Monday, September 22, 2014

Xanadu-Just The Word Should Put That Song In Your Head

A classic clip. In fact this post threw a wrench in the works yesterday as I worked out what to do.

This is the easy part. Xanadu (1980) features two song and dance numbers featuring Olivia Newton-John in thigh boots. Most boot fans know this.

Then it gets sticky. Someone mentioned it to me last week and that got me hunting. It's never had a proper blu-ray release, but has been broadcast in faux HD (DVD format professionally upscaled). On one of my hard-drives I found a version (of unknown provenance) of the two songs in 720. Upon review I found the picture quality to be somewhat murky, but still a 1280x720 version is nothing to sneeze at. I then visited a site I frequent which puts all of the available rips of popular movies through rigorous testing before awarding a "high quality" star to a file. I acquired that "high quality" version and did a side by side comparison. To my eyes, on my monitor, the smaller 720x460 version is superior. BUT....that one got mangled when I uploaded it to Youtube.  So I decided to upload the "big" version to Youtube and give you a chance here to pick the one you prefer. Most clips don't deserve this level of attention, but, it's THAT SCENE from Xanadu.

My Choice, smaller but clearer-

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http://www49.zippyshare.com/v/53956168/file.html

Bigger, but......

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http://www49.zippyshare.com/v/91848152/file.html



2 comments:

  1. Bruce, No question at all this video needed cleaning up and a better capture than was usually available, glad you took the time to find us, what I think is a fantastic version, certainly better than my VHS copy if it!

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    1. Thanks, I always like to upload the best version possible. Often it's such a rare film that I'm lucky to find a fuzzy vhs rip. I'm surprised there isn't a real blu-ray version of Xanadu available, but I knew if I searched I could find a pretty nice one. Trust me, this post felt cursed, even before imagebam crapped out for a couple hours.

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