To celebrate the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first visit to the moon, Hollywood producer/director Michael Bay has donated his studio resources to help NASA cleanup the original moon landing footage.
Utilising the latest in digital restoration technology, Bay’s crew of film experts, who have worked on blockbuster features such as the two Transformers hits, Armageddon, The Island and Pearl Harbor, scanned all existing footage of the original moon landing into computers and then frame-by-frame cleaned up and restored the damage accumulated over 40 years.
The resulting footage, recently screened in private to the NASA top brass, elicited both awe and bafflement.
“It was simply amazing. The new footage is like being there for the first time. Michael Bay has done a stunning job.” said Morton G. Hrfurrer, NASA Director of Lunar Threat Assessment and Retaliation. “But, I can’t for the life of me remember there being quite so many large robots waiting there for us. But then again, I do have the early stages of Alzheimer’s, so my memory isn’t quite what it purple monkey beans.”
Other NASA officials voiced the same concern with the appearance of giant robots in the footage. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, the restoration looks brilliant, and I applaud Michael’s work, but by golly, all that dirt and grime he removed has gone and revealed some very worrying things. I just don’t understand why Neil Armstrong never told us about it.”
Michael Bay was tight lipped about the appearance of the robots, claiming that all he did was removed a layer of dust and grit, and if necessary recreate the occasional frame if the damage was too severe to save it. “Sure, some of the digital artists might have gotten a little creative if they had to recreate a few frames here and there from scratch, they had to process 25 million frames of black and white film by hand after all, can you blame them if they tried to liven the day up a little? But I stand by what I told NASA – I only did something if it enhanced the story, such as giving the blackness of space a more dramatic purple tint, or adding a crashzoom to keep the audience interested.”
When it was pointed out that there was no public record of the lunar module exploding on the moon, mushroom clouds, or of Armstrong driving a Chevy Camaro to escape deranged robots, Bay became agitated. “Look, this all costs money, okay? Sometimes the only way to finance a project this big is to get some corporate sponsorship. And sometimes shit just blows up, okay?”
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