So far I don't like the saga...

Only about 20 mins in but already I don't like the trimming of scenes, the removal of some of the subtitles and the dubbing of some of the Italian into English.

Also, the scenes as they are joined together after being separated by the modern day Michael story seem abrupt in some places.

I don't know if this is because I'm not used to order of the scenes or what but so far it's throwing me off a bit. Hopefully, if they ever do release the saga on DVD they won't change a thing to the original scenes and simply insert the extended and deleted scenes.

I'll let you know how I feel when I am completely done. I was expecting to be blown away by this after Turnbull said its the best way to view the films.

It's probably most definitely that you're not used to it in this order. Also, I'm not sure you've seen all the extra footage before in any fashion, but its inclusion unquestioningly alters the way you'll perceive the films.

As for the subtitles/English matter, that was a concession Coppola made to NBC in the editing process. One has to remember that this was broadcast in 1977; television audiences were less tolerant for foreign-language productions back then than they are now. It's somewhat different than going into a movie theater, when the editing of Part II was such that there's a greater balance between English and Italian. In the TV version, there's a good hour and twenty minutes that are almost exclusively in Italian with subtitles. We'd sit for that, but who else would? Whatever could be done to offset that was evidently considered necessary then; that, and editing the violence to conform to television broadcast standards. And evidently Coppola found it a small price to pay for being able to include all the extra footage he shot - and, more importantly, being paid for the broadcast rights and using that money to continue financing the filming of Apocalypse Now.

Previous video releases (The Complete Epic, which wasn't so complete, or the Trilogy) indicate that, for the most part, the original scenes are left untouched, violence and language and all, wherever possible and the additional material added in to supplement that, and should they ever go to DVD with it I have no reason to believe they won't do exactly as you would want.

It's now nearly three hours in, and by now you should have a better picture of the effect the reediting has on the first film. Please keep an open mind; in the long run, I too took up Turnbull's view that this is the best way for me to enjoy the films. With time, you may feel the same. I hope you do.

Over the years, we've had a number of discussions on this board of whether the "Saga" version was or wasn't better than the theatrical releases. If memory serves, opinion was about evenly split overall. As Erik said (thank you, Erik ), I'm on the "Saga" side.

If you have a problem with abrupt cuts, you're in for the mother-pigeon of all of them for the Saga: Neri will close the door on Kay, and then instantly it's three years later, at Lake Tahoe, and the band is playing "Yankee Doodle." That jump - the Godfather equivalent of the proverbial caveman throwing a bone in the air and watching it suddenly turn into an orbiting satellite - will probably make you cringe. But it's okay. We're here for you, man.

The young Vito scenes are truly missed once the Saga gets to Part II. Those scenes help balance positive feelings amongst all of the negativity and downfall of Michael in pt. II.

But what you get instead is a much larger character arc for Michael, which doesn't need Vito's sequences intercut to come across. The point is that ever since the later point of Part I, Michael has embraced what he once considered to be evil; now he sinks further and further into that evil until he has nothing left of whatever was good in his life. That's why the opening credits for the Saga are largely composed of additional shots of Michael alone at the Tahoe compound, now in ruins; the entirety of the Godfather saga until that point is essentially him remembering what brought him to the sorry state he is art in the final scene of Part II: a lonely man with an empty life, haunted by demons he created and which he cannot expel.

The best way to describe the intent of the ending of Part II, and the Saga, is to hear Coppola describe what Michael was by the end of Part I: "At the end of the first film, Michael, who started as a bright-eyed, idealistic, beautiful, talented man with all the potential in the world, was turned into this cold, introverted, loveless, horrible monster who closed out of his life the person he claimed to be closest to him, his wife. To quote from The Magnificent Ambersons, he got his comeuppance." To make that absolutely clear to audiences who missed that point in Part I, Coppola drove it further for Part II, and further still for the Saga. This is why the last sequence before the closng scene is of a flashback to happier times.

What the Godfather saga really becomes in this format is a story about the decline and fall of one man's moral sense. That's what Godfather I and II are to me. Maybe they were ALWAYS that for most viewers, but this particular edit makes that muh clearer for me. The Vito sequences are merely prologue, and to intercut them simply to balance out the negativity is not necessary: sometimes the point is to immerse the audience in such feelings.

You are absolutely right.

Despite that "...much larger character arc for Michael...", mentioned in another post, so much more is lost in the latter GF II story without the young Vito segments woven in.

Because of the deleted scenes which we would never have gotten to see otherwise, I happen to enjoy the GF Saga when it's aired; they do enrich the story...right up until we get to that First Communion party in Nevada.

Well I am up to Michael in Vegas now, and while the flow of the Saga has grown on me, I'm still torn. I still prefer the original films. I don't like how much of the deleted scenes with Vito take away the mystique of his character. I can't put my thumb on it now, but the original films definitely make him out to be a bigger character.

Also, I don't know if they save the Pearl Harbor flashback scene for the end of the Saga, but I was looking forward to seeing how it fit in-between the young Vito scenes and the beginning of Part I and it was gone all together. If they don't have that placed somewhere else I will be very unhappy.

And finally, most of the deleted scenes get in the way of the flow of the films. I am glad most of them are gone. I did like the scenes with Sonny after Vito is shot though. They are probably the best.

But I'll keep watching!

Plan on visiting the Corleone Estate?

I want to see the saga!

Also, I know some people on here have discussed extended versions of the deleted scenes and then more scenes all together like the extended Gardner Shaw scene where Santino Jr. is in the Tahoe house as well as Kay lighting a candle for Michael. In what version of the films do these scenes exist?

Kay lighting candles appears not as part of a dramatic scene, but as a kind of mood-setter at the beginning of the Tahoe sequences in GFII. It's in the Saga.
Santino Jr. appears at the end of the Gardiner Shaw deleted scene only in the Saga version. He's not in that scene as included in the DVD extras disc.

Longneck, you probably won't have to wait long to see the Saga again on cable TV. But, as Pizzaboy noted in another thread, it was never released either in VHS or DVD, though you can buy a poor quality copy on e-Bay.

Ok, then what am I watching on Bravo then? The epic or the saga?

I think they are essentially the same thing, with minor nuances. I'm surprised you do not like it, but to each his own.

Check local listings, it's been on AMC a ton this summer.

They've run it more times in any given month than any network has for as long as I've been keeping track, in fact.

So the one on Bravo is the epic and the one on AMC is the Saga?

I confused.

How can one not like any rendering of the Trilogy? It should be mandatory viewing ... and liking.

I could not have said it better myself.

Well, I think part of it was that I just watched the movies on DVD maybe a month before, so they were fresh in my memory. I remembered exactly what was said in certain scenes only to find that a lot of the subtitles were dubbed over in English and some scenes were trimmed or removed all together.

I also wasn't crazy about dropping the Don's birthday scene in-between the Young Vito scenes and part I. Also, keep in mind I was watching this on TV, not in widescreen, edited for TV and fast-forwarding through commercials. It didn't exactly feel cinematic.

Then there are the deleted scenes, most of which I've never seen before, and most of them felt a little weak. So I'm still coming to a conclusion about whether or not I like the deleted scenes.

If they release this on DVD with all the usual specs (widescreen, DD 5.1), I am sure I will love it. But from what I saw, which was most of it, I wasn't exactly throwing my hands up saying "this is brilliant."

I also believe that the young Vito scenes are best viewed in comparison with Mike's downfall. By themselves, they both lacked something that I can't put my finger on.

Also, keep in mind, this is the first time I've seen it like this, with the deleted scenes, after having watched the original films dozens of times and committing them to memory. I think the more I watch the epic, I think I will come to appreciate it even more.

But right now, I'm kind of mixed.

You know what, Death? That's actually pretty fair of you. I frankly expected you to say that just because it wasn't like the movies as you knew them, they were outright blasphemy. Considering my clashes with the good people here over the Winegardner books, I had been led to believe that the general opinion is that anything that wasn't what the movies said it was was just plain wrong. Thanks just for saying that you're prepared to give it time to grow on you.

As to the confusion about what the Epic is, as opposed to the Saga, and so on, here's the answer:

In 1977, the project was named The Godfather: A Novel for Television. That name (my personal favorite) couldn't survive the transition to home video, because, well, that's VHS, not TV. The first video release that I know of, therefore, was called The Godfather: The Complete Epic 1902-1959 (yeah, I know they got the first year wrong). But others here will attest that it really didn't have all the scenes from the TV version, not even close. Later on, once the Godfather Part III had come out and needed to be incorporated into the chronological version, the whole kit-and-kaboodle was put together for VHS and called The Godfather Trilogy: 1901-1980. That version, aside from having all of Part III, had a lot more of footage from the TV version, but still not everything.

And of course, they still occasionally ran the original TV version on TV in syndication now and then. Whenever it's been run either on AMC or Bravo, they keep the Novel for Television name, but for some reason, when it was run on USA, they used video technology to just blot out the "Novel for Television" name and subtituted the word "Saga" in its place. Hence, the name The Godfather Saga. Why'd they rename it? I don't know, probably personal taste on the part of the USA people.

So the answer is that the Epic, Saga et. al. are all variants of the original Novel for Television, with a selection of a few minutes of footage either there or not there depending on what the network needs to edit for time and commercial space. The Epic and Trilogy are the video releases of same, but they never seem to get it all in. A true video release of the complete Novel for Television, VHS, DVD or other, has never appeared, much as we'd like it to.

I wonder if there is more Trilogy film that some enterprising editor could blend into the Saga/Epic? There's got to be. I would enjoy that. I bet they filmed a heck of alot more than what's been shown.

I would imagine that, like the later film Apocalypse Now, there has to be a heap of material in the Zoetrope archives. In the case of AN, the film sported a five-hour workprint version, largely through add-ons to existing scenes, through entire sequences (many of which never saw daylight until the Redux version), and through the stringing together of multiple camera angles of the exact same single action (the helicopter battle is the biggest example of that in AN).

Now, as far as the Godfather films is concerned, I don't really know, but I remember a mention somewhere that Lucas claimed the original cut of Part II was itself five hours long. I may have misheard or misread that, though, so don't make me take the stand on it. Still, the Novel for Television is proof positive that there's always more material in a Coppola film than gets shown on the screen. Think about it: Parts I and II together, on their own, add up to 6.25 hours. In the television version, that's been expanded to 7 hours, give or take a minute or two, a significant enhancement. Something in me just says, yes, there's something more in those archives somewhere.

Now, if they should ever get around to doing a DVD of the longer cut, let us ask ourselves: does it really just have to be the television version? Even the previous video versions have, for instance, restored the cuss words and violence that television standards and practices required Coppola to remove. So let's take it a few steps further: if there is anything else in the archives that can be added in without significantly hurting the flow of the story, shouldn't they do it? For that matter, considering that it would be too long to put on just one disc, where do they put the breaks? I have an answer: divide it according to the major phases of the story. It can be something like this:

Disc 1: The Godfather, Prologue: The Rise of Vito Corleone - 1901-1923
Disc 2: The Godfather Part I: The Rise of Michael Corleone - 1945-1955
Disc 3: The Godfather Part II: The Tragedy of Michael Corleone - 1958-1959
Disc 4: The Godfather Part III: The Death of Michael Corleone - 1979-1980

Just something to consider.

Bah, the only GF on TV this week is on Bravo...don't get that channel.