Director John Landis originally intended The Blues Brothers to be a three-hour roadshow with an intermission. Studio heads balked after a test screening and forced him to cut the movie down to 148 minutes, then again to 133 minutes for the final theatrical release. When Universal destroyed most of the elements for the original film in 1985, it was believed that only the 133 cut and its negative survived—until, that is, the son of a theater owner was caught trying to sell a print of the 148-minute cut on eBay in the early ’90s. And it is from this print that all deleted scenes and alternate cuts for the extended cut were sourced.

Back in the DVD era, the discrepancies between the quality of the original camera negative and of the lost-and-recovered print weren’t that blatant. Sure, you could tell that some scenes were a bit grainier, a little less detailed, a little more washed out, but it was hardly a distraction. In the HD era, the disparity started to become substantially more apparent.

Fast-forward to the UHD release of The Extended Edition, and I honestly find it nigh unwatchable, if only because the portions of the film scanned from the original camera negative are so utterly gorgeous it makes the preview-print footage look that much worse by comparison. After the opening credits pass by, The Extended Edition is simply a chaotic audiovisual rollercoaster, with one scene looking sharp, detailed, well-balanced, and properly saturated, with exactly the right amount of organic film grain, and the next looking like a blown-out, overly contrasty mess of crushed blacks, faded highlights, and about twice as much grain as it should have. It’s honestly such a distraction that I had trouble sitting through the extended cut, despite the absolutely fabulous DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio mix included with the Kaleidescape download.

Thankfully, purchasing the extended edition on Kaleidescape also comes with the theatrical cut, fully restored in UHD HDR as well, so I decided to give it a watch, despite not having seen the shorter edit in over a quarter-century. And what I took away from that viewing surprised me. When you get right down to it, the studio was right. The shorter cut is a better movie; better paced, more consistently funny, and with the focus more consistently where it belongs—on the musical numbers.

The original theatrical cut is also a better home cinema experience from beginning to end. Again, the opening and closing titles—which had to be sourced from what I believe is the interpositive, not the negative—don’t quite measure up to the quality of the rest of the transfer. But that aside, I never would have imagined The Blues Brothers could look this good while still looking true to itself.

And it isn’t merely the enhanced detail brought about by the 4K scan. HDR also allows enhancements to shadow depth, bringing details out of the darkness that have never appeared in home video presentations before.

Granted, the real star of the show is still the immaculate DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio mix, which doesn’t suffer from the tonal and fidelity inconsistencies that plague so many films of the era. Sure, the pre-recorded musical numbers shine brighter here, with deeper bass and better transparency than the rest of the mix, but dialogue and sound effects are still clear and well-presented, and the occasional surround sound effect doesn’t sound at all out of place. A lot of that probably comes down to the fact that the film was originally mixed in four-track stereo, with discreet left, center, and right channels and a mono surround channel, making it a little easier to conform to our modern surround-sound channel layout. But whatever the reason, The Blues Brothers sounds absolutely as wonderful here as you would hope.

In a weird way I think I’m grateful the 4K release of the extended cut revealed what a mishmash that version of the movie is, visually speaking. If not for that, I probably wouldn’t have returned to the theatrical cut and discovered just how much better it is. I’ve spent the past few decades treating the longer cut as the film proper, viewing the theatrical cut as a sort of historical artifact, when we should actually view these different cuts from exactly the opposite perspective. The extended edition is really just an incredibly long bonus feature, and one that quite frankly overstays its welcome.

If the only version of The Blues Brothers you know is the compromised, intermediate extended cut (it was, after all, the only version available on DVD for the longest time), I encourage you to give the shorter theatrical cut another shot—especially in its newly restored 4K/HDR form, it’s simply the best version of the movie that actually exists.