Some *beep* at Warner Brothers decided to edit out the "fade to black" continuation of the theme song. That was one of the highlights for me, and some *beep* decided to cut it out. Man am I pissed.
So am i. That really was a bummer for me.
shareAgreed. It shows real disrespect for the power that Curtis Mayfield's music added to the film. Watching the original ending, as seen on the VHS release, you can imagine the producers in 1972 saying, "This music is so good, it DESERVES to continue after the fade. And it'll probably put the theater patrons in an even more upbeat mood while they're getting up from their seats and heading for the exits!"
I hate it when people doing remastering (on DVDs or CDs) decide to "fix" something that was not a mistake, in order to "tidy it up", and cluelessly end up removing some of the flavor of the original work. It's almost as if they needed a fan of the original film to be there and say, "Dude, that was their creative decision in 1972, and it works just fine. If they hadn't MEANT the song to run all the way, they wouldn't have done it!"
So maybe it was actually fortunate that the studios in the VHS era didn't have the ambition or the allotted budget or the technological advances to do top-to-bottom "restorations" for most videotape releases. Compared to the DVD releases, the VHS tapes were more like quickie jobs-- not a lot of time to go meddling with things-- so those versions sometimes end up truer to the original films.
Meanwhile: It's been noted elsewhere that the final zoom-in to the Empire State Building spire makes it look, in this context at least, like a giant hypodermic needle. Intentional or not? I don't know, but I'm wondering how they chose the typeface for "The End". That graphic looks like it was borrowed from a very old movie-- early-1930s or even 1920s.
I'm sure the use of the Empire State Building to resemble a hypodermic needle was intentional: Money corrupts, power is a drug and whatnot. The typography for "The End" is a curious and funky choice.
I wonder if the team behind the Empire State Building had realized what the spire resembled? Probably not.
On cable during the past year, I've seen similar or identical "The End" typography in many old movies-- at least one as recent as 1960, and that graphic probably would've been considered pretty archaic even then. Not sure if it originated with Columbia Pictures, but it might have; most of those old films I've watched were on GetTV {also some on TCM), and GetTV's movie lineup is primarily Columbia releases.
I'd bet the resemblance to a hypodermic did occur to someone during the building's design process, but they probably figured, "Eh, it's not worth thinking about THAT too much."
There are other strange coincidences, too. Near the end of the early-'60s comedy "Who Was That Lady?" (also on GetTV), Dean Martin and Tony Curtis make some mistake in the basement of the Empire State Building that causes a huge explosion near the top of the structure. When the fire is shown blasting out of a couple of the upper floors, it looks so close to what happened to the World Trade Center on 9/11 when the jets hit, it made my jaw drop. And just weeks after seeing that, I pulled a 1975 National Lampoon magazine out of storage. The issue features a mock movie poster that parodies a then-emerging Hollywood trend, the all-star disaster film. The poster artwork, painted in the exact style used at that time, shows all kinds of disasters happening simultaneously: floods, earthquakes, tornadoes... and explosions near the top of both WTC towers, looking virtually identical to what would happen 26 years later. It was beyond eerie. I've never seen "The Towering Inferno," and at this point I would never want to.