Mr. Devlin, the Blu-Ray disc of Stargate has a defect, can you help?

[cmedina]

Hi Mr. Devlin,

I was fortunate enough to meet you when you spoke for a Filipino group at UCLA a few months or so ago. Your passion for Stargate (and all of your projects) was evident, and it is one of my favorite Sci-fi films. I have owned it on VHS and DVD, both regular and director's cut. I feel this mistreatment of that film needs to be brought to your attention.

Recently I bought the Blu-Ray version of Stargate (Lionsgate produced it). There is an error: the burned in subtitles for the Egyptian and alien (Ra's people) languages are gone. The only way to get those subtitles is to turn on all subtitles for the entire movie, including the English dialogue ones. I have called Lionsgate Customer Service twice, gotten a voicemail, and no call back re: my problem. This is an acknowledged problem in the internet community and has been discussed in respected forums like the Home Theater Forum.

I felt I should bring it to your attention because this is a serious problem with the disc and Lionsgate should make a new Blu-ray pressing with the corrected subtitles appearing without needing to enable all subtitles for the entire movie. If they are unwilling to use the burned-in subtitles, then they should create a player-generated subtitle track that does only the Egyptian/Alien languages without the English dialogue subtitles.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[Crazy Pavarotti Man]

Um... well, it's great that you're such a devoted fan, but honestly, Centropolis/Electric Entertainment/Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich have nothing to do with the production, nor distribution, nor quality control of any current or future releases of the original Stargate movie.

You were right to call Lionsgate customer service, but really, that's the *only* route you can take. They are the company responsible for any and all faults in the reproduction and distribution of the movie.

And for the record, it may not be a defect. They may have done it like that on purpose (not necessarily the best decision, but if it was done on purpose, it's not a defect, only an inconvenience).

[cmedina]

I fully realize it's not this company's product. However Mr. Devlin is one of the primary forces behind Stargate's creation, so if he were to at least voice his support for the fixing of this error, it would help the customers who are getting nowhere with Lionsgate. All it would take is a quick phone call or email on his part.

I fail to see how it is not a defect. The subtitles need to be displayed for the Egyptian and alien languages. It was like this in the theater, and it was also like this on all prior home video releases (VHS and DVD). The subtitles aren't even automatically enabled upon starting the BD (which if they did might, in a very small way, support your assertion of this being done on purpose).

Most likely what they did is this: they used a new master without the burned in subtitles (the master they used for previous DVDs had a lot of halo/edge enhancement/filtering artifacts, so it's good that they used made a new master). Subs are often the last part of the process before it goes to theaters.

It was either pure oversight that they forgot to burn in the subs, or they planned on making a player-generated subtitle track for the foreign languages only (not the english dialogue) but forgot to include that track. Forgetting to include subtitle and/or audio tracks is a semi-common mastering error on DVDs (see recent Superman The Movie disc which omitted the advertised original audio track). Much more likely of an error than "they meant to do it this way" which would make no sense.

Mr. Devlin, as part of the creative powers behind that movie, should still have some pull with the company who is making money off of his creative product.

[Crazy Pavarotti Man]

The problem with "burned in subtitles" (as you put them), is when the actual dvd subtitles are enabled, they overlap the "burned in" subtitles. In order to remedy this, AFAIK, the producers have to create multiple subtitle tracks for each language (instead of one per language as is normal), and it has to cut in after the "burned in" tracks. This has to be done EACH time there's an instance of 'burned in' subtitles. That costs a lot of extra money. Since Blu-Ray is a more expensive process to begin with (as opposed to HD-DVD, which can be created using the same equipment as current DVD manufacturers), my guess is Lionsgate didn't feel the need to put forth the extra expenditure to accomplish the above. Thus, it was likely done on purpose, and it's a shortcut that Lionsgate doesn't want to spend time confirming to each and every person who calls them about it.

Have you done a web search to see if Lionsgate has already publically addressed this issue?

And your last line, it's very idealistic. In an ideal world, it would be true. However, this is hollywood we're talking about. Money talks. That's it. Nobody's doing anybody any 'free favors', and once someone walks away from a done project, that's it.

[Crazy Pavarotti Man]

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/showthread.php?p=3071777

That's the most I've found on it. Nobody's getting a response. I'm thinking they did it purposely as I suggested above, and don't want to "own up to it" because they have no intention to replace the discs (like I said, Blu Ray is expensive to produce. They probably didn't know how to fully utilize the Blu-Ray production process).