Look How They Massacred My Boy

Todd Vaziri, on the HBO Max Mad Men fiasco:

It appears as though this represents the original photography,
unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow,
this episode (along with many others) do not include all the
digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and
home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO
Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to
customers.

I decided to help illustrate the changes by diving in and
creating images that might do better than words. The first thing I
noticed is that, at least for season one, the episode titles and
order were totally jumbled. The puke episode is “Red in the Face”,
not “Babylon”.

So HBO Max not only ruined several episodes by “remastering” the wrong footage, but they both mis-numbered and mis-titled the episodes. Breathtaking ineptitude. Think about it. This is the entire raison d’être — streaming high quality movies and episodic series. That’s the one and only thing HBO Max does. And they have zero care or craft for what they do. They didn’t just do this to any show. They did it to one of the most cinematically beautiful and carefully crafted shows ever made.

Vaziri’s post, as is his wont, is replete with illustrated and animated examples of the mistakes in HBO’s versions compared to the correct originals available from AMC and iTunes. Vaziri notes:

The fun thing about this restoration mistake is that now we, the
audience, get to see exactly how many digital visual effects were
actually used in a show like “Mad Men”, which most would assume
did not have any digital effects component. In this shot, not only
were the techs and hose removed, but the spot where the pretend
puke meets Slattery’s face has some clever digital warping to make
it seem like the flow is truly coming from his mouth (as opposed
to it appearing through a tube inches from his mouth, on the other
side of his face).

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