MoxieCat

You want to watch Jurassic Park. That should be simple enough.

Why not go for some nostalgia. The real 90s experience. You dig through a drawer, you dig through cabinets under your TV, you dig through plastic bins in a closet. After 15 minutes of contracting dustborne illnesses, you dredge out a mildly distressed but still glossy and black VHS sleeve - Tyrannosaurus's empty sockets look askance at your cardboard DVD case of Pokémon: The First Movie.

But you don't have a VHS player. The last time you saw a VCR was in your parents' garage 8 years ago. You had tried to turn it on for novelty's sake (and to watch your dad's box set of the Discovery Channel Watergate series) but had quickly discovered that the Devil himself had holed up in its motors. You suppose you could get a new one, but c'mon; you are not going to buy a VHS player.

Checking prices on VCRs on eBay 48 seconds later, you reaffirm that you are not going to buy a VHS player. After all, you'd need to hook it up properly to your modern TV, and you're also pretty sure that a tape this old will have probably degraded to the point that it's not viewable. (You're correct.)

You want to watch Jurassic Park.

Up until this point you had understandably assumed, as everyone does, that you woke up in the same place where you fell asleep. Watching an old VHS tape in the present day is an annoying experience, nothing atypical.

So you didn't realize that, overnight, you had drained out of this world like whey through cheesecloth, drained into a new place that smelled and sounded and felt close enough.

Your first hint that something was different was when you looked at those prices on eBay. The players were expensive, yes, but that made sense. These were rumbling old boxes full of moving, grinding metal. But then you looked up movies and shows.

Movies, in this new wheyworld, are quite a bit more expensive! Rare films and shows, sure, but even common ones range from half- to twice-over in price than you'd think was reasonable. Some VHSs and DVDs of well-known popular films that had standard print runs are listing for hundreds of dollars, fueled by a vast speculator market. Photographs circulate of an old Los Angeles video store, its shelves stripped bare.

So you decide not to buy them - but, out of curiosity, you check how much work it would have been to set it up. In the curdworld you were familiar with, you already knew that the analog-to-digital conversion might make things look a bit off, and that you'd need to make sure to set the aspect ratio. But here, things are even worse. Somehow, the very act of watching it on a standard display would have made Jurassic Park fundamentally less pleasant to watch than on a tube set. Maybe all the sound would be delayed, maybe the buttons on the remote would barely respond, maybe everything would look slightly warped, or maybe the vibes would just be off.

So because of this an entire business model had popped up in this world, where you needed yet another, much more elaborate auxiliary box (beyond a little RCA-to-HDMI adapter) to properly watch not only VHS and Betamax tapes, but DVDs as well.

It bewilders. You don't remember any of this. You follow links down rabbit holes; boutique companies are selling special limited order tape players (always out of stock) that promise to play nearly any format of video cassette tape with "near-perfect accuracy." A two-year-old pinned tweet promises a special disc format model coming soon.

You want to watch Jurassic Park.

You should have done this in the first place. You point a tiny remote at an nondescript obsidian ark hidden beneath your TV. After 10 seconds of silent dread and a startup logo daring you to continue on this path, you slowly enter "Jurassic Park" into a search bar that hitches up after every character you enter, delete, and reenter.

The machine connects to the repository of all human artistic knowledge - Netflix, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Klunge, Dimetrius+, Borj, Miimoo, Unk, Dorf Max, and Crunchyroll.

After 30 seconds of waiting, it spits out two results.

That's a bit odd. There are like three proper Jurassic "Park" movies, right? And the World ones, but you guess the search algorithm spared you.

The results are:

• Jurassic Park
• Jurassic Park HD

You don't know what that means. Jurassic Park, you assume, means Jurassic Park. They're a devil of a thing, names. But why is "HD" separate? You remember there was that 3D conversion a while back in theaters that was actually pretty cool. But why are these options? Is the unadorned first option somehow a standard definition transfer? Don't HD versions of films just get called... what they're called?

Whatever. You want to watch Jurassic Park - there's Jurassic Park. You click on HD, its description saying that it's been painstakingly remastered (you hope that doesn't mean bad DNR), and select Play.

...This is not Jurassic Park.

A beam of distinct moral clarity shines on you and tells you that it's time for piracy. You look for Jurassic Park online (the NTSC version, please), and download it.

But here in wheyworld, you can't just play it in a standard video player. Instead, you need a specific video player program for each respective variation of cassette, disk, and video format ever released. Every single format has competing options - many of which have been abandoned, do not work on any operating system released in the last 15 years, or has a Reddit thread telling you that its lead programmer is a professional racist. Comments helpfully let you know that even the best programs are only just now starting to let you play most DVDs on your computer with barely any glitches. A video with over 80,000 views tells a thrilled audience that The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season can now finally be watched without Big Pussy's face turning inside-out in every shot, and the third season may soon not even crash on attempting to play it.

To your relief, the VHS program you download (it's called Cassex) is apparently fully fledged. You drag and drop JurassicPark-v10-[NTSC-EN-VHS].vhs onto the program to watch it on your filthy laptop screen like a jerk.

This is, in fact, Jurassic Park.

But.

The entire film is the wrong aspect ratio. Sometimes you can see boom mics and lights in the corner of the screen, or frequently the actual edges of the film frame. Every CG element is pixelated and the wrong color. Every shot looks really smooth; not smoothed with a denoising filter, but like there was never any film grain at all. Prop and actors almost look like they're popping out of the frame. It's like raw film footage from the editing room. It is, at least, not blue.

Again, you know that film transfers can vary wildly. Color grading, noise or denoising, aspect ratio, format, all of that means a film aficionado can get a bit into the weeds picking the "best" version to watch. But this is just weird. Various settings in your program let you fix the aspect ratio, fiddle with smoothing, and enable an awful fake film grain filter (you've seen that "film grain shaders" are really popular, if you pick the correct one from a GitHub page, install it, and have a 4KHDR display to really capture the luminance and detail of each grain structure). Only if you really mess around can you make it look like how it's supposed to. By default, this does not actually look like Jurassic Park as seen by anyone at the time it was released.

Except most of wheyworld believes it does. In fact, the look of those default settings are what nearly every old film or show is believed to look like. Nearly every film distributor in this world releases products that look like this, and has done so for decades. They do offer aspect ratio changes now, and sometimes even the film grain filter. Not the good one, though.

You look up other movies and shows.

• Fox has apologized for the X-Files: HD Collection changing the title track into MIDI, and the I Want to Believe poster having a totally different font. It's blue.
• Michael Clayton: Remastered changes the drawing of the horses in the book so it doesn't even look like the hill, and the phone is visibly powered off in the final scene. Michael's face has been changed to kinda look like Mickey Rourke for some reason.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has never been rereleased on any format.
• Quantum Leap: Releaped Edition. It seems decent-ish quality, is the original version of the series, and the distributor has a good track record of classic releases. The only way to get it on discs is to buy a $250 special edition that comes with a plastic Dean Stockwell figurine.
• The Witches of Eastwick: Recherried was released only on one obscure digital storefront following a Kickstarter which failed to secure funding for a physical release. Jack Nicholson's character is dubbed over by someone else, when he turns into a demon at the end it looks like it's from Warcraft, and the ending has been expanded to set up a Kickstarted sequel that never comes out.
• The Matrix was released in 2021, is the same movie but has entirely different actors, a new soundtrack, the Agents' Desert Eagles are all replaced by USPs, and the film is blue when the characters are in the Matrix. Halfway through the movie, Keanu Reeves appears and tells Remake Neo that this isn't a remake, but a secret sequel to the original Matrix, as there are multiple instances of the Matrix running in parallel, like a multiverse of Matrices. The original Matrix does exist on streaming services, though it has awful motion blur, the subtitles are wrong, and it uses a bad remix of the original soundtrack.
• Ocean's The Re-Oceaned Collection appears to be a Blu-ray of the trilogy, except it doesn't have Ocean's Twelve, which, y'know, but it'd still be nice to have that. The colors are fine, except the lighting is all midtones. The disc in the box is actually purely ornamental, and it just has a code for a digital download printed on it.
• Volcano's never been rereleased, and when you try to play it on playback programs like Cassex or DVirtualD, that guy visibly has a large pixelated outline around him when he melts and you can still see his legs clipping through the floor.
• Kingdom of Heaven: HD Remaster isn't the director's cut because for once they wanted to "be faithful to the theatrical experience." Also Baldwin's mask is redesigned to look nasty, with sores modeled into it. And it's blue. The movie, not the mask, though that also becomes blue by extension.
• E.T., as in, that E.T., has only been re-released once on a digital store 15 years ago and got delisted 14 years ago.
• Disney's Hercules was rereleased on DVD as Hercules Deluxe, which totally changed the designs of every character and backdrop, degraded the audio quality, and edited scenes to create blatant continuity errors. This version was rereleased on HD-DVD as Hercules HD that also contained errors in the animation cels causing things to be on the wrong layer, and finally that version was rereleased on Netflix in 2011 as Hercules, where the end of every line of dialogue is clipped off by a half second.
• Requiem for a Dream: HD2HD Edition is tinted orange.

"This is the version that matches your memories of the original," reads one comment.

"If they had had the technology to make the movie like this back then, they would've," says a Reddit post.

"Casablanca's street sets were actually just repurposed from The Desert Song. [image comparing the two] There was no 'artistic intent,' lol. The new ones are way better and more detailed, and I never would have watched it otherwise," a forum reply explains.

"never understood the haters whining about this. do you want to go back to ugly old special effects?" argues a wise sage.

"lmfao the theory that grant's seatbelt thing was foreshadoweing the raptors breading was juts a stupid headcanon, the actor debunked it, it doesn't matter"

"All I know is, this remake made my jaw drop and justified my new Bluray player. It looks THAT good."

"Don't be obtuse. Everyone knows that in film, a remake is replacing all the props and sets, a reimagining is a whole new movie following the same premise, a remaster is replacing most of the visuals but not really that much, or just making it a different resolution, and a rerelease is also that but not as much. Stop spreading FUD just because you're an Amazon Prime fanboy."

"Spielberg HATED the original shark, it looked fake and caused so many problems filming. So what if the CG version has devil horns? That makes it more bad*ss, honestly, and it's just a different artistic interpretation. The novel of Revenge does say it's from a voodoo curse, so it's actually MORE canon to the lore."

"the original master and commander doesn't have achievements, so ¯\__ (ツ) __/¯"

"I watched JPHD and it was good for the time but it's really ugly imo, the remake was needed due to how bad the first aged."

An executive for Paramount asks why anyone would want to want to watch the original Star Trek. The popular behind-the-scenes documentary series Craneshot, lead by former film critic Sean O'Shea, dutifully stenographs the production of Jurassic Park Remake, as he and the production staff explain that the original was incredible... but not really as good as you remember it, because you're stupid. A hobbyist masturbator on social media commands that We are NOT going to start being nostalgic for how films were color graded in the 90s, sparking a week of discourse.

The first time you try to chime in, someone scolds you that the aesthetic characteristics you're asking to see restored to this historic art were actually just part of how art looked in that historical period, and were caused by a variety of material contexts.

Well, yes.

It's all a lot. You remember, back in curdworld, the hassle that admittedly often popped up trying to watch a movie or show. The byzantine apps, the limited releases, asinine remakes, the occasional disastrous transfer, rights limbo. It happened. But wheyworld is different. What was unthinkable in the modern era is the typical. An entire artistic medium, gnawed by slow fire. Time degrading all originals only accessible by the devout willing to make pilgrimage at considerable personal expense, copies warped by successive mimeography, the proliferation of what are essentially admitted forgeries openly signed by their forgers.

Out of frustration, you finally go online and say that you thought the original Jurassic Park was better than the remake, and you hope that maybe The Lost World rerelease will be a bit more faithful. You look at at your rotting tape and Richard Attenborough's cyan-tinted and remastered zombie face on your HDTV, and glance back at your screen. Someone's responded.

"It's not like the original is going anywhere."

and then i whispered a soft "yes."