I just re-read these posts; First of all, I wanted to thank everyone for their invaluable contributions here - there is a lot of info. re: the edits that were made to the YIJC for the VHS/DVD releases that I would have been unaware of if not for this thread. It's
truly amazing that there were
so many edits made; I understand much of this was because Lflm. modified the shows from one-hour (roughly) episodes into the 2-hour TV movies so they felt they needed to cut the GH bookends, etc.,
however there were a lot of scenes that could easily have been kept in the tele-films and/or shouldn't have been changed. It almost seems that some/most of these changes were made for the sole purpose of making changes
As has been mentioned, the additional scenes filmed to "link" the two episodes for the tele-films were, in most cases, quite awful & awkward -The "linking" sequence between the London 1916 and the Ireland 1916 episode was especially terrible, i.e. Remy & Indy's hair length & Remy's mustache in this sequence were obviously different from the "London" episode, even though the sequence was chronologically supposed to take place right after "London"; very sloppy. While this didn't ruin the whole tele-film for me, it was most definitely jarring & unecessary. And, that's just one example.
So, now that the 20th anniversay of the show is almost here (Spring 2012), I would really like to see another release of the YIJC on DVD, with the
unedited individual episodes as they originally appeared on TV in the early-mid '90's, i.e. with the George Hall bookends, etc. Though I have the 2007-2008 DVD sets and enjoy them, it would be great to have the originals both for nostalgic reasons (since I saw them on TV back in the day), and also because a lot of the edits made took away from the impact of these original shows.
Wishful thinking, I know, since Lflm. is notorious for ignoring previous versions of their material that they don't like (i.e., the original 1977, 1980, and 1983 SW films are still not available in acceptable DVD releases). So, I seriously doubt this will ever happen, unless?! there is a 5th IJ film....(and maybe not even then)....