When I was a teenager I read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and fell in love with the story but was entirely unable to track down a copy of the film to watch. All VHS copies were out of print, the DVD had just been released but it was well over £40, laserdiscs were pretty much non-existent in the UK so the first time I actually managed to see the film was in the year 2001 on the big screen at the Edinburgh film festival where they screened a 70mm version...what a way to see it for the first time!

While watching the film I noticed a few small but noticeable mistakes, both near the beginning of the film. The first was when the leopard attacked the ape and at the top of the image the sky ended and you could see the wires holding up the projection screen. The second was not long after the bone to space ship (weapons station?) transition and one of the ships (the one with the fan like front) is visible "stuck" at the right hand side of the screen as the camera pans upwards, then the ship flies across the screen to the right when panning stops.

A few years later when I finally got hold of the DVD I kept an eye out for these mistakes but couldn't see them. I just shrugged and assumed they were only part of the 70mm version. This weekend I got hold of the Stanley Kubrick Blu Ray boxset which includes 2001. I'd read that the Blu Ray transfer was consistent with the 70mm version, and I have to agree that it is a breathtaking transfer, but again these mistakes were missing.

So I'm wondering if the DVD and Blu Ray versions have been re framed to exclude these mistakes or whether the image was incorrectly matted when I saw it in the cinema. Do any of the laserdisc transfers contain these mistakes?

For a long time the first mistake was even listed on imdb but is no longer there (though you can still see it on waybackmachine) so it's obviously something that used to be widely seen.

Does anyone have any information on this? I'm perfectly happy with the Blu Ray transfer but noticing these mistakes was part of my original cinematic experience of the film so I would love to know if they are available in any home version.

Sorry for the long rambling post.

I believe 2001 was digitally restored and remastered several times on its way to blu ray. What you probably saw was a 70mm release print, which would have all of the original faults

Cheers for the info. Does anyone know if any of the laserdisc releases include these mistakes? The Criterion one was supervised by Kubrick himself so that means he'll either have fixed them or remained religiously true to what was shown in the cinema.

I looked up the first mistake on the Criterion CAV Laserdisc but I couldn't see it at all.