Luke Halpin
Luke Austin Halpin is an American former actor. He became a child actor at the age of eight but is best known for his role as Sandy Ricks in the feature films Flipper and Flipper's New Adventure, as well as for reprising his role for the NBC television series adaptation called Flipper. Halpin was born in Astoria, New York City, the son of Eugene A. Halpin and the former Helen Joan Szczepanski, his father was of Irish and German descent, his maternal grandparents were Polish. He grew up with his family in Long Island City, he has Eugene, Jr. and an older sister, Joan. He and his siblings were reared as Roman Catholics. Halpin's career began when a music teacher, impressed by Halpin's "all-American" look, encouraged him to try acting. In 1955 he co-starred with Natalie Wood in an episode of Studio One entitled "Miracle at Potter's Farm". Numerous roles followed, by his mid-teens, Halpin had appeared on many of the major TV series of the day: Armstrong Circle Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, Kraft Television Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Phil Silvers Show, The Defenders, Route 66, Naked City, The Everglades, had a recurring role for six months on the soap opera Young Doctor Malone.
Halpin's early career included several stage roles. He made his Broadway debut in Take Me Along starring Jackie Gleason, appeared in Sunrise at Campobello, with Mary Martin in both Annie Get Your Gun and Peter Pan. Halpin acted in plays that were televised on The Play of the Week including starring with Broadway luminaries Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel in the critically acclaimed avant-garde play Waiting for Godot. Halpin's most famous role came when at age 15 he was picked to play the 12-year-old Sandy Ricks in producer Ivan Tors' 1962 feature film Flipper, starring alongside Chuck Connors, who played Sandy's father and fisherman Porter Ricks; the successful film spawned a sequel, Flipper's New Adventure, released in 1964, with new co-star Brian Kelly as Porter Ricks, a trainee Park Ranger who, after his training, is assigned to the fictitious Coral Key Park. Kelly played a widowed father to Sandy. Kelly and Halpin kept the same roles for the television series that began filming in the summer of 1964 adding younger brother Bud, played by Tommy Norden when Norden was eleven.
Halpin was chosen by Tors for the role of Sandy Ricks because of his skills in the water as well as his extensive prior acting experience. He proved able to bond with the dolphins who filled the role of Flipper; this chemistry paved the way for the launching of the TV series after the two feature films. By the time filming of the TV series commenced, Halpin had become an expert skin and scuba diver and exhibited an easy athleticism that enabled him to perform many of his own stunts in and below the water including a number of dangerous scenes involving sharks, his popular TV character became defined by many water-activity related plots with him wearing nothing more than what came to be his signature cut-off blue jeans shorts. The television series is still in syndication, it was filmed in the park and waters around Key Biscayne, Florida, at the Ivan Tors Studios and the Miami Seaquarium, both in Miami. The series performed in the hotly contested Saturday night TV slot, rating in the Top 25 of all TV shows in its debut 1964-65 season.
The series made Halpin a teen idol among adolescent viewers. He was featured in such magazines as Bravo, Teen Life, 16 Magazine, the earliest issues of Tiger Beat. On the basis of his appearances in the original Flipper feature films, Halpin was a guest'contestant' on the CBS panel show To Tell the Truth just prior to the beginning of filming of the Flipper, on March 30, 1964, he appeared on the show again just prior to the filming of the second season, on April 15, 1965. After Flipper ended, Halpin appeared in feature films, including as Stu MacRae in Ivan Tors' Island of the Lost, as Bo in If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, as Keith in iconic niche horror movie Shock Waves and as Ken Wilson in Flipper co-creator Ricou Browning's Mr. No Legs. Television guest appearances in the years shortly after Flipper were as Kenny Carter, Jr. in the Carl Betz series Judd, for the Defense, as a celebrity contestant on The Dating Game, as Ben Cabot, Jr. in Bracken's World, as Greg in Ivan Tors' Primus, as Eric Bates in Caribe.
He appeared in the 1968 episode, "A Mule … Like the Army's Mule" of the syndicated anthology series Death Valley Days, in which he was cast as the outlaw Sandy King, the youngest member of the "Curly Bill" Brocius gang. In the story line, King is befriended by a United States Army lieutenant, played by Sam Melville. Robert Yuro was cast as "Curly Bill". A notable appearance was in the 1980 television movie The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, a dramatization about Samuel Mudd, the Maryland physician, imprisoned as an accomplice to John Wilkes Booth in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, where Halpin played David Herold, the conspirator who brought Booth, suffering from a broken leg incurred in the process of assassinating Lincoln, to Dr. Mudd for treatment. Following an acting career that spanned three deca
A House in the Hills
A House in the Hills is a 1993 film directed by Ken Wiederhorn. It stars Helen Slater. Alex is an aspiring actress, working as a waitress to make ends meet while she prepares to audition for a TV soap opera. To earn some extra money, she agrees to house-sit the home of friends for the weekend; the friends feel obligated to let Alex know that a robbery and murder has taken place at the house next door. Although she pretends to be unconcerned, Alex is understandably on edge when a stranger, turns up at the house, he is a thief who has a way about him that attracts Alex as well. Michael Madsen as Mickey Helen Slater as Alex Weaver Jeffrey Tambor as Willie James Laurenson as Ronald Rankin Elyssa Davalos as Sondra Rankin A House in the Hills on IMDb A House in the Hills at Rotten Tomatoes
DVD
DVD is a digital optical disc storage format invented and developed in 1995. The medium can store any kind of digital data and is used for software and other computer files as well as video programs watched using DVD players. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than compact discs. Prerecorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD; such discs are a form of DVD-ROM because data can only be not written or erased. Blank recordable DVD discs can be recorded once using a DVD recorder and function as a DVD-ROM. Rewritable DVDs can be erased many times. DVDs are used in DVD-Video consumer digital video format and in DVD-Audio consumer digital audio format as well as for authoring DVD discs written in a special AVCHD format to hold high definition material. DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs; the Oxford English Dictionary comments that, "In 1995 rival manufacturers of the product named digital video disc agreed that, in order to emphasize the flexibility of the format for multimedia applications, the preferred abbreviation DVD would be understood to denote digital versatile disc."
The OED states that in 1995, "The companies said the official name of the format will be DVD. Toshiba had been using the name ‘digital video disc’, but, switched to ‘digital versatile disc’ after computer companies complained that it left out their applications.""Digital versatile disc" is the explanation provided in a DVD Forum Primer from 2000 and in the DVD Forum's mission statement. There were several formats developed for recording video on optical discs before the DVD. Optical recording technology was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1958 and first patented in 1961. A consumer optical disc data format known as LaserDisc was developed in the United States, first came to market in Atlanta, Georgia in 1978, it used much larger discs than the formats. Due to the high cost of players and discs, consumer adoption of LaserDisc was low in both North America and Europe, was not used anywhere outside Japan and the more affluent areas of Southeast Asia, such as Hong-Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.
CD Video released in 1987 used analog video encoding on optical discs matching the established standard 120 mm size of audio CDs. Video CD became one of the first formats for distributing digitally encoded films in this format, in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc storage formats were being developed. One was the Multimedia Compact Disc, backed by Philips and Sony, the other was the Super Density disc, supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Mitsubishi Electric, Thomson, JVC. By the time of the press launches for both formats in January 1995, the MMCD nomenclature had been dropped, Philips and Sony were referring to their format as Digital Video Disc. Representatives from the SD camp asked IBM for advice on the file system to use for their disc, sought support for their format for storing computer data. Alan E. Bell, a researcher from IBM's Almaden Research Center, got that request, learned of the MMCD development project. Wary of being caught in a repeat of the costly videotape format war between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s, he convened a group of computer industry experts, including representatives from Apple, Sun Microsystems and many others.
This group was referred to as the Technical Working Group, or TWG. On August 14, 1995, an ad hoc group formed from five computer companies issued a press release stating that they would only accept a single format; the TWG voted to boycott both formats unless the two camps agreed on a converged standard. They recruited president of IBM, to pressure the executives of the warring factions. In one significant compromise, the MMCD and SD groups agreed to adopt proposal SD 9, which specified that both layers of the dual-layered disc be read from the same side—instead of proposal SD 10, which would have created a two-sided disc that users would have to turn over; as a result, the DVD specification provided a storage capacity of 4.7 GB for a single-layered, single-sided disc and 8.5 GB for a dual-layered, single-sided disc. The DVD specification ended up similar to Toshiba and Matsushita's Super Density Disc, except for the dual-layer option and EFMPlus modulation designed by Kees Schouhamer Immink.
Philips and Sony decided that it was in their best interests to end the format war, agreed to unify with companies backing the Super Density Disc to release a single format, with technologies from both. After other compromises between MMCD and SD, the computer companies through TWG won the day, a single format was agreed upon; the TWG collaborated with the Optical Storage Technology Association on the use of their implementation of the ISO-13346 file system for use on the new DVDs. Movie and home entertainment distributors adopted the DVD format to replace the ubiquitous VHS tape as the primary consumer digital video distribution format, they embraced DVD as it produced higher quality video and sound, provided superior data lifespan, could be interactive. Interactivity on LaserDiscs had proven desirable to consumers collectors; when LaserDisc prices dropped from $100 per
VHS
VHS is a standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes. Developed by Victor Company of Japan in the early 1970s, it was released in Japan on September 9, 1976 and in the United States on August 23, 1977. From the 1950s, magnetic tape video recording became a major contributor to the television industry, via the first commercialized video tape recorders. At that time, the devices were used only in expensive professional environments such as television studios and medical imaging. In the 1970s, videotape entered home use, creating the home video industry and changing the economics of the television and movie businesses; the television industry viewed videocassette recorders as having the power to disrupt their business, while television users viewed the VCR as the means to take control of their hobby. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a format war in the home video industry. Two of the standards, VHS and Betamax, received the most media exposure. VHS won the war, dominating 60 percent of the North American market by 1980 and emerging as the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period.
Optical disc formats began to offer better quality than analog consumer video tape such as VHS and S-VHS. The earliest of these formats, LaserDisc, was not adopted. However, after the introduction of the DVD format in 1997, VHS's market share began to decline. By 2008, DVD had replaced VHS as the preferred low-end method of distribution; the last known company in the world to manufacture VHS equipment, Funai of Japan, ceased production in July 2016. After several attempts by other companies, the first commercially successful VTR, the Ampex VRX-1000, was introduced in 1956 by Ampex Corporation. At a price of US$50,000 in 1956, US$300 for a 90-minute reel of tape, it was intended only for the professional market. Kenjiro Takayanagi, a television broadcasting pioneer working for JVC as its vice president, saw the need for his company to produce VTRs for the Japan market, at a more affordable price. In 1959, JVC developed a two-head video tape recorder, by 1960 a color version for professional broadcasting.
In 1964, JVC released the DV220. In 1969, JVC collaborated with Sony Corporation and Matsushita Electric in building a video recording standard for the Japanese consumer; the effort produced the U-matic format in 1971, the first format to become a unified standard. U-matic was successful in business and some broadcast applications, but due to cost and limited recording time few of the machines were sold for home use. Soon after and Matsushita broke away from the collaboration effort, in order to work on video recording formats of their own. Sony started working on Betamax, while Matsushita started working on VX. JVC released the CR-6060 in 1975, based on the U-matic format. Sony and Matsushita produced U-matic systems of their own. In 1971, JVC engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano put together a team to develop a consumer-based VTR. By the end of 1971 they created an internal diagram titled "VHS Development Matrix", which established twelve objectives for JVC's new VTR; these included: The system must be compatible with any ordinary television set.
Picture quality must be similar to a normal air broadcast. The tape must have at least a two-hour recording capacity. Tapes must be interchangeable between machines; the overall system should be versatile, meaning it can be scaled and expanded, such as connecting a video camera, or dub between two recorders. Recorders should be affordable, easy to have low maintenance costs. Recorders must be capable of being produced in high volume, their parts must be interchangeable, they must be easy to service. In early 1972, the commercial video recording industry in Japan took a financial hit. JVC restructured its video division, shelving the VHS project. However, despite the lack of funding and Shiraishi continued to work on the project in secret. By 1973 the two engineers had produced a functional prototype. In 1974, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, desiring to avoid consumer confusion, attempted to force the Japanese video industry to standardize on just one home video recording format.
Sony had a functional prototype of the Betamax format, was close to releasing a finished product. With this prototype, Sony persuaded the MITI to adopt Betamax as the standard, allow it to license the technology to other companies. JVC believed that an open standard, with the format shared among competitors without licensing the technology, was better for the consumer. To prevent the MITI from adopting Betamax, JVC worked to convince other companies, in particular Matsushita, to accept VHS, thereby work against Sony and the MITI. Matsushita agreed out of concern that Sony might become the leader in the field if its proprietary Betamax format was the only one allowed to be manufactured. Matsushita regarded Betamax's one-hour recording time limit as a disadvantage. Matsushita's backing of JVC persuaded Hitachi and Sharp to back the VHS standard as well. Sony's release of its Betamax unit to the Japanese market in 1975 placed further pressure on the MITI to side with the company. However, the collaboration of
Return of the Living Dead Part II
Return of the Living Dead Part II is a 1988 American zombie comedy horror film written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn, starring Michael Kenworthy, Marsha Dietlein, Dana Ashbrook, Thom Mathews, James Karen, Phil Bruns. It is the first of four sequels to The Return of the Living Dead; the film was released by Lorimar Motion Pictures on January 8, 1988, was a minor box office success, making over $9 million at the box office in the United States against its $6.2 million budget. The film was panned and holds a 0% Critics' Rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 43% Audience Rating. Much like its predecessor, it has since gained a cult following. During the zombie outbreak in Louisville, a military truck is transporting barrels of Trioxin, when one breaks loose and falls into a river without the driver noticing; the next morning, pre-teens Johnny and Billy take a reluctant Jesse Wilson to a cemetery mausoleum for a group initiation with a group of pre-teen bullies. Frightened, Jesse flees into a nearby sewer, where he and the others stumble across the rogue barrel.
Upon opening it, they find a corpse inside and running away screaming as the toxic gas contained within begins to leak out. When Jesse says he's going to call the Army from a number on the barrel, the bullies trap him in the derelict mausoleum and leave him. Billy and Johnny return to the barrel and open it, releasing the Trioxin gas that begins to permeate the whole cemetery. A trio of graverobbers. Brenda is creeped out by stays behind in the van. Ed and Joey go into the cemetery; when they enter it, Jesse is able to run home. Meanwhile, acid rainfall causes the Trioxin to begin seeping into the ground and resuscitating the corpses. Returning home, Jesse is ordered to do his homework by his older sister, but sneaks out of the house when a cable repairman, distracts her, he goes to Billy's house to see him, but he has fallen ill, so he makes up an excuse and Billy's mother allows him in for a brief visit. Suffering from the effects of Trioxin, Billy warns Jesse not to tell anyone. Against his friend's wishes, Jesse returns to the sewer to further examine the barrel.
Upon seeing a tar-covered zombie, he flees to the cemetery, where the newly resurrected bodies begin to dig their way out of the ground. Meanwhile, Brenda encounters a zombie, but is able to get away. Ed and Joey are still inside the mausoleum. Joey smashes its head with a crowbar, they flee the building, they are running through a mob of zombies. Jesse gets home and tries to tell Lucy about the zombie uprising, but she dismisses him and locks him in his room. Elsewhere, Ed, Brenda show up at Billy's house to get help but they run away when Billy's dad pulls a shotgun on them. Meanwhile, Jesse starts a fire outside his door to set off the smoke alarms, to distract Lucy so he can escape. Jesse calls the Army and gets through to Colonel Glover, who had helped put down the Louisville outbreak days earlier, but the call gets disconnected. Ed, Brenda steal Tom's van but are unable to get through the zombie horde, so they barge into Jesse's house. Joey begins to fall ill from Trioxin exposure; as the zombies close in on the house, the graverobbers attempts to find a getaway car.
They manage break into a doctor's house, where they convince him to let them use his car, they drive to a hospital emergency room that appears to be deserted. At Billy's house, his condition worsens and his father leaves to get a doctor, but Billy's mother sees him being attacked and eaten by a group of zombies. Turned, Billy proceeds to attacks his mother. Elsewhere, Tom and Jesse escape a group of zombies and take the car to look around town, they make it to Lucy and Jesse's grandfather's house and break into his gun safe to get weapons and ammo. They go back to the hospital where Joey are experiencing symptoms of rigormortis. Jesse is attacked by a zombie. Brenda is upset about the diagnosis for Joey, they try to leave in the car, but Ed follows them and gets in the car, they are stopped at gunpoint by National Guardsman under Glover's command. A zombified Ed attacks and kills one of the soldiers, causing his squadmates to flee. Brenda drives away with Joey. Brenda is attacked by a zombified Joey, unable to kill her former lover she willfully lets him cannibalize her.
Fleeing in a stolen ambulance, the survivors come to a roadblock, the National Guard mistakenly opens fire on them, thinking they are zombies. Realizing that the whole town had been evacuated, Tom thinks of a new strategy to give the zombies what they want, drives them to a meat packing plant, they take a truck and distribute brains out of the back as they drive to a power plant intending to electrocute them all. Billy opens zombies corner them into the truck. Jesse is attacked by Billy and stabs him with a screwdriver, activates the power, killing all of the zombies. Billy walks in, holding the screwdriver, Jesse pushes his tormenter into a large transformer that falls through the roof. Glover and his men arrive to lead the others away. Michael Kenworthy as Jesse Wilson Marsha Dietlein as Lucy Wilson Dana Ashbrook as Tom Essex James Karen as Ed Mathews Thom Mathews as Joey Hazel Suzanne Snyder as Brenda Herzog Phil Bruns as Doc Mandel Thor Van Lingen as Billy Crowley Jason Hogan as Johnny Mitch Pileggi as Sarge Jonathan Terry as Colonel Glover Sally Smythe as Mildred Crowley Don Maxwell as George Crowley Forrest J Ackerman as Harvey Kramer Allan Trautman as Tarma
Peter Cushing
Peter Wilton Cushing, OBE was an English actor best known for his roles in the Hammer Productions horror films of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, as well as his performance as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. Spanning over six decades, his acting career included appearances in more than 100 films, as well as many television and radio roles. Born in Kenley, Cushing made his stage debut in 1935 and spent three years at a repertory theatre before moving to Hollywood to pursue a film career. After making his motion picture debut in the 1939 film The Man in the Iron Mask, Cushing began to find modest success in American films before returning to England at the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite performing in a string of roles, including one as Osric in Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Hamlet, Cushing struggled to find work during this period and began to consider himself a failure, his career was revitalized once he started to work in live television plays, he soon became one of the most recognizable faces in British television.
He earned particular acclaim for his lead performance in a 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cushing gained worldwide fame for his appearances in twenty-two horror films by the independent Hammer Productions for his role as Baron Frankenstein in six of their seven Frankenstein films, Doctor Van Helsing in five Dracula films. Cushing appeared alongside actor Christopher Lee, who became one of his closest friends, with the American horror star Vincent Price. Cushing appeared in several other Hammer films, including The Abominable Snowman, The Mummy and The Hound of the Baskervilles, the last of which marked the first of many times he portrayed the famous detective Sherlock Holmes throughout his career. Cushing continued to perform a variety of roles, although he was typecast as a horror film actor, he played Dr. Who in Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A. D. and gained the highest amount of visibility in his career in 1977, when he appeared as Grand Moff Tarkin in the first Star Wars film.
Cushing continued acting into his years, wrote two autobiographies. He was lovingly devoted to his wife of twenty-eight years, Helen Cushing, who died in 1971. Cushing died in 1994 of prostate cancer. Peter Wilton Cushing was born in Kenley, a district in the English county of Surrey, on 26 May 1913 to George Edward Cushing and Nellie Marie Cushing, his mother had so hoped for a daughter that for the first few years of his life, she would dress Peter in girls' frocks, let his hair grow in long curls and tie them in bows of pink ribbon, so others would mistake him for a girl. His father, a quantity surveyor from an upper-class family, was a reserved and uncommunicative man who Peter claimed he never got to know well, his mother considered of a lower class than her husband. Cushing's family consisted of several stage actors, including his paternal grandfather Henry William Cushing, his paternal aunt Maude Ashton and his step-uncle Wilton Herriot, after whom Peter Cushing received his middle name.
The Cushing family lived in Dulwich during the First World War, but moved to Purley after the war ended in 1918. Although raised during wartime, Cushing was too young to understand or become affected by it, was shielded from the horrors of war by his mother, who encouraged him to play games under the kitchen table whenever the threat of possible bombings arose. In his infancy, Cushing twice developed pneumonia and once what was known as "double pneumonia." Although he survived, the latter was fatal during that period. During one Christmas in his youth, Cushing saw a stage production of Peter Pan, which served as an early source of inspiration and interest in acting. Cushing loved dressing up and playing pretend from an early age, claimed he always wanted to be an actor, "perhaps without knowing at first." A fan of comics and toy collectibles in his youth, Cushing earned money by staging puppet shows for family members with his glove-puppets and toys. He began his early education in Dulwich, an affluent area of South London, before attending the Shoreham Grammar School in Shoreham-by-Sea, on the Sussex coast between Brighton and Worthing.
Prone to homesickness, he was miserable at the boarding school and spent only one term there before returning home. He attended the Purley County Secondary School, where he played cricket and rugby. With the exception of art, Cushing was a self-proclaimed poor student in most subjects and had little attention span for that which did not interest him, he got fair grades only through the help of his brother, a strong student who did his homework for him. Cushing harboured aspirations for the arts all throughout his youth acting, his childhood inspiration was an American film actor and star of many Western films. D. J. Davies, the Purley County Secondary School physics teacher who produced all the school's plays, recognized some acting potential in him and encouraged him to participate in the theatre allowing Cushing to skip class to paint sets, he played the lead in nearly every school production during his teenage years, including the role of Sir Anthony Absolute in a 1929 staging of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy of manners play, The Rivals.
Cushing wanted to enter the acting profession after school, but his father opposed the idea, despite the theatrical background of several of his family members. Instead, seizing upon Cushing's interest in art and drawing, he got his son a job as a surveyor's assistant in the
Special edition
The terms special edition, limited edition, variants such as deluxe edition, or collector's edition, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products published products related to the arts, such as books, video games or recorded music and films, but now including clothing, fine wine, whisky, among other products. A limited edition is restricted in the number of copies produced, although in fact the number may be low or high. Suzuki defines limited edition products as those “sold in a state that makes them difficult to obtain because of companies limiting their availability to a certain period, region, or channel". A special edition implies; the term is used on DVD film releases when the so-called "special" edition is the only version released. Collector's edition may just be another term for special edition and limited edition products that include additional features or items that regular versions do not have. Speaking about books, collector's edition products may refer to books in special limited and numbered editions, sometimes hand-bound, signed by the artist and containing one or more original works or prints produced directly from their work and printed under their supervision.
Whatever these extra features or items are, they must represent additional value to collectors of these products. Popular culture employs Special, Deluxe and Limited Edition in marketing, releasing subsequent, improved versions of film DVDs, video games. Companies use special editions and incremental improvements to sell the same products to consumers multiple times; this has been seen in the 10th Anniversary edition of Titanic, which consists of the first two discs of the previous Special Collector's edition, only with new packaging, on CD with the 30 Year Anniversary Edition of Bob Marley's Exodus, which has the same content as the original album, but in new packaging. In many cases, successful film releases have had items made in limited numbers; these "limited editions" contain the best DVD edition possible of a film with special items in a box set, sometimes containing items available only in the limited edition. Items marked thus are released for a shorter time and in lower quantity than common editions with a running number printed on the products to boost the rarity feel, as the company implies not to manufacture more.
It is common to have such items packaged with unique designs. With the success of DVDs, special editions of films themselves have become common. Sharing similarities with the concept of a director's cut; these feature additional in-movie material. The material may be footage deleted from the final cut, or new digitally-created, interpolated content. Unlike true director's cuts, the directors may not have had part in such projects, such as in Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, in which Richard Donner did not help create the new version, just supply the material; the Doctor Who television movie The Five Doctors was edited, amongst various other changes, to make the "Special Edition" in 1999 for the first DVD release of the episode. Limited edition prints known as LEs, have been standard in printmaking from the nineteenth century onwards. A limit to the print run is crucial, as many traditional printmaking techniques can only produce a limited number of best quality impressions; this can be as few as ten or twenty for a technique like drypoint, but more would be in the low hundreds - print runs of over a thousand are regarded as dubious by the serious art market for original prints though with many techniques there is no loss of quality.
Edition sizes higher than about 500 are to be of print reproductions of paintings, of much less value, though some modern techniques blur this traditional distinction. As in other fields, the use of the concept has become driven by marketing imperatives, has been misused in parts of the market. In particular, photogravure and giclee reproductions of prints, derived from photographs of an original print, which are most unlikely to have any investment value, are issued in limited editions implying that they will have such value; these need to be distinguished from the original artist's print produced directly from his work, printed under the artist's supervision. In UK and New Zealand the Fine Art Trade Guild ensures the quality and verification of limited edition prints by employing a number of administered regulations for all processes and aspects related to them. In the United States limited editions are regulated under state consumer protections laws. California became the first state to regulate the sale of limited edition art prints with the "California Print Law" of 1971.
The state of Illinois expanded on the California statute. However, it was not until 1986 that more comprehensive provisions, still in place today, were enacted with the passage of the "Georgia Print Law"; that law became the template for statutes subsequently enacted by other states.. The Georgia Print Law written by State Representative Chesley V. Morton, became effective July 1, 1986; the law requires art dealers, artists, or auctioneers to supply information to perspective purchasers about the nature of the print, the number of prints and editions produced, the involvement of the artist in the creation of the print. The penalty for violation of the law ranges from simple reimbursement to treble damages, in the case of
