by Willa Ross
For admirers of Sergio Leone’s seminal western The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, an era may be coming to an end. After decades of problematic home video releases, Kino Lorber is releasing a new UHD Blu-ray of the film which appears to be directly addressing every major issue with the film’s previous home video representations. It’s an exciting moment to be a fan of the film (which, erm, I am).
As we wait for that moment in late April, it seems a good occasion to write a series of posts detailing some of my opinions about the film’s many different releases, be they the distinctions between different cuts of the film or the disparate audio quality of different discs. This first post covers the latter, specifically comparing the representations of the film’s original mono audio track in the Laserdisc releases of the early 90s and the Blu-ray releases of the mid-2010s. Below is a video comparing these two tracks; to be clear, this is from the English-language track created for Leone’s International Cut of the film.
It should be clear both from the text and the audio evidence itself that I much prefer the Laserdisc audio. I had the opportunity to screen a version of the film that used it as its sound source, and can’t begin to describe how magical it was to hear, for the first time, such detail in the soundscape and such soaring heights in the music. It may seem odd that such an early home video release can handily best contemporary releases decades later, but it’s not uncommon, and can be caused by overzealous filtration of audio tracks or the deterioration of the original elements over time. Because of this, accurate rips of Laserdisc audio are sometimes an unlikely boon to the task of film preservation.
In spite of its astonishing sound design and meticulously recorded dub, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’s audio has had a bumpy ride on home video. After the Laserdisc releases, the 1998 DVD edition of the film featured a mono track with boomy low-end and less high-frequency detail. In 2004, the mono track disappeared from home video entirely along with anything resembling an original cut of the film, as the Extended Edition became the only version available in the English-language market.
The new 5.1 surround sound mix prepared for the Extended Edition had numerous issues. The mix would suddenly pan a character’s dialogue to another part of the mixing space in mid-sentence, a terribly disorienting use of the added channels. New sound effects were added to the mix, most notably gunshots, and their more contemporary sound was terribly out of place both stylistically and technically. The overall quality was also worse than the Laserdisc’s mono track. Some of these issues are clearly presented in this video by “RaccoonWarriorPrincess”. (Note that the mono track used for comparison here is not taken from the Laserdisc.)
The 2009 Blu-ray of the Extended Edition responded to the controversy of this mix by including a mono mix, however, it was not the mono mix prepared by Leone and his collaborators almost five decades earlier. Instead, the entire 2009 mono track simply “folded down” the surround sound audio into a single channel — meaning that the new sounds were still present. At last, in 2014, a “true” mono track was included by MGM on a Blu-ray that featured the film’s then-new 4K restoration. While this release’s use of the Extended Cut meant that it wasn’t completely accurate to the original, it was preferable to anything that had been available in the previous 10 years. However, for the few that had heard it, the Laserdisc audio offered clear evidence that the film could still sound much better. The 2017 Kino Blu-ray of the film retained the same mono track used in 2014, both in the Extended Cut and in that edition’s reconstruction of the International Cut. (The Kino 2017 “Theatrical Cut” was at once flawed and a welcome improvement of the film’s presentation, and it will be discussed in a post detailing the film’s history of cuts on home video.)
Kino’s upcoming 2021 UHD Blu-ray disc touts “Restored 2.0 Mono audio, after going back to the 1993 MGM laserdisc PCM monaural track”. In an industry that tends to overlook the importance of audio, this is incredibly promising, and it speaks to a dedication by Kino to correcting the wayward course the film has been on since 1998. However, this blog post you’re reading may not be irrelevant for a while yet — while Kino’s release may at last place the best available audio for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly back in the hands of the public, the English-language streaming copies of the film continue to exclusively present the revisionist 5.1 mix. That’s likely to be where the majority of people experience it at home for the foreseeable future, meaning that advocacy for the best possible audio will continue to be vital in ensuring its longevity.
Other posts in this series:
Why the International Theatrical Cut Is Better Than the Extended Cut