High-Def Digest‘s Josh Zyber has assembled a four-panel video that shows that the allegedly “fixed” overture sequence in the West Side Story Bluray still isn’t right. Here‘s how he explains it:

“As you can see [in the video], the original version of the sequence dissolved from a red (or orange) still image, to green, and finally to blue. In the first Blu-ray, the green section was missing entirely, replaced with a fade to black and then a fade back up to blue. In the new ‘fixed’; version, the green is still missing.

“Instead, the red still fades about halfway to black, freezes, and then dissolves directly to a darkened version of the blue frame. After a second, the blue comes back up to regular brightness and the sequence resumes normally.

“I’m left to assume that whatever film elements MGM used for the Blu-ray transfer were missing the green section of the footage, and the studio tried to disguise this with the fade-to-black. When consumers complained, rather than search for another source of the green frame, MGM digitally manipulated what it had on hand and gave us this half-assed ‘fix.’

“This is a static still frame of a simple image. How hard could it be to sample either the red or blue frame, digitally recolor it green, and insert it into the middle with new dissolves? I feel like a clever fan could probably do this at home on a laptop. Yet a major Hollywood studio can’t? I find this very bizarre.”

Zyber has apparently never tangled with Yvonne Medrano, MGM Home Entertainment vp technical services, before. The evidence suggests that she doesn’t fool around.