Pre-Order Man's Favorite Sport (1964) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

The price link below will take you directly to the product on Amazon. If you are using an adblocker you will not see link.

 

[ponset]

I love this Rock Hudson comedy. The scene with Rock and the bear always cracks me up.

 

[Matt Hough]

I watched this tonight. The Universal Blu-ray is absolutely beautiful. True, no menu (just offers subtitles on or off), just the movie, but it is glorious to look at.

 

[Robin9]

I watched this tonight. The Universal Blu-ray is absolutely beautiful. True, no menu (just offers subtitles on or off), just the movie, but it is glorious to look at.

I agree. I re-watched this disc a few weeks ago and was very pleased.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I watched this tonight. The Universal Blu-ray is absolutely beautiful. True, no menu (just offers subtitles on or off), just the movie, but it is glorious to look at.

Yeah, I need to watch my Blu-ray.

 

[Alan Tully]

Ha, me too! I've got this habit of checking the disc when it arrives, putting it on the pile, & there it sits. I think Hainshisway has the right idea, he seems to look at the movies as he gets them.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Ha, me too! I've got this habit of checking the disc when it arrives, putting it on the pile, & there it sits. I think Hainshisway has the right idea, he seems to look at the movies as he gets them.

I wish I used that strategy from the start.

 

[Matt Hough]

On the other hand, it's kind of nice to bring movies back up after the initial interest when they're first released.

 

[LeoA]

Sounds like they did a much better job here than with the three Rock Hudson movies with Doris Day. Recently watched that collection after owning it for years and while I loved it, the picture quality wasn't anything special.

 

[Matt Hough]

Sounds like they did a much better job here than with the three Rock Hudson movies with Doris Day. Recently watched that collection after owning it for years and while I loved it, the picture quality wasn't anything special.

They did, and also this looks far superior to Doris' The Thrill of It All.

 

[OliverK]

Sounds like they did a much better job here than with the three Rock Hudson movies with Doris Day. Recently watched that collection after owning it for years and while I loved it, the picture quality wasn't anything special.

Pillow Talk looks very good and has gotten a new master, the other two did not but at least Universal did not overdo it with the DNR.
Also you have to remember that there is a limit to how good Pillow Talk can be expected to look - it is not an outdoor western but a comedy that plays mostly indoors so this is not a movie that we can expect to look stunning.

 

[LeoA]

Much of what I watch from this late 50's and early 60's era on Blu-Ray are movies predominantly filmed on sound stages. I still think they were a pretty mixed bag from a visual point of view, even if naturally they're not ever going to wow their audiences with their visuals like a well shot western and so on could do. Quality seems all over the place with many scenes looking great and others looking downright awful.

Even with inherent limitations they had to work with like the split screen stuff in Pillow Talk that naturally accentuates the grain (Which they appeared to have sadly messed with to keep it consistent looking with the regular scenes, it looked to me) and aspects I'm not personally familiar with like the state the negatives were in, I'm skeptical their efforts with these took them anywhere close to their full potential.

At one point in either Pillow Talk or Send Me No Flowers for an example, there's even a scene that looks like a ton of static for a little while. I don't remember which movie it occurs in or just what it is that I'm seeing (The worst grain ever in a motion picture, perhaps?), but it's awful looking and wasn't some anomaly that just lasted 2 or 3 seconds (It's not in Lover Come Back, which I watched just a week or two ago).

I'll leave it to the experts or those that may be familiar with the state of the masters of these in Universal's archives, but my hunch is that a top of the line restoration in 2019 such as some of the magic we get out of the Warner Archive program could yield transfers that run circles around what we have in our Blu-Ray collections for these three.

That all said, I'm glad to own all three on Blu-Ray looking the best I've ever seen them (Even if their presentation potentially is flawed), and I'm thrilled to hear that Man's Favorite Sport looks top notch.

 

[OliverK]

In the previous post I wanted to say that Pillow Talk looks very good compared to the other two and not compared to how it could look so I hope this did not cause a misunderstanding. This is by virtue of having gotten a new master which as you correctly point out could still have been handled better especially in the split screens but they do not make up that much of the whole movie. For the other two I only peeked into them but noticed that they looked to come from the same old masters as my HD recordings so I was a bit disappointed. As Lover Come Back to me is a movie that is at least as good as Pillow Talk I would have hoped for it to also get a new master, maybe later.

I completely agree that Warner would have done better with the new master for Pillow Talk but then given the fact that this is a Universal title I was happy they did not give us an old master together with some extra heavy handed DNR.

in any case I hope that we will both find Man's Favorite Sport to look better and I look forward to hear your impressions if you get around to watching it first. As I do not expect color grading to be an issue I am especially interested in how the grain is handled.

 

[JohnMor]

Pillow Talk received far more than just a new transfer. It was one of the 13 films Universal restored (and played theatrically in select cities) for its 100th anniversary in 2012. And from what I understand, its elements were not in very good shape at all.

https://deadline.com/2012/01/univer...nces-major-restoration-of-13-classics-212347/

 

[Nick*Z]

Pillow Talk looks superior to anything it has ever looked like on home video and is a reference effort and a quality affair. The other two titles in the Doris/Rock collection did not receive such care and look it. But Pillow Talk was an extremely difficult restoration to undertake, exacerbated by its split screen opticals and other SFX, plus the film stock itself, in a horrendous state of vinegar syndrome color implosion. Spending nearly a million to bring it back from the brink, Uni's done its very best and the proof is on this disc. So, to see Pillow Talk looking this bold, vibrant and spiffy on Blu is indeed a treat. No complaints here!

 

[LeoA]

That definitely changes my opinion quite a bit on the Pillow Talk transfer.

They touch on some of that on the restoration retrospective included as a bonus on the disc, but the viewer doesn't get a full idea just how bad off this one was.

 

[OliverK]

Pillow Talk looks superior to anything it has ever looked like on home video and is a reference effort and a quality affair. The other two titles in the Doris/Rock collection did not receive such care and look it. But Pillow Talk was an extremely difficult restoration to undertake, exacerbated by its split screen opticals and other SFX, plus the film stock itself, in a horrendous state of vinegar syndrome color implosion. Spending nearly a million to bring it back from the brink, Uni's done its very best and the proof is on this disc. So, to see Pillow Talk looking this bold, vibrant and spiffy on Blu is indeed a treat. No complaints here!

I still think it was a misguided decision to overprocess the split screens but given the history of the elements it looks a lot better than I would have expected it to look given Universal's previous track record for catalog titles at the time. As for absolute picture quality one cannot expect every difficult movie to look like Spartacus just because it got a restoration.

 

[OliverK]

That definitely changes my opinion quite a bit on the Pillow Talk transfer.

They touch on some of that on the restoration retrospective included as a bonus on the disc, but the viewer doesn't get a full idea just how bad off this one was.

I agree that one would wish this was presented a bit more prominently on the disc. The same goes for Spartacus where they have a featurette that should be a lot more extensive to give a better impression of how difficult it was to perform this long and extremely expensive restoration.

 

[Matt Hough]

With all the talk above about Pillow Talk, I hauled out my anniversary Blu-ray disc for Pillow Talk and watched it tonight with the Nick Redman-Julie Kirgo commentary on it. The commentary was entertaining, of course, but I had completely forgotten how splendid the picture quality had been improved in this edition. Colors really pop (Doris' blue eyes are especially notable), and I had a very good time watching the images while listening to the intelligent conversation behind it (easy to follow a movie I've seen probably fifty times in my life). Great movie comedy!

 

[Robin9]

With all the talk above about Pillow Talk, I hauled out my anniversary Blu-ray disc for Pillow Talk and watched it tonight with the Nick Redman-Julie Kirgo commentary on it. The commentary was entertaining, of course, but I had completely forgotten how splendid the picture quality had been improved in this edition. Colors really pop (Doris' blue eyes are especially notable), and I had a very good time watching the images while listening to the intelligent conversation behind it (easy to follow a movie I've seen probably fifty times in my life). Great movie comedy!

You've prompted me to look up when I received and last watched this disc: May 2012! I did make a note that the picture quality is very good. Time to watch it again!