo stops walking, falling behind*
    Cosmo: "Wait."
    *the group stops and turns*
    Cosmo: "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."
    *Liz's face falls as Cosmo's henchman start slowly walking up behind her.*
    *dramatic music as we cut and zoom in to Cosmo's face*
    Cosmo: "Marty."
    *Cosmo turns and runs toward his office*

sbarre• 1 year ago

I saw Sneakers when it first came out in theatres and at the time I was in high school and working part-time in a shoe store..

I had learned from the store owner that you can tell so much from someone's shoes, often more than from their clothes.

Combined with that line in this very formative movie (for me), I still to this day can't help but check someone's shoes when I first meet them.

Ntrails• 1 year ago

you can tell so much from someone's shoes

You can make educated guesses based on apparel of all sorts - but you are always guessing.

heyflyguy• 1 year ago

I still remember that goofy looking run, haha

sgt9• 1 year ago

Dude, your mom just wanted to see Robert Redford. The guy was a chick magnet.

DamnInteresting• 1 year ago

"A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."

When I first watched this movie, I felt like this was a weak moment in the film. "Computer dating" at the time was laughably bad, so seeing a character regard it as infallible ruined the immersion.

With age and experience, I now see that some people just throw themselves behind certain technologies, and fail to find flaw. So maybe this character was just a misguided computer dating evangelist, blind to the technology's failings.

KennyBlanken• 1 year ago

Keep in mind the script was from a top-shelf writer who worked on it for ages. It's established earlier in the film that the crew think it's completely plausible a computer dating service would set the two of them up.

"...Fellas. Fellas, look at this man's trash. He's not looking for "buff." The man who folded this tube of Crest...is looking for someone...meticulous. Refined. Anal. ...What?"

I think Cosmo's comment - note he's extremely vain, how he dresses, his office is practically a modern art gallery, he's got the organization's Cray sitting on display, etc - just further shows how vain he is, thinking someone as attractive as Liz couldn't possibly be a good match for a nerd like Werner, when it's established that they're actually quite alike/compatible.

One could imagine that Liz also obeys all speed limits and comes to complete stops at every stop sign...

cestith10• 1 year ago

He knew he had something Martin wanted. He knew what Martin and his partners did for a living. There was already the suspected breach, and finding Werner’s card in his office settled that briefly. When the mere mention of a computer came up in this scenario, Cosmo reconsidered how likely it was to be a simple misunderstanding versus his former close friend being involved.

Karellen2• 1 year ago

    Marty: Organised crime?
    Cosmo: Trust me, it ain't that organised!

cwe• 1 year ago

I’ve always hated the thing about computer dating. Why would that have been so unreasonable?

Cyphase4• 1 year ago

A couple of potential answers:

* It's not about computers and them (Liz and Werner). It's about Cosmo.

* Computer dating is about algorithms and pattern matching. Cosmo didn't have any suspicion of Liz and Werner going on a date; even if he saw a type-mismatch, humans are complex and multi-faceted. But when he learned a computer program ostensibly made the match, his alarm bells went off.

losthobbies• 1 year ago

I love this movie so much. I know there are parts that don't make sense but everyone in it is excellent and it's very quotable.

"Practice, Practice, Practice" "You...won't know...who to trust" "No more secrets"

The soundtrack is great too.

duxup4• 1 year ago

The parts of the soundtrack are on one of my coding playlists.

croes• 1 year ago

Best keypad hacking tutorial

polycaster• 1 year ago

I’m sorry, but could someone please elaborate on the significance of this post?

BLKNSLVR7• 1 year ago

Sneakers is a very popular movie in the HN community. It's a great movie, well written, well cast, well acted, suspenseful, interesting, funny.

It beautifully captures the golden age.

happycube5• 1 year ago

BTW the writers also previously wrote WarGames, and you can see a lot of the same fingerprints...

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

Hacker culture.

SamuelAdams• 1 year ago

Awesome, now do one for the Die Hard series, particularly Live Free or Die Hard.

I know the first Die Hard is 4k, but the others are not.

meifun5• 1 year ago

This movie helped me:

1. Relate to a blind student in our school when they could hear things differently than the rest of us.

2. Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.

3. Realize that a government can steal or in general can be sneaky/secretive.

ethbr12• 1 year ago

Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.

We realized that door bolts are easy to manually jimmy if not precision-fit.

Thankfully, our computer lab overseer was a hacker at heart, congratulated us, and got the door fixed.

I miss the 90s.

meifun5• 1 year ago

Agreed. I talked my way into the server room several times by different night janitors at my old high school back in 1996. I told them I was there to do maintenance and it wasn't entirely untrue but I was there for running wires and setting up new Macs as part of my class load.

cestith10• 1 year ago

I had a teacher in high school who asked me how secure the data on our lab network was. I asked if I could show her without getting in trouble for knowing how to do something. About fifteen seconds later I asked her if the directory we were looking at had all her tests for the year in it.

It was, and for anything not requiring an essay-style answer it also had the keys. This one really isn’t impressive to any sophisticated user. They removed the shell from the user menu list of programs, but they left the shell-to-DOS functionality enabled in a few programs they left enabled. The shared drive directory structure was straightforward to navigate, and being DOS had no real security once the user was at a prompt.

Many of us would spend our in-class lab time playing Scorched Earth or other games installed into hidden directories the students had created.

imacomputertoo• 1 year ago

I saw this movie as a kid when it came out on vhs. it blew me away! I loved the blind guy. He was amazing. That part where he listens to the sounds on the road to determine where they took Robert Redford. You're right, it made blind people cool.

meifun5• 1 year ago

Yes. And the part where he knew where the cryptography device was on the desk.

Don’t look, listen.

Then he taps two tuning forks together.

aksss• 1 year ago

2 & 3 for me came from War Games with Matthew Broderick

meifun5• 1 year ago

another good movie!

gosub100• 1 year ago

2. In high school I tried calling the manufacturer of the lockers and buying a replacement master key, said I was a principal or some nonsense. They turned me down but I forgot why, I doubt my voice even dropped yet.

meifun5• 1 year ago

I can totally relate.

We had a Corvus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_Systems) and I managed to call them and pretended to have trouble with out system and they asked no questions. Ended up sending a manual to the school and I just watched out for it in the Librarians mail slot.

Then I formatted the Corvus after copying the various software packages I wanted to use on my Apple IIe.

xattt2• 1 year ago

Re: negative re-masters

I can’t help but notice that a number of older and very prominent shows on streaming services are clearly ripped from a video cassette.

For example, the older Simpsons episodes on Disney Plus. Some of the episodes have very prominent dot crawl which is unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for.

I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape. Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

sgt9• 1 year ago

Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though.

The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

But surely the film rolls still exist?

I just watched a video revealing that many multichannel masters of big artists have gone up in flames in a big warehouse fire in 2008 [0] [1], and a comment told that a film company burnt down their silent film archive to get insurance money.

So, I don't bet.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9eXk4o35UI

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...

MrRadar2• 1 year ago

A while ago I found a few episodes of a 1950s crime drama/noir series called M Squad (the M is for "murder") on Youtube. I don't recall exactly how but probably because someone mentioned it was a direct inspiration for short-lived Police Squad series and later the Naked Gun films.

Anyways, I went to see if there was an official DVD release of it, and there was but several of the episodes were sourced from off-air TV recordings from reruns in the 1980s because those were the only copies the distributor could find! They were originally planning to release the set without them but asked fans if they could source copies which is how they ended up with those recordings. I didn't end up purchasing it because even the episodes where they had a better quality source weren't mastered particularly well to the point where several reviews said they were borderline unwatchable due to the image getting crushed into murky darkness thanks to the noir lighting and DVD MPEG-2 compression.

esafak2• 1 year ago

I recall reading that they assumed TV shows did not have as much long-term value as films.

itisit• 1 year ago

Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0]

[0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...

MisterTea2• 1 year ago

Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.

MrRadar2• 1 year ago

It doesn't even take destruction of the property to keep media locked up forever, sometimes even just IP rights. For example original Brave Little Toaster film has never seen an official release in HD because it was produced as a joint venture and nobody has (apparently) been willing or able to hammer out a deal between the various rights holders for a new home video or streaming release.

In 2023 a 4K scan of a theatrical print was uploaded to Youtube and despite the slightly rough state of the print it remains the best quality you can view the film today. There's even a pinned comment under the video from the original director thanking the person who uploaded it to Youtube for preserving their film!

bravoetch2• 1 year ago

There are several Star Wars film projects that are collecting old film print, negatives, laser disc, etc and using that to remake the original releases. Gemini is very good at listing off all these projects, if you're interested.

gnomesteel2• 1 year ago

Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

They're solidly pre-digital. Somewhere, the individual frames were drawn/painted on cel, were they not? In principle, remastering should still be possible.

al_borland2• 1 year ago

I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.

etempleton• 1 year ago

Film begins degrading immediately even if well stored. Television was seen as largely disposable and was treated as such.

Aurornis• 1 year ago

The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV.

I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry.

I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time.

BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.

kranke155• 1 year ago

The new X files HD/4K version looks preposterous! Ridiculous! I’ve been watching them recently and I was blown away by how good they were.

schlauerfox2• 1 year ago

I know most productions now run so tight they rent their stuff, so once the edit is done and shipped most of the raw footage is all purged. No outtakes or extra footage exist. Actors prefer this for their image, studios will not pay to store any of it, but what a loss.

rbanffy8• 1 year ago

We knew HD TV was coming since the days of the first analog demos (1125i, IIRC). It’s also a matter of budget to shoot in high quality film, shoot widescreen, and get any SFX/VFX at least recomposed. Entire series of Dr Who were lost to originals being reused.

bluGill• 1 year ago

If you look close at the early silent movies: the campfires are burning the film from even older movies that are thus completely lost.

bredren• 1 year ago

Sometimes it happens by accident. See the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed music and film masters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

...and is covered up for years.

ornornor• 1 year ago

Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?

zimpenfish3• 1 year ago

I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head:

re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0]

"While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated."

re: Dr Who missing episodes[1]

"Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974."

[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

sumtechguy• 1 year ago

Sometimes accidents happen for things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

toyg• 1 year ago

can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape

The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.

wk_end• 1 year ago

Nothing that anyone’s watching on Disney+ was from The Tracy Ullman Show. And by the second or third season of the show proper it was already a bona fide cultural phenomenon, so one would hope (hah) Fox might’ve been a bit forward thinking by then. Alas.

BHSPitMonkey• 1 year ago

What you're referring to came before "the first few seasons". Season 1 and onward are the standalone TV show, spun off from the Tracey Ullman Show shorts.

dylan60411• 1 year ago

I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain

Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.

jboggan• 1 year ago

This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.

doublerabbit2• 1 year ago

O/T: I've discovered that the animation studio I had a gig for has shut it's doors recently to liquidation.

They had a killer render archival server with archives from 2000-onwards show casing what the studio had studio made. Cartoons, Movies; a collection of praised possessions.

It pains me to think that the studio has handed this over to the liquidators only for it to be shredded and now how many OG copies have now been destroyed.

RajT88• 1 year ago

For sure, Matt Groening and co. had no idea how much of a phenomenon The Simpsons was going to be early on.

coreyo• 1 year ago

amusing that the studios do all this work in contracts to make sure they have rights as long as they possibly can and then they forget to take care of the physical media

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river.

If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.

rbanffy8• 1 year ago

We might need to build faster than light ships and great radio telescopes to get those broadcasts recorded.

Henchman21• 1 year ago

Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually…

My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack.

Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.

hylaride• 1 year ago

Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons.

The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added.

Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions.

Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.

doublerabbit2• 1 year ago

Does it need to be fixed though? If children got on with it then, why cannot we now?

registeredcorn• 1 year ago

I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes.

Let's say I do the following:

1) I take a photograph of a flower

2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production

3) I crop and resize it

With each step, copies of the image are made.

After that, I export to several file types.

Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day.

Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later.

Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact.

To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?

matheusmoreira• 1 year ago

unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for
Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

These corporations could not care less, it's just money to them. Streaming services will take your money and ship you "high definition" nonsense that's so horribly compressed it has artifacts in 90% black frames.

If you want quality, you need to find the obsessives out there who will not be satisfied unless they have the absolute best version of everything. These are the people who will track down and scan the negatives the company left lying around to rot using equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

These people really put these billion dollar corporations to shame.

mannyv• 1 year ago

From a business perspective, each movie is generally its own LLC. So once everything's wrapped up the things need to be disposed, and where those things go is unclear.

I mean, storage is forever...but who wants to pay for storage forever?

owlninja• 1 year ago

Plenty of good Sneakers comments, but I was also excited to learn from this article that Uncle Buck has also recently gotten the same treatment!

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Uncle-Buck-4K-Blu-ray/342214/...

zimpenfish3• 1 year ago

Also "Live At Pompeii"[0] (although to my disappointment, it's the cinema version with the DSOTM studio clips - my original experience was the Laserdisc and VHS versions which omitted those because IMO they're not interesting and just get in the way. I'd probably watch "Pink Floyd: DSOTM: BTS" as a standalone thing but it has no place, for me, in "Live At Pompeii".)

[0] https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/pink-floyd-at-pompeii-mc...

BLKNSLVR7• 1 year ago

I listen / watch Live At Pompeii every now and then. My son used to enjoy it when he was between four and ten-ish.

Those deep bass parts of Echoes are magic, when the camera is panning past the speaker stacks.

dymax78• 1 year ago

The newly released blu-ray includes both the 85-minute and 60-minute cuts.

nailer3• 1 year ago

Sneakers could absolutely be remade with the box being a quantum computer. ‘No more secrets’ being breaking all the pre-quantum encryption.

api2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't fully remake it. It's a classic. Just watch it with that explanation in mind. It makes it more plausible.

Maybe what the mathematician did was crack a gigantic outstanding problem in scaling quantum computers that allowed e.g. extraordinarily effective quantum noise reduction at scale.

nailer3• 1 year ago

I do the same thing with Prometheus - I watch the Weyland TED Talk before the film and view the film as a man that considers himself a god trying to meet god.

jackgavigan• 1 year ago

One of the great things about Sneakers is that the McGuffin's core concept still holds up as reasonably credible 30+ years later.

I first saw this movie in the mid-90s, and it sparked a mild fascination with how cryptography (specifically, RSA) works, that arguably influenced my career path.

Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/

nickpeterson• 1 year ago

I love the joke about being snubbed for mathematical consulting at the oscars.

ynniv3• 1 year ago

"There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing"

zombot2• 1 year ago

By now they just declare encryption illegal and order backdoors everywhere.

ecairns• 1 year ago

I was a CS major at the University of Washington in the mid 90s. In one of my intro courses we were touching on public key cryptography and this movie came up. The professor mentioned that Adelman was a consultant on the movie and that he was a notoriously slow replier to email. Like you would get a reply weeks or months after you sent an email to him. But, if you asked a question about this movie you'd get a reply to your email almost immediately.

wdr1• 1 year ago

Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/

One of the few movies to have a mathematical consultant in the credits!

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

Interstellar, and Kip Thorne being another one. Though he was a producer.

istillwritecode• 1 year ago

They spelled Len's name wrong in the credits. :/

jamesdwilson• 1 year ago

You might be right, but keep in mind actors often adopt variations for their names and may not even be consistent.

int0x21• 1 year ago

I was pretty sad the other day when I chose 'Setec Astronomy' for a trivia team name & nobody got the reference

kstrauser• 1 year ago

I have a sticker for it on my laptop. You're not alone out there.

Dowwie• 1 year ago

my voice is my passport

pwrrr• 1 year ago

One of my favorite hacker movies! Saw it in at the cinema and numerous times on dvd. Will definetely get this.

The comment about the shoes, stick with you ;)

MiscIdeaMaker99• 1 year ago

This came out when I was in high school and it's been one of my favorite movies ever since. I still watch it from time to time.

ednite• 1 year ago

Definitely in my top 5, if not first. Feels right seeing so much appreciation for it here—very fitting for HN.

iancmceachern• 1 year ago

Love this movie! So many iconic San Francisco scenes!

fitsumbelay• 1 year ago

very cool movie love the e-commerce website for online purchase of said movie

jack_pp• 1 year ago

Wonder how fast we're gonna get the torrent

LE: weird, my local private torrent has a 4k version from 18 April while the site had it on 22 April

psanford• 1 year ago

I was shocked when I rewatched this recently just how good the cryptography technobabble is in this movie. Specifically the scene where the professor is presenting on breaking public key cryptography. The very first thing he mentions is a number field sieve. Nice work hiring whatever cryptography consultant that got for this scene.

ckozlowski• 1 year ago

It was none other than Leonard Adleman of RSA fame.

bink3• 1 year ago

I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.

ynniv3• 1 year ago

Once you accept that a movie isn't a documentary, Hackers is a lot of fun. The editor of 2600 consulted on it (and lent his nym)

myself2485• 1 year ago

Oh yeah. It snapped me out of immersion the first time too.

But upon reflection, I find it forgivable, because if you think about what it would've taken to make it accurate, and then enough narrative to explain it to the fraction of the audience not up on the technical details, you've got a recipe for 15 minutes of yawns.

The story is no more or less valid for that directorial shorthand, and it could easily be replaced with an authentic scene if you really wanted to. It would break the pacing but not the plot.

bravoetch2• 1 year ago

There are a couple of command line play-things to recreate that effect, here's one:

https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets

agar• 1 year ago

Little known fact: in the late '00s, PGP Corp had developed a free standalone "Viewer" to decrypt email if you didn't have the full PGP email product installed (the onboarding process walked you through initial key generation and publication on a keyserver).

The decryption process showed the encrypted PGP Message block and used a similar Sneakers-inspired animation to transform it into your plaintext email. It was incredibly cool and I remain sad that the product never saw the light of day.

ryanmcbride• 1 year ago

Hackers is actually good.

thephyber• 1 year ago

… OF GAUSSIAN PROPRTIONS!

greasegum• 1 year ago

All I remember from seeing this as a kid is that, in the final scene, River Phoenix asks the hot government agent for her phone number. The number she gives is a real non-555 number--pretty sure it was 818 area code?. You could call that number and hear a message from the character for many years.

Was this the only movie ever to do this?

reverendsteveii• 1 year ago

You're gonna love the answer to that. Disney's 1994 family holiday treat, The Santa Clause, starred Tim Allen as a guy who (I'm remembering this as I'm typing it and holy cow) sort of kills Santa Claus by startling him into falling off the roof. He then puts on the Santa suit and becomes the archetype himself. But in that movie, there's an off-hand reference to a phone number: 1-800-SPANK-ME, meant entirely sarcastically. Turns out, either that was already a real number or some enterprising pornographer recognized that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and precocious youngsters who called the line after watching the movie were invited to pay $5/minute for "the hottest phone line in America".

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-clause-deleted-scene...

ethbr12• 1 year ago

Tossing a few ARG links here, since the heyday of larger games (and especially ones with PTSN connectivity) is old enough some HNs might not have experienced them.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_ga...

It's a shame too, as they were unique. Would love to see a nationally-accessible Meow Wolf tie-in.

PS: ilovebees

schlauerfox2• 1 year ago

I really enjoyed the original Valve's Portal BBS you could dial into Aperture Science and read on the history. The writers at Valve really wrote some great silly backstory about a shower curtain company developing quantum portals, as some sort of tool to get in and out of showers. I'm not sure that's cannon anymore though.

voodooEntity• 1 year ago

One of my absolute favorite movies.

Got the dvd still and did recently just watch it again.

myvoiceismypass• 1 year ago

One of my favorite fun facts about Sneakers is that their headquarters was the upper level at the Fox Theatre in Oakland! I think about that every time I go to a show there now.

joshstrange• 1 year ago

I cannot hear the word "verify" and/or "passport" without saying "My voice is my passport, verify me" under my breath.

MisterTea2• 1 year ago

Heard a Verizon tech on a phone call to tech-tech (tech^2?) support and the automated attendant stated "Repeat after me, my voice is my password" and the tech responded "my voice is my password" then had to wait on hold. Felt a little dystopian.

pavlov• 1 year ago

The design of Blu-ray.com makes me nostalgic for a web where 12px Verdana was the obvious ideal body font, margins were an optional luxury, and Mac OS X Aqua-style shiny blue-gray gradients behind a menu bar were the height of sophistication. (You want just a little bit of blue glow at the bottom of the gradient for that translucent 3D effect that Steve Jobs called "lickable".)

pier252• 1 year ago

That "change the world" scene in the Cray computer room still gives me the chills:

https://youtu.be/coDtzN6bXAM

keevitaja• 1 year ago

there's a nice app that "emulates" this movie https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets

pixelmonkey• 1 year ago

I really love “Sneakers.” It’s one of the best classic “hacker” films. This essay also does a nice job of breaking down a scene you might not have otherwise noticed, which has some lovely filmmaking technique and subtle sound design at play:

https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/searching-for-playtronics....

The ensuing despair over how to proceed is interrupted by the voice of Whistler (David Strathairn, Bay Area native), the team’s blind technician. “What did the road sound like?” he asks. “Did you go over any speed bumps? Gravel? How about a bridge?”

I nearly stood up in the theater from excitement. I’d never seen anything like it: the geography of San Francisco turned into a puzzle to be solved.

Sneakers (1992) – 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative

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