Pat & Mat: the TDK collection

NOTE: In case you haven't read them yet, I started my discussion of these DVDs in two previous posts. Here's a post about the different masters of the same episode over the years which showcases just how much better TDK's masters are. In my most recent post (link), we saw how the Japanese audience experienced Pat & Mat in cinemas from 1999 to 2001, which must have been a big incentive to produce a DVD collection of the episodes.

This is an overview of five Pat & Mat DVDs released in 2001 by TDK Deep Impression. First of all, I have to yet again thank Jürg Schaeppi, without whom I would never get to know about these DVDs.

So, after a couple of years of theatrical shows, the time came for the series to receive a DVD release. This was one of the earliest, if not the earliest (I don't have data on South Korean DVDs) release of episodes produced prior to the 1990s on DVD. As this lovely promo found on eiga-chirashi.jp shows, the DVDs (and VHS tapes, as the collection was also issued in that format) were released on November 29, 2001, a week after a similarly high-profile release of another classic series from the same studio, Pojďte pane, budeme si hrát, which you should definitely check out.

The contents
A presentation of the collection on TDK's webpages was saved by the Wayback Machine.

introduction

description for VHS/DVD #2

listing for the whole collection

There are five DVDs and each contains seven episodes. This is the often found packaging of the first 35 episodes. The TV episodes are spread out among four DVDs, while the first DVD features all of the episodes produced by and for Krátký film Praha. The episodes were arranged by the then-actual episode order. You can find the full list of episodes on Jürg's old website. The covers and the discs are all in the same design with just the colors switched. Each DVD came with a different booklet which contained the episode and credits list (it's fun to see Jan Klos, Jan Keks and Karel Klos listed separately as they are the same person) and some background info, usually biographies of people who worked on the show, ranging from one of the main authors Vladimír Jiránek to one of the people behind the scenes who usually isn't spoken of much, Ivo Špalj, the sound engineer. This is what they look like for DVD #4 (with the biographies section this time simply giving an overview of the series), while you can find the rest at the end of this post:

The DVDs themselves, on the other hand, are bare-bones and don't feature any bonus materials. There's an intro for Deep Impression, an intro to the series and then the episodes start.

However, there is something in the menus that I find very interesting. Starting from 1981, two promotional photos were shot for (probably) every episode. These photos were not frame grabs, but were staged photos usually featuring both P+M demonstrating some of the plot from the episode. The puppets were often staged in ways in which they weren't in the scenes themselves. I have seen many of these photos before (you can check out some of them out on Polish fan Artur's imgur profile) and eagle-eyed readers could have spotted some on the cover you saw just a bit earlier, so here are those photos which I've never seen before and which I would like to one day see in good quality.

The masters

The quality of the masters is what makes this DVD collection unique. As we have come to know, these DVDs contain by far the best copies of ... a je to! episodes available anywhere. As a sort-of sequel to this post, I am preparing a couple of posts where I will, with screenshots from every one of those 28 episodes, discuss some details, goofs and peculiarities which I found by re-watching the entire series. That is why I am only posting a couple of random screenshots from DVDs 2-5 now:

How do Ateliéry Bonton Zlín's masters stack up against these? As you might have guessed, terribly. When I first watched Tapety on TDK's DVD, I was, in one word, shocked. It looks so different!  While the crappy (apologies, but that's really the only epithet it is worthy of) Bonton copy has a yellow "patina" with faded colors, TDK's copy is quite revealing. Mat's room looks more depressive at the beginning, as if the crew did not yet have a sense of how to light up the set and started with too much white light. They gradually dialed it back a bit and introduced warmer colors, even in the same episode. Compare these two shots. Nuances like these are complete lost on the Bonton masters, of course.

Here's a comparison video of the two copies, again thanks to Rakso. Not only is the TDK copy much clearer, but you see quite a bit more of the frame as well. I should note that both version came out a bit brighter in this video than they really look to me, probably as a result of formatting the video and uploading it to YouTube:

This is how much, in comparison to the TDK release, the conventional release cuts off the frame. It is practically butchering the original artists' vision. Again, thanks to Rakso for these takes.

For most of the collection, the episodes look as beautiful as Tapety does. Another major difference is that there is, in the whole entirety of the collection, a grand total of zero splices, zero jump cuts, zero damage which makes the screen wobble. For example, a minor splice in Telocvičňa makes the screen unstable for a couple of seconds. On TDK's copy, the damage is nowhere to be found (again, everything on the video looks a bit brighter than it should, at least in my eyes):

Unfortunately, two ... a je to! episodes were transferred from considerably weaker materials for this collection: Výlet and Hrnčiari. While the rest is sourced from impeccable prints, probably the original negatives or something very close (more on that down below), these two episodes were sourced from used, faded, washed out, flickery prints, most likely positives. I don't know why this is the case. Maybe better materials were damaged, but it seems unlikely given the state of the other episodes. I hope it was just a case of there not having been enough time to locate better materials. What makes these cases even more interesting is that Výlet has lower quality, scratchy audio, obviously sourced from the audio track on the print. However, Hrnčiari's audio is not any worse than the rest. I'm pretty sure the audio and video for that episode, therefore, didn't come from the same source. Here's a comparison video for Výlet (again, thanks to Rakso):

You can see a lot more black dust (spots, threads, etc.) on these two episodes, while the rest (second image) usually has a majority of white dust. Now, there is quite a bit of white dust on these two episodes as well, but the presence of blacks could imply that the rest was sourced from negative, while those two episodes from positive prints. It makes sense that if you have dust on the negative, it will turn out as white spots when you invert the negative image and vice-versa.

positive? - black spots

negative - white spots

Even though there is more color and the brightness is more balanced in Bonton's copies of these two episodes, TDK's still have some things going for them: you again see much more of the frame, while there is also less flickering. Bonton's materials could be better, but they haven't been mastered that well. Compare these screenshots (Bonton followed by TDK):

However, there is one disc where Bonton's DVDs do beat their Japanese counterparts and that's TDK's DVD #1, which features the seven episodes produced for Krátký film Praha. Now is a good time to mention that this is the only TDK disc which gives copyright credit for Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, a.s., while the DVDs featuring ...a je to! episodes have copyright attributed to Slovenská televízia. Does Bonton's copyright for these episodes not apply in Japan? Were the DVDs made before Bonton bought these episodes from STV? These are questions I cannot answer. Here is how DVD #1 looks:

What makes the Czech DVDs (and perennially used masters) better is not the source materials. In fact, I believe that the sources for the Japanese and Czech masters for these 7 episodes are the same, most likely original negatives again. However, while Bonton had them transferred from film to digital, TDK's masters are film-to-tape and that significantly downgrades the image quality. Here are comparison screenshots from Klíč (TDK, then Bonton):

there isn't more of the frame at the top here, I just couldn't capture the final card due to ABZ's added (c) card

The situation is the same in other episodes, like Dveře. You can see how the TDK masters are cropped a bit differently:

The sources are definitely of very high quality on both masters. One of the reasons which make me believe they are, in fact, one and the same for both Bonton and TDK is the (minimal amount of) damage appearing in the same places. Here are some frames from Kuťáci, with white patches appearing at the same points:

Source of the materials?

When it comes to this collection, this is the most interesting and most important question of them all. Where did TDK acquire such beautiful materials for their collection, which the rest of the world has never seen? The short answer is: I don't know. However, I can't say I haven't tried to find out. I contacted every company and person I think could have some information about these DVDs. Some have replied, some haven't. The friendly people at NFA, the Czech film archive, told me they weren't involved with the DVDs in any way. As I've already written before, I only received a non-answer from Bonton, one of their employees asininely writing that the "Japanese probably made the transfers of the masters to NTSC, so they can have a different look than those in PAL", as if that could be the reason for the massive difference in quality, which I carefully presented to that person with 10 comparison screenshots beforehand. Give me a break. I also contacted Krátký film Praha, who at first tried to redirect me to Patmat (who don't have anything to do with the oldest episodes) and then went silent when I gave them more info about what I was searching for. Given the state of their company at this moment, I didn't expect much more, to be honest.

However, I do believe that Krátký film Praha did, actually, provide the materials for these releases. It is quite possible that the Japanese requested 35 mm copies of the episodes for the theatrical screenings a couple of years before the collection's release. Of course, it makes perfect sense that the studio which made these films would have the best materials on them, but that's only the beginning. Krátký film Praha has a long history when it comes to releasing their animated films in Japan. As you might remember from the second picture in this post, TDK's Pat & Mat collection was released simultaneously with Pojďte pane, budeme si hrát, which KF completely owned at that time (currently, under Czech law, the films are becoming NFA's property). In 2009, Columbia Music Entertainment the majority of the rest of Břetislav Pojar's work at KF, including a 4-DVD box set and the entirety of his 1970s series Zahrada. A lot can be discovered by looking up Pojar's name transliterated into Japanese, which is ブジェチスラフ・ポヤル.

source: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/

All of these DVDs carry a copyright notice for Krátký film Praha and all of the films on them were sourced from very good materials. Some films look as good as the ...a je to! episodes. For instance, Biliár, made in 1962, also looks pretty much flawless. The quality again points to the original negatives - furthermore, one of the films, 1957's ‎Paraplíčko, couldn't have come from anyone else other than KF. At first, I was dumbfounded that the opening titles for Paraplíčko on the Japanese DVD didn't have the actual title of the film and didn't specify the profession of any credited person, leaving just the names and nothing else. I presumed the copy must have been made from some original which, given the film was part of international festivals and didn't have dialogue, could be used to make titles in other languages easily, just by adding overlays to the already completed prints. I checked out a Czech TV print and, fair enough, all the missing bits of information are there, obviously overlaid later on! This is another clue, at least to me, that the prints must have come from KF themselves.

As you might guess, these films haven't even been released in Czechia on DVD! Their copies do show up at festivals in Europe here and there. I can't remember where, but I've seen them listed once as "restored versions". Restored they probably are not, but sourced from the best possible materials they seem to be. Here is a link to a 2017 projection in French cinemas which uses the same masters from the Japanese DVDs:

By analogy, TDK's copies are also most likely to have come from Krátký film. Of course, I have no proof for this - it is, for now, just a theory. I am leaving all options open, while also remembering Vladimir Rott's mention of the original negatives six years ago (source):

Perhaps, there may soon be a BD/4K video edition of all his [Beneš's] 49 shorts from the 35 mm master negatives...

In the end, I would like to say that finding out who provided these wonderful materials for a DVD collection (albeit a great one!) almost 20 years ago is not really that important. What is important is for these materials to be kept somewhere safe and sound in the best possible conditions, so that once the companies which own the rights to them (even if they maybe don't physically own the film reels) finally remaster these episodes and restore them, none of their quality diminishes. I can only hope that is truly the case. And on that note, I conclude this mammoth of a post.

Bonus

As a bonus, here are the covers for the remaining three DVDs: #2, #3 and #5.