Does anyone think--or has anyone said--there was a relation between the announcement of the Montreal DVD and the death of Saul Swimmer, who directed the WWRY movie? I'm assuming it's the same footage. I also seem to recall some sort of disagreements between Swimmer and the Queen camp on how the film should be made. (Or was it disappointment from it being released with the film sped up a bit)
I chalk it up to unfortunate timing. On previous DVDs, word seems to come out about 6 months before release, and the Queen Convention (where word did leak) was a good opportunity to announce it. If they really wanted to stick it to Swimmer, why not make a big announcement of getting the rights back, which presumably happened months ago.
Brian does not mention the death of Paul Swimmer in his soapbox.
Maybe, this is a hint, that the relation ship between him and Swimmer was not the best.
I forgot to add that there is mention of minor quarreling in Swimmer's commentary to the WWRY DVD. I forget exactly what, but it was about the making of the final product.
This should be of interest, from August 2002 (link goes to 2003, you have to go back to August through the link, only place I can find the quote) link
"I'm thrilled that our "A Night at the Opera" surround sound DVDA won the award! Fabulous! And really glad that the "We Will Rock You" performance DVD didn't win! It could have been so great - but they contented themselves with a "Silk Purse out of a Sow's Ear" sound quality, instead of risking the extra money to let us remix it properly in DTS 5.1 surround. They frigged around with the old Stereo mix to make a kind of surrogate surround. unfortunately the old mix was crap. I only wish we could have stopped them putting it out in this shoddy fashion - it's the only Concert footage which we don't own - we let this company called "Mobilvision" film us to put us on an experimantal large-screen show for "concert"- type audiences many years ago. So we lost control of this footage. Shame, and apologies to all - we hate having anything out there with our name on it which we don't consider to be up to scratch quality-wise."
"we hate having anything out there with our name on it which we don't consider to be up to scratch quality-wise."
-Rare Live
-Live in Rio
-Final Live in Japan's audio mix
-MIH The films
...
-GVH1 minus 25% of the image that was cropped (still, a good product, but this was an outrage)
-GH WWRY edition with crappy liner notes
-ROTC's crappy cover (the DVD itself I find it very good, but lacking extras)
...
etc.
On the other hand, Wembley and Milton Keynes were great releases, although the latter's packaging and art is very lame.
Let's hope they can pull this off successfully and present us with a DVD with great sound and image, cool packaging and, more importantly, GREAT EXTRAS! If they don't include nice extras, this is going to be another disappointing release.
Wiley
Yeah, I'm not saying the new Montreal film will be better than the WWRY DVD; I suppose the announcement of this seems to coincide with Swimmer's death, but that seemed to be debunked.
I do think a lot of what Queen has put out film-wise has been subpar. I think that blaming Swimmer is fine, but then DoRo has to be included as well. Just because they got off their duffs and made a good Freddie documentary doesn't get them off the hook.
Release it all, I say; to hell with liner notes.
Pink Floyd, yeah. But how bout the Rolling Stones' attitude toward The Rock and Roll Circus? They hated it, thought they sucked, thought they were outdone by the Who -- which they were. But the Stones were still great on that film, still miles away better from what they present themselves as now. If Houston 77 is somehow subpar to them, perhaps they should take into account that, especially at that moment in time, they were simply awesomely unstoppable?