Apparently the intent was to retcon away the first season's implausible conceit that the invasion had been forgotten and had no lasting impact, and instead to portray the world as the post-apocalyptic wreck it more realistically would have been a mere 35 years after such global devastation. But that created a massive contradiction between seasons that they never bothered to handwave.
And here I thought retcons were generally intended to fix problems, not create all-new ones...
While not at all to the same degree, this reminds me of how each season of
Picard almost works better when taken as its own miniseries independent of the other seasons. Almost.
The season 1 finale had said there'd be a second wave of aliens coming in four years, so I tried to rationalize it to myself that there was a four-year time jump between seasons in which the aliens' ongoing attacks had done heavy damage to the world. But that didn't work, because the teenage Debi McCullough was only a year older in season 2.
It's been so long since I watched the show, but I may have disregarded the Debi inconsistency and tried to assume there had been a lot of time elapsed before the S2 premiere (I'm not even sure I ever saw the S1 finale...was it even a 'season finale', or just another episode?)...except that IIRC in the premiere episode the world still seems mostly fine, and it's really in the next episode that things suddenly seem to have gone to hell.
...though, the aliens causing that level of destruction also seemed inconsistent with their season one MO, unless they'd gotten their hands on ships at some point...
I'm being a bit glib, because really, it's just silly BTS decisions for a show that's decades old now, that seem to have been made without a lot of consideration for the in-universe implications.
Why not just have the heroes who survived into S2 just find themselves in an alternate timeline? Then it would all make sense!
The episode was hardly compelling, just moderately more watchable than most of season 2.
But by the standards of the show in general and S2 in particular, "moderately more watchable" is "compelling", in relative terms!
I grew up watching the movie in black-and-white, because our family didn't get a color TV until I was 13 or so. I can't see any point in watching it that way, given that its glorious 3-strip Technicolor was one of its major attractions. For decades, viewers were saddled with an inferior 2-strip reproduction that made the FX look worse and kept them from knowing how great the film had originally looked. I finally saw the restored version last year and it was just gorgeous.
And G-1 Minus Color is far more than just the film with the color removed. They had to reprocess every frame and digitally optimize its shading and contrast to look good in monochrome. Color and black-and-white are two very different cinematic languages, so it was a meticulous process of translation. Just turning off the color doesn't come remotely close.
I'm still slightly annoyed that I bought WotW on Blu-ray about a year before the Criterion Collection released their edition, but I believe the special features are a bit different between the two, and there are certainly worse films out there to double-dip on.
I know GM1MC went through a much more involved process, but my point was that I wondered whether seeing WotW in a MC version would hit differently similar to how GM1MC hit a bit differently. It might feel more "of the time" in which it was made, especially given how 'long ago' that was now? I still don't really know whether it was worth it to pick up GM1MC as anything other than a curiosity, though.
