A little surprised to be approved here, thanks! As promised: Last year I was looking around France's INA (National Audiovisual Institute) for work, and started looking for old Sega stuff. There are some fun things on there, like promotions for both Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 that feature the character taking over the channel identification bumpers for Canal+ (drawn in a very European style too). Most interesting to me though was this Mega Drive TV commercial which has a brief clip of the first boss fight from Sonic 1, with a very different looking wrecking ball graphic (and very obviously running on a 50hz Mega Drive, so the commercial footage presumaly recorded locally). This appears to be public-facing, so take a look: https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/publicite/pub3774380056/sega-mega-drive-console-jeu-video The part in question is at 8 seconds. It shows the spinning ball from the first boss with far more fluid animation, what appears to be a rotating light shine effect. In fact, the light shine effect seems to rotate along with the ball itself rather than being fixed in place, which, on hardware that couldn't easily do its own rotation, must have taken up a decent chunk of graphics memory? Either way, it's much more striking than the final version which (correct me if I'm wrong) just alternates between two frames. Apologies if this is a nothingburger and you've seen it all already, but I don't think that's the case as most people won't be trawling French audiovisual archives, and I can't see this documented on TCRF anywhere. It makes me wonder though, where in the timeline does this fit? How does its removal tie in with the original dual-purpose of the ball animation? The animation shown here, to me, looks like it was designed specifically for this boss enemy.
It indeed is a nothingburger. These European ads (there are many variations of them in different languages and featuring different games) were manually edited in post production, you can even notice they even went through the effort of making the springs more cartoony with that super extended coil in Marble Zone. I guess they thought the original games didn't look interesting enough for the french audience? XD We had posts about this since at least 2008 haha.
Ahhh, well my face is red. Thanks for confirming! And seeing it in full context is very interesting rather than the cutdown version in the INA trailer. It's... an apple? In context it's clear what they're doing, in the shortened version, not so much. Interestingly, I think that sort of "sprucing up" of footage would be illegal in some other European countries such as the UK due to their advertising laws - unless there was text that made it clear that the footage had been altered.
I seem to recall some scuttlebutt that the edits were supposed to better tie in the game footage to the live action portions (which may have been originally filmed for Castle of Illusion?) EDIT: Here's the post I was thinking of: https://forums.sonicretro.org/index...-of-other-knowledge.8815/page-115#post-629331
I made the same mistake ages ago lol. also @Blast Brothers they are indeed versions with live action stuff, I remember seeing one where some punk guy got hit with a spring.
On a related note, weren't these commercials archived? I remember seeing someone having the reels and uploading them online with BTS footage as well. Nvm, found it: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp3i9MOQh3Hm22rkmJsYr2lVOb5EpeSNc
That would be the guy in Switzerland who runs the Dreamcast preservation site: https://en.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/pub-megadrive-aventure-numerisation He has the original negatives of the 35mm live action parts. Back then, the workflow would have been to telecine that stuff to video and then do the final edit in post. So the live action parts are preserved.
I was expecting a grainy black and white film of a well dressed man smoking in front of a TV displaying only the eternally spinning wrecking ball animation, but this is way better
Another rip of the commercial, courtesy of the aforementioned playlist: Is it just bad frame blending, or does the really long spring extend past the blue overscan border on the right?
Frame blending doesn't do that: since the blue border is intact and it's only on the black border, that must've been a digital post edit.
I really don't understand, why does they edited video? For.. for what? To make more heckin' mysteries in Sonic Fandom after so many ears of existing?
I was wondering whether that was the song, just because it didn't quite sound like it. Perhaps it's a cover of "Surfin' Bird" or even "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow"? Also, I don't think this can be explained away as "50hz system": Specifically, this:
I'm going to ruin your day - that's not a rip, that's an attempt at remaking the advert. You can tell by the fact Labyrinth Zone is in a completely different aspect ratio, which was not the case in the original ad.
Watching the ad again, still seems to me those borders were inserted there to mimic the "50hz System".
