Terry Gilliam Has Gone Back And "Fixed" Time Bandits' Little Niggle For New Blu-Ray Release

Earlier this morning, I watched Arrow Video's new Blu-ray restoration of Time Bandits. I was rapt. Again.



I think this is the best of all "family films," in all of cinema. It's overflowing with imagination, slick with wit as much as it's grubby with detail. There's so much to enjoy, on viewing after viewing, and the execution is almost always breathtaking.




And now this disc definitely shows us the film at its best with a great new colour grade that was supervised by TERRY GILLIAM, the film's director.*



It's a restorationbut the movie isn't quite how you might remember it.



There was always this one little loose end in Time Bandits, something that actually caused me a bit of anxiety, I'll admit. If you knew where to look, you'd spot it about ten or eleven minutes into the film. A tiny glitch, that I always imagine, had given the filmmakers an awful lot of heartache.



Here's the scene: the Time Bandits are in Kevin's bedroom and, to make their escape from The Supreme Being, they're pushing one bedroom wall away, elongating the room into an incredible corridor. Eventually, the wall flies off into the void and everybody tumbles out into blackness



There used to be a little bit of a blooper here. There was some masking tape, part of how the set was constructed, flapping loose, a little white tag protruding conspicuously into the blackness of the void. It was part of the set that didn't stick down.



But now it's gone.



Gilliam decided to have the glitch painted out digitally during the restoration of the film. This is hardly George Lucas-scale stuff, and the film is otherwise pretty much just as you know it, just better presented in both image and audio.



But Gilliam, who has often talked about just living with a film's shortcomings and not wanting to go back and re-cut or reshape the edit of his movies, just couldn't sit on this one tiny detail.



I agree completely. It's good that it's gone. I hope we never have to see it again. It was like an irritating little itch that has finally been scratched, and now Time Bandits feels that little bit more settled down.



Incidentally, there is one particularly famous scene from Time Bandits that was shot but not used, and it's not included anywhere on this disc despite the array of new supplements. Chances are, it's been lost forever.



The scene featured two old spider-women, Myrtle and Maisie, knitting webs in a cave in the Time of Legends. Here's a couple of images as they appear in - something that really needs to come back into print, I think.



Because the budget ran low, Gilliam never shot the scenes before or after this one so it wouldn't have been possible to use it sensibly. I do wonder where the reels went, though. It'd be great to see it restored, if obviously not jammed back into the movie. *I guess it's kind of good-news, bad-news that the restoration work was done at 2k - this is good enough for Blu-ray and most cinema screenings, but 4k or 8k resolution would have been ideal and future-proofed the film.
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