Short YouTube doc about Marineland

This place is an absolutely terrible theme park. Horrible place to go for that poor Orca. Would have been better off almost anywhere else.

It's not on any streaming from what I can find on JustWatch. Have to buy it online or pick up a DVD set.

I first watched it back in the good old days of Hulu. When you didn't have to sign in, they put full seasons of shows up, it was extremely easy to navigate with tidy spreadsheet layouts, and only one ad played at a time. Those were good times.

And finding high quality photos. Needs to be a postage stamp saved at 50 quality JPG saved 3 times over before it qualifies to be shared.

God in the show is extremely subtle yet omnipresent in everything. Everyone accepts it as a matter of fact, yet as a character, God rarely shows up except to tip the scales one direction or the other. He communicates entirely through prophets and signs that aren't too overt and aren't too subtle. The one episode where satan showed up was interesting too since she clearly has the power to rain down curses and make deals with the humans too.

The writing never quite reaches the point where they could adequately explore these themes though. Definitely too high concept for network television writing constraints.

Not that there are actual writing constraints besides content rules, but network TV just almost always feels like it's been tied down to be Basic AF.

It's a weird juxtaposition of a network show with a prestige cable/streaming show.

Ambitious and unique premise, decent production values, Ian McShane acting the hell out of everything, and some really interesting plot points. Running directly into network budgets and network trope plot points. There are episodes with incredibly good and aggressively bad writing all in one.

I remember listening to the director commentary for the pilot with a few producers and Ian McShane. They recorded it for the DVDs long after the show was cancelled and wrapped. McShane said he got talked into it by the show runner because it was going to be better than typical network tv drivel. Then McShane keeps saying "should've been on cable, this was too good for a network, should not have been on a network," for the rest of the commentary haha.

Haven't read the article yet but looking forward to it. This is such an odd little known show that I never see enough discussion about.

There's a few answers to this because it can depend on a lot of things.

Basically there's a lot of ways to scan film. Some are very slow, some are very fast. Automated systems can be incredibly expensive. The best dedicated film scanners are no longer made and can be very expensive to obtain and maintain. The dedicated systems with automated scanning can be extremely expensive. Automated mechanisms also specialize on strip film or mounted slides.

Currently made systems mostly rely on camera scanning, which is pretty good these days. There's one that does slide carousels and I think they made a system for strip film. There's also an automated strip film system by Negative Supply.

If you don't have an automated system you have to manually mount each strip of film, scan all 3-5 frames, take it off, put it away, grab another, keep going. Or do that for each individual slide. Flatbed scanners are among the most common ways to scan film (though it's not nearly as good as camera scanning), and you can do a bunch of frames at once. But they're usually very slow and takes a few minutes per slide.

There's just a lot of ways to do it but it almost always involves a lot of manual intervention even with the fastest systems.

Besides the actual scanning you have to deal with the media you're digitizing too. Re-sleeve, remount, and re-sort anything that might be deteriorating and in poor condition. Clean major dust off the frames, decide if something isn't even worth scanning, wear gloves and handle the film carefully so you don't damage it, keep everything in the organization system so it isn't lost, organize it physically and digitally, tag the photos according to date and content (data doesn't exist if it isn't organized and/or searchable), decide how much editing you'll do to each frame, and adapt your procedures because of special circumstances.

You can scan everything and just toss it up there. People do that all the time, but it's still a very physical and manual process. And if you're after quality and organization, it can take even longer.

You get to see so many cool memories from the past vividly restored in very high resolution. Properly exposed, developed, high quality, and safely stored film can deliver some amazing digital results. Far better than a lot of people realize (though film doesn't have infinite bazillion K resolution like some redditors may say haha). It's very rewarding! But it's also very slow and very repetitive.

Bit of a random explanation but hope that makes sense!

That's super cool! I've digitized film as a hobby and for friends/family/small businesses, but not on that scale. I'm sure you love seeing all that old stuff come back to life in modern accessible formats too!

I (wrongly) assumed Poland wouldn't have as hardcore copyright laws as the US does, but yup, that's the case. That definitely makes sense though. You have to stay above board on who holds the rights even if it seems a little ridiculous at times.

It is extremely niche to researchers and historians. I know no museum is holding out with the hope that someone is going to come specifically for some random scanned images. People, even experts in the field, really don't care enough most of the time. Most archivists definitely would prefer to just throw it out (in an organized fashion of course haha) and let bygones be bygones.

Still, I've seen some places stay pretty overzealous on gatekeeping their archives. Random story, I worked for a university and their library had an enormously convoluted process to access their old, university specific, and mostly public domain photo archive. The people managing it are all in their 60s and 70s and would not budge that the super niche 120 year old photos MUST be protected. I worked in marketing and figured out which librarian to contact to have the lists of photo ID's sent over to me in high res when we needed some archival content. The rest of my coworkers just went to the index site, downloaded the low res preview with the watermark, and edited or cropped the watermark out. I couldn't convince them to just take the time to email the right person and get it in full quality, haha.

True, but the photos are almost certainly out of copyright and it should be easy enough to access high res scans for remote projects if they exist.

Data ultimately doesn't exist if it's inaccessible.

I get raising the bar for accessing stuff, but it kills the casual research curiosity for a lot of people. When I scanned 17k pages of yearbooks and docs for a school with my book scanner, I could have charged for access like all those yearbook sites. Instead I just posted it all online for free in high res. I'm never going to recoup the time costs involved in digitizing it. Might as well make sure as many people can get to it as possible. To date nobody has ever done anything particularly research worthy with that content, but I've had dozens of curious old people contact me to say thanks for letting them explore their old long lost yearbooks from their home.

Museums and archives can be hilariously stingy about releasing high res scans of what they've found. Though it's possible these are just buried in some very technical obscure web portal for the museums work that I haven't found yet.

To be fair, scanning things in is expensive, boring, and extremely time consuming. The margins for historical archive work is almost always in the negative.

Literally the last episode. Not even last couple episodes.

It's solved in the middle of Season 2 in such a shocking way he's basically trying to middle finger the TV suits. It's amazing that that murder was shown on network television in 1991. After that, the plot devolves mostly into campy nonsense, then Lynch shows up in the last episode, blows the daylights out of the camp plots, does a crazy twist, and then it's canceled. Pretty legendary TV moment from 30 years ago.