Dragon's Lair Interview - The Armchair Empire

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Conducted by Syd Bolton

May 19, 2007

AE: Dragon’s Lair lives on – almost 25 years later. Did you guys ever think it would remain this popular for so long?

GG & DB: Absolutely not. We didn't even know what we were making, other than the quality of the animation. Games and their attraction was a real mystery to us. The credit here goes to David Foster and his continuing interest in marketing this product. Our careers were deeply mired in classical animation for feature-length theatrical films. We had just produced our first independent film, The Secret of NIMH. None of us (at Bluth studios) knew much about video games or how to put one together. We were totally dependent on the knowledge of Rick Dyer and the folks at Cinematronics to let us know that we were going in the right direction. We had fun designing the characters and figuring out how the continuity should work for the programmers to access, but we knew nothing about the market or its audience. The fact that it was an instant hit was a huge surprise...and for it to continue to sell on about 19 or 20 home interactive platforms for the past 24 years is truly amazing.

AE: We’ve heard the rumors about the Dragon’s Lair movie. Are there any new updates you can give us?

GG: No new news. We have broken the script down and are restructuring based on comments of those whom we've had read and respond. It's a lot stronger than it was. We have a clean story with a lot of entertainment in it and we're targeting the writer we want to translate it into a script. I believe we're still 6 months to year away from starting actual production. Thank you for your patience. We know there are a lot of fans that have been waiting for this. Because we want to make the film in traditional animation, just like the animation in the original game, there is hesitation in commitment. The popular medium at this time is CG animated feature films. But, we think we are getting close, both with update to the story and script but also interest from investors.

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AE: The new version is obviously a new, high quality transfer and it’s quite clear that you took great care in making the conversion. How was it done, and what were some of the challenges you’ve faced?

DF: We had a copy of the original film made by the Technicolor's Preservation Group as

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the original splices might not have held through the transfer process. We then had the IP (Inter-Positive as it's called) captured, color corrected and transferred to HDCAM tape. We then captured the HDCAM tape into our computers and began a frame by frame clean-up, removing all dirt, dust, hairs, specks etc. This process took over six months to work through all 30,000 frames.

We used a combination of three techniques:

1) as in the Amiga days, on scenes that were very dirty and the background was static, we would clean one background frame and then overlay all the subsequent foreground images (much easier now than in the Amiga days!)

2) in cases where the scenes were less dirty, we would take from previous or future frames and overwrite the affected areas.

3) in cases where we couldn't pull from previous/future frames (moving characters/background images), we would take similar pixels from areas near the affected areas and use them.

It was a big job. I personally did the Mudmen scene, which was agonizing! Hope you like it :)

Beyond that, we certainly have had challenges programming for the two new HD formats -- Blu-ray and HD DVD.

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