Comment by globular-toast

I find a lot of the stuff I remember from decades ago looks worse now. Toy Story in particular I watched when I got a projector after I'd seen Toy Story 4 and it looked bad, almost to the point I wish I hadn't tarnished my memory of it. Similar things have happened with N64 games that I cherished when I was little.

I don't buy that it's a real degradation due to different presentation methods. I'm sorry, but no matter what film stock you lovingly transfer Toy Story to, it's never going to look like it does in your memory. Same with CRTs. Sure, it's a different look, but my memory still looks better.

It's like our memories get automatically upgraded when we see newer stuff. It's jarring to go back and realise it didn't actually look like that in the 90s. I think this is just the unfortunate truth of CGI. So far it hasn't reached the point of producing something timeless. I can watch a real film from the 80s and it will look just as "good" as one from today. Of course the colours will be different depending on the transfer, but what are we hoping for? To get the exact colours the director saw in his mind's eye? That kind of thing has never really interested me.