Mr. Bean.
These days, anytime my thoughts drift to Mr. Bean, they're immediately consumed with the absolute mess that is the digital representation of those episodes, and how one of these days I have to sort out that mess into a viewable restoration before I could begin to consider enjoying it again.
So many problems exist with those episodes, so many demonstrations of laziness and corner cutting that exists in the world of video.
For starters, there's the obvious - those of us in the US that were introduced to Mr. Bean by discovering him on PBS know that the Do It Yourself Mr. Bean episode should include the scene of him modifying the chair, Merry Christmas Mr. Bean should include the turkey weighing scene. Even the VHS copies available in our market at that time included these scenes - the same versions of the episodes that aired on PBS.
Many of us were absolutely baffled when Mr. Bean came to us in the digital era on DVD with these scenes just missing. Why would full scenes just be discarded like that? To spend money on what should be a "new and improved" version of something, and finding it to be compromised and worse in ways, is such a frustrating experience. But I've ranted about this before.
But this opened up quite a rabbit hole for me as I dug further in, coming up with ways to fix these wrongs.
The original US set is plagued with issues - some episodes have mono soundtrack while the old VHS sources have stereo, most episodes have sloppy edits to adapt them from having act breaks for TV to be a full program. But these things were applied inconsistently. The more one digs into these things, the more apparent it is that the creation of DVD sets involves a process of grabbing what is handy and convenient, without anyone ever asking the question, is this the best source?
But I've ranted about these things before as well.
And then we get the 2015 DVD set, which made some attempts to fix these issues, but also committed a horrible crime against Mr. Bean. While the previous US DVD set presented the content as 29.97 interlaced, the 2015 set included 23.976 progressive content. The problem is that the original source was in the British standard of 25fps, but some idiot decided that slowing down the content to 24 was an acceptable compromise. For a TV show that has physical comedy and comedic timing! Not to mention, this meant time expanding the audio program, which was very noticeable and my first clue that something was off on this DVD.
A real shame, because it went back to the original sources, included all act breaks, and included the missing scenes. Unfortunately the missing scenes were included as bonus content rather than re-inserted into the episodes, to preserve the original presentation, but having the content would mean restoration could be completed relatively easily.
If not for the digital molseting that took place.
This led me to picking up the 2010 British DVD set. Which is true 25fps, but unfortunately is plagued with many of the same issues as the previous US DVD set - missing act breaks, extra scenes not included at all.
With 3 imperfect DVD rips, this show fell into a state of limbo on my media server - various rips that need to be edited into something watchable someday...
So, I wanted to watch the Mr. Bean Christmas special. And, I know at some point one of the digital releases of it includes the turkey weighing scene, but it wasn't on any of the versions of this episode on the 3 DVD sets I have. So I went digging. And managed to find a bootleg 1080p 25fps download that includes the scene. Not sure at all the source, it's labeled bluray, but no bluray release exists of this. It includes a dolby digital 5.1 soundtrack - with silent sub, center, and surround channels. It's widescreen, but not pillboxed, stretching the episode to be distorted. Ugh.....ok, extract the stereo audio, mangle the picture back to full frame, and I have something that can be worked with in Vegas as a source of the scene, to insert into the 2010 DVD version.
Why the 2010 DVD version? Well, I put this rip up against the 2015 DVD version, video only, modified to also be 25fps, so they would line up, and the 2015 DVD source, even when timed up right, has a bit of a blur to it compared to the 2010 DVD. Of these 3 sources, the 2010 DVD rip is the superior source. Although, I also stumbled onto Netflix rips that are 1080p 25fps that might need some comparison, but still do not include extra scenes, so yay, another comparison. So....wow....2015 DVD was a complete loss, even if you extract the video and set it to the right framerate to align with another audio source, it's picture is not an improvement to the 2010 British DVDs. The only thing the 2015 set has is complete act breaks on all episodes - but it requires time expanding audio that has been time compressed, so the sound is pretty shitty, but all I have to work with for re-inserting those missing act breaks. But - we'll see what happens as I dig into more episodes to eventually put together a proper library of these episodes on my server.
But wait, it gets better.
As I'm aligning the 2010 DVD rip, with this bootleg 1080p source, to find a transition point to re-insert the turkey weighing scene, I'm watching the frames of Mr. Beam walking into the store. And - they do not align perfectly. As in - I have 25 frames on one source that seem to fit perfectly in between the 25 frames of the other.
WTF!?!?!?
So I ask co-pilot, and it suggests that Mr. Bean was likely shot on video in 50i originally. Which suggests that different releases that are 25p basically just threw away half the fields.
Which means a true proper remastering of these episodes should be de-interlaced into a 50p format.
Which has never been done.
Which will probably never be done.
Which will leave the Mr. Bean library permanently a mangled mess...
I really hate video editors. No standards. No care. No attention to detail. Fuck all of them.
And a Merry Christmas to them all.
