What scenes in your favourite films do you regret were not included in the final release on 8mm?

Must be the ending on the 400' Alien digest. But, not shoddy editing this. Best edited digest so far for me

The very abrupt and shoddy ending with those bloody "letraset" THE END titles of the 400 ' cutdowns of BEN-HUR on MGM.

Also the editing of the 4 x 400 version of The Devil Rides Out leaves out some key scenes.
Such as Mocata in the mirror of the car contacting Tanith sadly cut out.

I've noticed on a few digests there's not even a The End title card. My copy of Ken Films "The Sand Pebbles" ends in that fashion.

I think one of the worst edited 8mm releases (and my favourite film of all time!) has to be Columbia's print of "Close Emcounters of the Third Kind", rumour has it that Spielberg himself had input into the 8mm cut, I wish he'd have let the in-house editors just do their job. The whole 400' is disjointed by trying to show too many big scenes in the final edit, if you didn't know the movie you'd be scratching your head trying to make sense of it. The only plus side is that it is a nice souvenir to an extraordinary movie, and there are still some nice prints out there, but not Columbia's finest edits by a long shot!

"The Poseidon Adventure" (1972) 400' reel starts out pretty good. But by the time the ship is capsized, and a few decide to climb the Christmas tree to find a way out, there isn't a lot of time left on the reel to get to the ending without totally disregarding all but one of the death scenes. So at the end of the reel, inexplicably the total number of survivors are minus four. It all feels a bit rushed.

I will be interested to read a review of the digest of 'Duel', this was a great made for TV movie that ended up being shown on the big screen. Interested to know if they can tell virtually the story in 18 mins.

They can ... Very nice edit this one. I have two of it myself, want to check which is best in colour (both quite nice)

Fun to see that gas station and the old lady in 1941 too :-) John Belushi blew it up though :-)

A difficult one to answer really Hugh as there are so many.
In the 3 parter of airplane there are loads but in such a fast paced comedy this was inevitable.
In the 600 foot release of never ending. Story the part where the boys horse sinks I think is an awful cut.

You're not kidding there Tom, some of the German edits are truly awful, missing really important scenes, "Once Upon A Time In The West" being a case in point, after the massacre of the little family that introduced us to Henry Fonda in that famous panning shot, missing, the railroad man dying in the desert, missing, as was the tragic end with Jason Robards slowly dying of his gunshot wounds, missing, the railroad reaching the station and
Charles Bronson riding off, missing. What we have is basically the middle of the film, as with "Ten Commandments", their "War of the
Worlds 3x400 was a great example of editing, makes you wonder why some of the others were so bad. I love the Italian western, but
it is heartbreaking to see classics of the genre like "Face To Face", a 2x400 B/W German release, butchered, beautiful scenes of a massacre in the desert with a great music score from Luis Bacalov, missing, the brilliant ending with the face of the bad guy, as a corpse. literally getting his face shot away to kid the bounty hunters, a key scene, missing. I could go on listing these travesties, the
"Dollar" films fared no better from Germany, Iver Films release of "My Name Is Nobody" was also poorly done, the whole point of the exercise, missing, the entire end of the film that drew everything together, gone. Thankfully, 16mm came to my rescue, nice prints too
of quite a lot of the main titles, but not everyone wants 16mm. A great pity that someone like Keith Wilton wasn't involved in these edits.

hugh, i sure it was morricone who did 'face to face', best

I think it has to be said of nearly all 400ft and up to some 3x 400ft edits, that if you didn't already know the film, would you really fully understand what is going on? SNF has only a relatively simple plot but jumps all over the place on the 3x 400ft. The Godfather is the same.

Marathon Man does it's best with the running time it has but needs much longer really to fully explain itself. Last but not least to spring to mind is the cutdown of the United Artist Derann release of Carrie. Contractually it had to be two separate individual 400ft selected scenes reels in order to gain release.

It is totally at random until you spend a summers day with 78 cut lengths of film cushion pegged to your washing line to gain some sort of order. About 80 splices later..it actually turns out to be one of the better edited 2x 400's!

The 400's are even worse! No sooner has Julie Andrews finished singing "A Few Of My Favourite Things", she is on top of the Austrian Alps , game over!! You sure would be scratching your head with this one if you hadn't watched the other 100 minutes plus first.
A good one I always thought, was The U8 version of The Jerk. A simple plot that contains quite a lot of the humour of the film and because it can be told in around 30 minutes reasonably well, it can be watched for a first time without necessarily knowing the film first.

Derann's Gremlins does well also in my opinion for a 2x 600ft cutdown.

You are right Clyde, I stand corrected, and after having the LP and unmentionable too, I should be ashamed. Andrew, I know the feeling,
I successfully edited DFS "Robin Hood", "Carrie", the Columbia 4 reel "Golden Voyage of Sinbad", without having seen the film, only reading the novel. I know we condemn the various editions, but Columbia didn't do a bad job with their 400' edits, even with the narrator, they were coherent at least. I have to edit the "Django... Prepare A Coffin" as the two parts tell a different tale, but with the
recently purchased silver thing as a guide, I've edited it on paper ready for the weekend, but all the key scenes are intact.... for once.
A nicely done job was "The Wild Geese" 3x400, which I think Dave Worrall did while at Derann, and the "Sinbad" "Jason" 4x200s were well
done I thought.