Little note first: I owe a bunch of e-mails to 
people and will get to them tonight or tomorrow 
morning! I had some problems with my e-mail I 
didn't realize I was having. ~_~

But the real reason for this post! *^_^*  My 
husband is a huge Transformers nut and bought 
himself the remastered, digitized, etc, box set 
that was just released of the series. There's a 
whole disc full of bonus stuff which includes how 
they cleaned it up and digitized it. . .

And it ALSO shows some of the things they had to 
clean up which are very cel-related. Things that 
got photographed into the film including:

-- Fingerprints on the cels
-- Reflections of the animator's arms/hands!!
-- Hair and dandruff on the cels  o_0;;
-- Mylar tape from splicing (this is more
   post-cels, but it was neat to *finally* know
   what those lines were!)

A lot of these are things that look like just 
minor glitches until you see it frame by frame up 
close. ^_^  (They point them all out for you.)

Then of course, there are the assortment of 
miscolored areas which have made *us* all familiar
with correction layers. . . The best of which was 
a scene with a black guy who turns white and then 
back again! (*laughter*) But also there are 
*major* oopsies which were never corrected by the 
original animation team:

-- In one scene of the Autobot base, they forgot 
to include the (probably A1end) cel layer of part 
of the mountain!

-- In a scene were two of the jets are shooting 
at some car Autobots, they have the gunfire, but 
forgot to shoot the cels of the jets themselves!

-- In a number of places, the basic lines of an 
explosion were animated, but they forgot to add 
the fire. ^_^;;

-- Scenes where some of the vehicles transforming 
were accidentally animated *in reverse*! As in, a 
whole line of them transform from robot to car, 
except one who goes from car to robot -- then 
they ALL drive off in car form in the very next 
sequence! ;;^_^;;

Of course, they also had trailers, and I got my 
first chance to see the Japanese OP/ED's and 
eyecatches. . . THERE ARE CHIBI EYECATCHES! *^_^* 
They're the most darling things and if I ever 
find a cel from one of them, I'll pay a fortune 
for it!! **^_^**

I'm not a diehard Transformers purist, but I was 
pleased to see that for the restoration of the 
series footage, while they cleaned up the look of 
it (example: removed figerprints), they did NOT 
change the way it had been shot. Where the 
animators forgot to shoot the mountain layer, it 
was left like that, etc. They didn't try to add 
it in like it had been there all along.

I don't know a lot about different types of film 
(although the disc gives a mini crash-course on 
it which is interesting to read), but it's amazing
the color loss that the 1 inch film suffered both 
due to the years and the actual nature of the 
medium itself. (Most of the new digitized footage 
was made from 35mm film -- but for some scenes, 
the 35mm film was gone and they had to resort to 
using the other.)

In any case, if you're a hardcore Transformers 
fan, this box set is really nice and you should 
check it out. ^_^  If you're even just interested 
in seeing these kinds of cleanup efforts, you 
might want to try to find it for rent. ^_^

Many Sharp Smiles,
--Drac (just had to share!! ^_^)