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One of those obsessive fans happened to be J.J. Abrams, who recently helped Coscarelli remaster Phantasm (Captain Phasma from The Force Awakens got her name as a tribute).

"He just called me up out of the blue and wanted to talk about Phantasm. He wanted to show the movie over at his company, Bad Robot, and he couldn't believe there was no hi-def material. So he said, 'We can fix that,' and I found myself in this position of working over there, mostly at nights, when they'd have time between their other big movies. The guys working on Star Trek and Star Wars would call me up and say, 'Come over Tuesday night for four hours, and we can do some work.'"

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All those nights added up to about two months of work, and included removing all the visible tape, paper clips, and fishing line from the special effects and cleaning up all the imperfections on the cheap secondhand film that Coscarelli had used. Oh, and one other important change:

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"The real great part is ... look, I've got a sick sense of humor, alright? So [when the guy gets killed by the sphere], he hits the ground, and then I'm thinking 'Well, you've just been killed by this otherworldly thing, you have to piss yourself.' So we had it all worked out that the guys behind [him] had a bucket of apple juice and a bucket of beer, so you've got this foaming yellow stuff which would come out. But then on the original VHS, the color correction was so bad, so you never saw the urine. But now it's beautifully restored, the colors are balanced, and now you can see. So I hope people appreciate it."

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You can learn about Phantasm Remastered and Phantasm Ravager here, stream Ravager here, and follow Don on Twitter. Mark is also on Twitter, and has a book.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Things I Learned As A Child Star Of The Worst Movie Ever and 5 Reasons Doing Movie Stunts Is Harder Than You Think.

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