It's especially upsetting to me because, if a Blu-ray release were to happen (very unlikely at this point), this is probably what we'd get, and that just sucks.
Agreed that it's unlikely we'd get a blue ray release. Though even so, any future dvd releases are likely going to have the remaster instead of the original print, which also sucks really bad.
You know what really grinds my gears with all the issues the reprint introduced to the movie though? This reprint presented the opportunity to FIX errors. This movie had tons and tons of errors present in the original print - a fair bit more than you'd generally see in a land before time movie, at least as far as i've noticed - and reprinting would have given them the opportunity to fix some of those. Recoloring Grandpa and Grandma longneck to be on-model, for example. But they not only chose not to do any of that, but they were also so careless that they INTRODUCED a ton more errors on top of the existing ones. AND this is the print we're likely to see in any future physical releases. What really dumps salt in the wounds is the fact that they demonstrated that they were very capable of making edits to the movie by doing so - in the most nonsensical way possible that messes with the plot of the film. Yellow stone of cold fire, you've gotta be joking.
And yeah, it's probably all because this is a low budget low caliber kids movie that few people care about and it's being treated as such. But it upsets me a lot because I also care a lot about this movie for all its faults and problems. We could have had a nice updated fully HD better version of the movie, but instead we got this. How depressing.
Also
That said, I noticed there was a break in the annual schedule between VI (released in 1998) and VII (released in 2000). That could be another explanation behind the animation quality of the latter.
I believe what happened was the switch from traditional methods of inking and painting to digital. Wang Studios likely had some trouble getting used to the switch, and combining that with the tight production schedules that these movies no doubt had you get Stone of Cold Fire's animation quality.
I like to lovingly poke fun of 7's animation quality, particularly the fact that many characters are off-model so much that with that movie alone to go off of you'd probably have no idea what "on-model" looks like. Pterano is a good example, since he never appears elsewhere. He's quite chubby in one shot, and quite skinny in the next. No way to be sure which he's actually supposed to be, unless ref sheets were to be leaked at some point which would be very cool. Gimme the forbidden Pterano charts
