Synopsis:

This fully integrates all television footage back into the film coupled with the film’s original 2.0 mono soundtrack.

Intentions:

To fully restore all scenes from the original Theatircal Cut of the film while adding the extra material from the new Director’s Cut wherever possible.

Change List:

- Director’s Cut Tri-Star logo and “The Natural” title card. - Director’s Cut footage of Roy going to his old house and getting Wonderboy. All flashback scenes and all overlapping audio from the flashbacks have been excised. (* see note at end of this list) - Theatrical Cut’s opening shot with Roy sitting on the platform with “Robert Redford” credit coming onscreen. - Theatrical Cut’s credit sequence and entire prologue sequence with no abridged scenes up through Max meeting Hobbs on the train. - The new scene from the Director’s Cut with Roy and his trainer on the train where they talk about Roy’s dad saying one day he’d be the best who ever played the game. - Theatrical Cut from the train stopping through the entire scene with Roy being introduced to Pop Fisher (the “16 Years Later” title card is there as it should be). - The Director’s Cut uninterrupted from here on, beginning with Roy picking out his jersey. * In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to replace the existing audio with the audio from the Director’s Cut opening credit sequence, and as a result, only ambient, outdoor sounds remain during this scene. This may seem odd at first, but it has grown on me a lot. It’s almost as if Roy is a ghost at this point in the film. Like he doesn’t exist without the game. Which kind of goes in with how we have no idea what he’s done for the 16 years he was out of baseball. Then, in the next scene, with the sounds of the train coming in gradually, the film slowly builds to his comeback through nature…then man-made noise…then voices…then music. It’s a metaphorical transition to Roy’s rebirth from silence to crescendo. Or maybe I just like the new opening. I actually had to cut and re-paste/overlap several sections of the ac3 stream here to make the audio play out long enough to fill the sequence. Definitely a huge challenge for a newbie like me.

Additional Notes:

12 minutes added to the Theatrical Cut (or) 6 previously excised minutes of the Theatrical Cut reinstated to the Director’s Cut. Supposedly, there was 15 minutes of new footage added to the Director’s Cut. The reason my version only has 12 minutes of new footage is because some of the additional scenes were alternate cuts from the original prologue. Now that I’ve reinstated the original prologue back into the film, their inclusion was redundant and unnecessary. Also, the new credits sequence added time to the Director’s Cut and deleted footage from the Theatrical Cut, but the new sequence simply takes place over a blank screen, so I wouldn’t exactly call it “new footage” personally. The only “new” scene that didn’t make this cut was a few additional lines of dialogue between Roy and Harriet on the telephone in the scene before Roy is shot. This was not impossible to include without a jarring edit due to the editorial decisions in the new cut as opposed to the old one, so I made an artistic decision that a few extra seconds of dialogue wasn’t worth the trouble.

Other Sources:

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