Well, apparently it has taken 10 years for me to get over my Mr. Bean burnout, and get around to watching all those wonderfully funny episodes again. And so I went into my stash of DVDs from back when I was still buying those, and pulled out my copy of "The Whole Bean"
Wow...it's been 10 years since this dvd set came out, and I probably haven't watched it since I first brought it home. But, lets backtrack a bit further....
Back when I was a freshman in high school, one day other students in my algebra class started calling our teacher Mr. Bean. This was rather odd, being that his name was Mr. Weiss. I questioned this, and found out that apparently there was some show some students caught on HBO about a funny guy named Mr. Bean that supposedly looked a bit like our teacher, and so they started calling him Mr. Bean. I figured, I'll have to check this out, and quickly forgot about it. Until sometime later when I was flipping through channels, and I ended up watching some show about a guy doing laundry in a rather odd way, and playing a game of mini golf that took him all around town.
I was immediately hooked on Mr. Bean.
I started keeping track of what time it would come on PBS, and borrowed a tape of some episodes from one of my classmates in algebra class. When I had a bit of money to spare, I'd pick up a tape from the store, hoping someday to complete a full set of all 8 VHS tapes.
Eventually, I did acquire the full set of VHS tapes, and I watched the hell out of all of them. So, in 2003 when finally Mr. Bean was coming to dvd, I was thrilled to finally replace this VHS tape with a much better quality DVD set.
It didn't take me long after getting it home to notice a glaring issue....2 episodes were missing memorable scenes. In the Christmas episode, the scene where he cheats at guessing the weight of the turkey was missing, and in Do It Yourself Mr. Bean the scene where he sabotages the electric chair so the other customer won't buy it was also missing. By the time I had noticed this, I had lost track of the VHS tapes, many were given away, some may have been lost, some may still be floating around somewhere with various things of mine in other locations. As pissed as I was about this, I never got around to doing anything about it right away, being that I hadn't yet mastered the fine art of basic video editing, and was so burned out on Mr. Bean by then that I wasn't going to be watching it all that much for quite a while anyways. I would fix this someday, but when I get around to it.
I decided to do a little digging online to figure out just what in the hell happened, and found some old forum posts discussing it. Apparently, the DVD set contains the episodes as they originally aired in England. When Mr. Bean came to American on HBO and PBS, there was no need for a commercial break, and so the episodes were edited to not break in the middle. This also allowed for these scenes to be edited back into those episodes, since there wasn't the same time constraint now.
So, 10 years later, here I am, wanting to watch some Mr. Bean, and wanting to fix these glaring issues. 32 cents plus 8 dollars shipping later, I have another full set of the VHS tapes, and to think back when I was in high school I probably ended up spending $130 by the time I acquired all volumes. Of course, being that 2 episodes were missing scenes, this called into question, what else is missing? And so I've started a thorough comparison of the DVD vs. the VHS, and the results have been shocking.
In addition to the missing 2 scenes, I've found the following issues. Many of the episodes suffer from a flickering/skewed picture on the very bottom of the screen. Much like you may notice when playing a VHS tape. The picture on the DVD is definitely better than the VHS, but I question the source that these episodes were transferred from. This is just lazy. The issue could have at least been covered, or cropped. When I transfer VHS tapes, I always make sure to either crop, or put a black line to cover the bottom. This is far better than seeing a glaring artifact like that on the bottom of your screen. I suppose back in the days of standard TVs, you could get away with this with the overscan, but we live in a world now where the TV will likely display every bit of the picture....you can't hide behind the overscan anymore.
Also, I've found that the 2nd and 3rd episodes have a mono soundtrack on them, while the VHS tapes have stereo. What in the heck? You couldn't be bothered to find a stereo source for these episodes? Clearly one exists. I mean...it's not like it was that long before this set came out that a stereo version of these episodes were sent to America for American broadcast....clearly there was a stereo soundtrack somewhere. I've also noticed that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th episodes each have a sloppy edit within a scene change with 10 seconds missing. I'm guessing this is where the act break would have gone. I found this rather odd, since most of the other episodes (I'm still going over these one by one) do have the original act breaks. Now, when the episodes were sent to America, the act breaks were removed, but not by slicing them out....the source before the break and titles were added were used, to make the episodes seamless, but still complete. I'm guessing at some point, in England, some episodes were prepared for tape, and it was decided to do a quick edit of slicing out the act break to make the episode seamless for home viewing. And somehow....these sources were what was pulled for some episodes to put on the DVD.
Which leads me to one conclusion.....not a fucking care in the world was given when it came to putting together this DVD set. This is absolutely unacceptable! No love or care was put into this set. Original materials weren't carefully found and transferred, they weren't looked over for issues that needed fixing, and carefully tweaked to bring out the best. Some asshole that deserves to be unemployed just grabbed whatever source was available, slapped them on a disc, and called it a day.
Just awful!
It just sickens me that people can be so careless in their work, and not only that, but the entire company can be so careless. I mean, I'm just a home viewer, and I immediately noticed something wrong. You would think a professional would have taken one look at this, and noticed that there were picture issues that could be fixed, sound issues that needed addressing, and perhaps someone could have even taken some time to consider the extra scenes us Americans were used to seeing in these episodes, and at least included them as bonus materials.
Episode by episode, I've been fixing these the best I can. I've added back in the 2 missing scenes from VHS tape, I've replaced the mono soundtrack on the 2nd and 3rd episodes with the stereo soundtrack from the VHS tapes, which has also allowed me to fix the sloppy 10 seconds edited out of these episodes.
It's sad when the professionals do such a horrible job, that the customer has to fix it just to make it watchable again.
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