In 1968 maakte Stanley Kubic misschien wel de beste science fiction film ooit. Want 2001: A Space Odyssey behoord nog altijd tot mijn vele favorieten. Sterker mijn computers hebben namen van karakters en personen uit de film, zo heet oa mijn laptop Hal9000 (incl achtergrond). Anyway wat blijkt nu in een zoutmijn in Kansas is nu door zeventien minuten aan verloren footage gevonden. Iets zegt me nu (als dit geen reclame stunt is) dat er over een tijdje een speciale limited edite van 2001: A Space Odyssey zal gaan verschijnen met deze extra beelden.

While conducting research for a now-cancelled documentary on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Warner Brothers found 17 minutes of "lost footage" from the film, perfectly preserved in a Kansas salt mine. According to reports, 2001 sfx supervisor Douglas Trumbull mentioned the footage in a Toronto presentation last week. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick cut out approximately this amount of the film shortly after it was premiered. According to a post in this online forum by someone who was at Trumbull's lecture, those are the scenes that were found in the storage facility.

The film originally premiered at 160 minutes. After the premiere, director 'Stanley Kubrick' removed about 19 minutes' worth of scenes and made a few changes:

• Some shots from the "Dawn of Man" sequence were removed and a new scene was inserted where an ape pauses with the bone it is about to use as a tool. The new scene was a low-angle shot of the monolith, done in order to portray and clarify the connection between the man-ape using the tool and the monolith.
• Some shots of Frank Poole jogging in the centrifuge were removed.
• An entire sequence of several shots in which Dave Bowman searches for the replacement antenna part in storage was removed.
• A scene where HAL severs radio communication between the "Discovery" and Poole's pod before killing him was removed. This scene explains a line that stayed in the film in which Bowman addresses HAL on the subject.
• Some shots of Poole's space walk before he is killed were removed.