The main reason the "laser disc" of Meteor has a stereo soundtrack, But not the dvd is because the horrible persons behind MGM's dvd transfers absolutely loves to transfer movies with stereo sound to mono. If you don't believe me, go rent "Zulu" and listen to what they did to the "70mm six-track sound." Thank god Sony bought them out back in 2005? Too late for "Meteor" and "Zulu" though. Let us hope Sony fixes that problem soon.
shareYeah it sucks too that MGM released a lot of these movies in non-anamorphic widescreen. They really should rerelease Meteor in the Midnite Movie collection and make it anamorphic and stereo.
You realize that now Fox is releasing MGM/UAs DVDs so they seem to be fixing them. Invasion of the Body Snatchers the 1978 version is an MGM/UA title and Fox is doing a 2 disc, anamorphic, 5.1 surround rerelease. Hopefully that means that someone at Fox realizes what gold they have in the MGM vaults.
Deterioration or unavailability of the original sound elements is a more common reason. CIC Video did a restoration of the stereo soundtrack (which was in poor condition) for Zulu, but US rights holders MGM/UA weren't willing to pay to use it because the film was not a success in the US and Public Domain releases (like Diamond's atrocious transfer) have diluted the market. The fact that a usable stereo master existed when the LD was mastered doesn't mean it'll still be usable by thetime DVD got round to it, especially with a film like Meteor that is held by various different distributors and has elements held in different vaults all over the world. It's a poor ttransfer, though, butif anything Sny would possibly do even worse - they recently released Young Winston in a cut version missing its original ending even though all the elements still exist.
"This time it's no more Mr. Passive Resistance!"
This film has been shown on a number of occasions in STEREO on UK tv, most recently last weekend on Channel 5. It was also in 1.85
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Well, contrary to poular belief, studios don't go out of their way to use the worst elements when transferring films, though some are defnitely lazier than others. Even though deterioration is commonplace - on some of the DVD releases I've been involved in, sound elements in particular were often so badly deteriorated on even 70s and 80s titles that they were unusable or had to be 'baked' and a copy made before they were completely ruined, while some of Film Score Monthy's archive CD score releases have had to be made from mono masters because the stereo ones are unusable - with Meteor you also have the problem that the film was produced and released by at least three different companies - AIP, Warner Bros and Run Run Shaw's outfit, which means the elements aren't necessarily stored in the same place even after the film ended up owned by just one studio. AIP went bust, Hong Kong companies are notorious for not taking care of master material and Warners lost money on the film: not a lot of incentive for looking afer the material.
As for using a print's soundtrack, that's not always as easy as it sounds with print damage, TV edits (and the TV prints of the film have sound edits for language) and noise. On a title that won't shift many copies it's often simply not viable to do that kind of patchwork restoration.
And, if you don't think deterioration is likely, check out Robert Harris' comments on why the DVD of the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia looked so poor: not much more than a decade after restoration, those restored elements themselves were in need of further work.
"Life flash before your eyes? Cup of tea, cup of tea, almost got a shag, cup of tea."
Yeah, it's very annoying what happens in terms of sound with some releases. I have a number of DVDs and old laser discs that are "mono", despite the movie originally being released in a stereo or surround sound format.
The irony with "Meteor" is that the sound work was Oscar nominated!
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