The Disney Years
Siskel and Ebert Movie Reviews
Original movie reviews untainted by time!
24 thoughts on “The Disney Years”
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Why no new uploads in a week?
No new uploads on the site lately, but there are a couple “new to me” uploads on youtube. Search for “Rated K for Kids Siskel and Ebert,” and “Siskel and Ebert review Apple commercials.” The Apple commercials one was evidently first unearthed back in 2013, so some of you might already have seen it.
Hi John, I appreciate that and will look for those two tonight. I, myself, really have nothing else. The last three I put up last month were from the archive website. We all need to think “outside the box” when looking for Siskel & Ebert shows. I know Roger taped a lot of his shows, but I am not sure how to approach Ms. Ebert about them. We will see!
That is the first I’ve heard about Roger taping his shows, though it makes sense considering his early adoption of technology. At some point, though, he probably had enough pull that he could just request a tape each week from the producers rather than having to tape it himself. I really wonder about the missing shows from the Tribune period-has there ever been any word that Tribune kept those tapes? I wonder if IMDb tried to acquire those too, but was turned down? One of the readers here might have a connection to Ms. Ebert. If not, there is always the option of sending her a direct message on Twitter.
I communicated with Roger while he was still associated with CompuServe. He asked me if I would like to share tapes, but unfortunately, nothing happened with that. I did receive an email from Chaz Ebert last year. She was kidda upset that I had the website up. I replied to her, basically saying that, everyone still like to watch the old shows, and more importantly, I wasn’t making any money from it. She seemed pleased with the reply. I guess I will try emailing her tonight.
As for the Tribune, I don’t know. I assumed they were upset with Roger and Gene for jumping ship to Disney; thus, they had destroyed their tapes. I need to contact them, but I have a lot going on with me right now – good and bad. Being a “one-man band” for this website has its ups and downs!
Good luck Larry. In addition to the videos on YouTube that John mentioned, here’s an educational video that Roger made to teach editing techniques:
https://youtu.be/pbS8mphRttM
Jesse, that video is dead now. Did you save a copy? Do you know how long it was? I found this 2-minute clip of what looks like the same video online. Apparently this is an educational video where Ebert comments on editing techniques that’s used as college course material. So the full video is rather expensive, at least $100 to purchase.
https://tinyurl.com/ebertholdup
Larry, I see no new uploads since June however I do remember episodes from the old site with reviews of Instinct, Limbo, Parenthood, Sex, Lies & Videotape, Other Sister and Just the Ticket. Can you upload those please?
One episode from 1989 contains these: Sex, Lies, and Videotape/Young Einstein/Parenthood/The Music Teacher. This full episode does not appear to be out there anywhere on the internet. It’s the only regular 1989 episode missing from this site.
YouTube user andyfilm has posted a lot of episodes recently. I went through his posts as of 2/13/2021 and found these seven episodes that are missing from THIS web site. I noticed some of his other posts may be superior quality or be a little more complete than some copies here:
Siskel & Ebert Classics – New Faces of 1989
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 1/13/89 – Beaches, Dangerous Liasions
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 1/27/88 – Parents, Physical Evidence
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 2/1/89 – Her Alibi, Three Fugitives
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 2/8/89 – Cousins, True Believer
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 3/1/89 – Farewell to the King, New York Stories
Siskel & Ebert Classics – 8/15/89 – The Abyss, Uncle Buck
If you Google this: best of craigslist: A trip down Analog Lane- 27 years of video taping American history!!
…you’ll see that in 2017 someone gave away 24,000 VHS tapes he personally recorded from 1987 to 2014. Siskel and Ebert was one of the shows he said was on the tapes. It might theoretically be possible to contact him, find out who took the tapes, and see if that person would be willing to sell, lend or convert to digital files the Siskel and Ebert tapes.
I downloaded about 850 reviews from the At the Movies.com website just before Disney shut it down in late 2010. The website had a little window on the home page where you could type the name of any movie from 1986(when Siskel & Ebert started with Disney) until the show got cancelled. Anyway, I think there were over 5,000 reviews over those 24 years but I got lazy and only downloaded 850(almost all from 1987-1992 + many others) before they shut the website down dammit. Of course, many of these 850 are on YouTube or this website(maybe 250 idk) but I’ve compared the quality of my downloaded siskel/ebert reviews to their YouTube counterparts and mine are about 3x better quality. Most are 20MB .flv files..I can also process them through my video editor and make them even better quality with much richer color but then the files come out to about 250MB. Remember, these are not the entire shows but one movie each .flv file. I remember Roger saying how painstaking it was for the Disney staff to cull these reviews from their library. Also, I’m pretty sure Disney owns these reviews, I kind of doubt Chaz or anyone else has the rights so they probably are stored on Disney’s harddrives under lock and key..too bad they won’t release them. Many of the 850 reviews I have are pretty noteworthy(like Schindler’s List) I think it would be very cool of this website to have a section named something like “Historically important reviews” and place these much higher quality reviews in this section. I’d be glad to help make this happen if anyone thinks this is worthwhile.
Eric, I know this web site likes to post full shows rather than the individual review snippets. However lots of us would like to see any “missing” reviews. I know Unforgiven is a notable missing review people are curious to see. If I were you, I would make a list of which reviews you have that are missing from this site. Then maybe post them on YouTube, Vimeo and/or the Internet Archive and post here which account they are under. But don’t post a direct link because sometimes those posts may take a while to get approved. Then we can look at the reviews and this site can decide if they want to include them. I would imagine this site would want to stitch together all the reviews that belong on one episode and post them as an episode even if the intro and ending are missing. You can sometimes find out which reviews belong to an episode on IMDB, for example by googling imdb siskel ebert unforgiven. It brings up “Unforgiven/Mistress/Death Becomes Her/Enchanted April/London Kills Me.” The quality upgrade would be nice but I think people are most interested in the completely missing reviews.
Hi Eric,
I appreciate your quick response. I took your advice and uploaded 2 versions of the Unforgiven review. You can do a YouTube search by typing “Un-Forgiven At Those Movies” and “Un-Forgiven At Those Movies HD”. Let me know what you think!
Thanks, Eric
Thanks! I just checked it out. I think your HD one definitely looks better. Do you have a list of all your reviews? I can help you figure out which ones are missing from the internet now and how they would be ordered/grouped by episode if you want. Even if you don’t post them stitched together maybe the video titles could be numbered with the episode date and part 1, 2 etc. so someone else could.
Hello again,
I’m glad you liked the HD versions, I think they’re much more watchable. I have all the reviews from 1987-1992. I also have a mish-mash from other years plus the final tribute episode with A.O. Scott and Michael Richards. You can find the 87-92 list on Wikipedia by doing a search for “1987 in Film”, “1988 in Film”, etc. I have a feeling it won’t be too long before YouTube blocks them so right now I’m going to just post a few more and wait to see what happens.
Eric, if you click on the menu for The Disney Years – 1992 I added a comment where I list what I think are the episodes missing from this web site. I used IMDB’s episode listing as my guide. I did not check to see if those reviews might already be on YouTube or anywhere else. I can do this for other years to help you out. I can keep you updated on things I can help you out with by e-mail to make it easier. I’m jedijones77 and that is on yahoo.
Hey Eric,
Thanks a million for all your help and suggestions. I see your posts on YT, I’ll probably keep it at 3 movies for now I’ll be sure to have them all in HD as well by the end of the week. We should probably get a Plan B ready for when YT blocks them.
Eric, I would hope the owners of this site would talk to you about how they want you to handle these reviews. It appears from what you said you may have one or two hundred not on this site. If you notice, almost all of their recent video posts here are simply embedded videos from YouTube and Vimeo. I don’t know if they are still saving videos on their own server or if they have backups of those saved in case those other sites delete them. I also know the owners of this site have said in the past they only like to post full episodes and not individual movie reviews. My best advice would be to first work only on all the reviews missing from this site that you have. Upgrade them to HD which looks a lot better. If you want this site to be more likely to use them, stitch the separate reviews together to reconstruct the original episodes. Then post them on YouTube and/or Vimeo and tell this site they’re there. If you stick to posting just the single movie reviews to YouTube or Vimeo, that is still great for fans, but I don’t think this site will use them unless they can grab all the reviews from a single episode and stitch them together into one video. I can try to help more if I can but we’d need to discuss further ideas over e-mail. Thanks for posting the videos.
Hey Eric,
I did email the site owner(s) about a year ago but no response. I certainly understand their desire to keep the original shows intact, especially seeing the cold openings and decades old commercials etc. I’m glad to post a few that are missing or upgrade to HD. My thinking is the more significant ones like Schindler’s List, Platoon, Broken Arrow, Cop & a Half, Saving Private Ryan, Unforgiven, JFK, Tombstone, last show ever(Tribute w/cold opening)..people would probably enjoy seeing these in better quality. I’ll be happy to fill that void via YT or Vimeo but obviously don’t want to give a ton of effort if they’re going to be taken down at any point in the future. Also, there are a couple of folks that did download all 5,000 from Sep 86 to last show. The might be willing to share with me but I don’t really need to go to those lengths unless there were tons of reviews we really needed. There’s enough content available on this site and YT to satisfy probably 99% of fans. The better quality vids, although for everyone, are really for very nostalgic folks like me and you. Funny, The Nostalgia Critic is like us, he wants higher quality! Check out what he says about old Siskel & Ebert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqhY3AwVMxA
Searching around online, I found that the Museum of Broadcast Communications (located in Chicago) shows in their searchable archives that they possess various Siskel and Ebert shows, primarly the special episodes from the Disney years. You can go to museum dot tv, click Archives Search and then click Keyword Search to search their archives. The shows are not viewable online and I don’t know if they have any way of providing copies to people but I would at least assume you could go there and view them if/when they reopen. This is a list of what I found that they have that are not currently available anywhere online:
*New Trends In Home Video – A look at current trends in the marketing of home video. – (10/28/1984)
*Overlooked Stars – Scott Glenn, Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon (1988)
*Hidden Stars – Albert Brooks, Charles Grodin, Barbara Hershey, Theresa Russell (8/18/1988)
*If We Picked the Winners 1989 (1989)
*If We Picked the Winners 1990 (1990)
*Bogie & Jack (9/1/1990)
*Movies We Loved as Kids – “Hans Christian Anderson,” “Bowery Boys,” “The Thing,” “Citizen Kane,” “Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Dangerous When Wet,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Inherit The Wind,” “The Glenn Miller Story” (5/4/1991)
*Memo to the Academy 1992 – “Bugsy,” “The Doors,” “JFK,” “Silence of the Lambs” (1/18/1992)
*Nolte & Sarandon (2/8/1992)
*If We Picked the Winners 1992 (1992)
*Steve Martin Special (11/28/1992)
*The Seventies (5/22/1993) (may be same as 1994’s The Early 1970s)
*If We Picked the Winners 1994 (1994)
*If We Picked the Winners 1995 (3/18/1995)
*Family Values (6/24/1995)
*Memo to the Academy 1996 (1/13/1996) [tape includes Ebert review of Portrait of a Lady]
*If We Picked the Winners 1997 (3/14/1997)
*Memo to the Academy 1998 – “In & Out”, “The Sweet Hereafter”, “G.I. Jane”, “Mrs. Brown”, “Ulee’s Gold”, “In The Company of Men”, “The Fifth Element”, “The End of Violence”, “Jackie Brown”, “Eve’s Bayou”, “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” (1/10/1998)
These Museum of Broadcast Communication special programs also sound interesting:
*An Evening with Siskel and Ebert – 60 minutes – Introduction of Dahl and Meier radio personalities to conduct an interview of Siskel and Ebert in front of a live audience at MBC. Clips from Siskel and Ebert’s earlier shows and interviews preceed the “anything goes” question and answer interview with Dahl and Meier. Siskel and Ebert discuss their careers as film critics from 1975 to 1993. (4/14/1989)
*A Salute to Siskel and Ebert – 98 minutes – This MBC salute features Gene Siskel and Robert Ebert talking about their careers. Also included are clips from their programs and taped tributes from celebrities. (4/15/1994)
They also have an old Tom Snyder episode with them:
Tomorrow Coast to Coast (8/5/1981)
They have other interviews with them from what sound like local Chicago programs as well.
That looks like a goldmine, Jedi! I will look into after I get caught up with the Andy videos on YouTube.
Sorry if I didn’t explain it well. The museum lets you search their inventory, but there’s no way to view the videos online. And the museum is currently closed for COVID so you can’t even go there. So I don’t know what they’d say if someone e-mailed them and asked if they could send out copies of the videos. It’s at least good to know they are out there and not truly lost to history. And once they’re open maybe someone could go there and see if there’s any way to make copies of the videos in the museum itself.
Hi, Larry. Been awhile. Glad to see some new stuff up here over the last few months. I noticed also you redid some of the videos through andyfilm and youtube because they were better quality, I suppose. I read somewhere not that long ago that Chaz was planning to do something about Ebert’s TV reviews so maybe that was why she was upset at first about what you were doing. Apparently, she is pleased with it after all. We all love what you have done and watching these shows again and ones I missed for various reasons is just a pleasure. There hasn’t been a movie review show like this since Ebert died and I don’t think there ever will be again.