[innerSpaceman]

Love this tale of opening day from a commenter to the link in the post above:

Originally Posted by woid

I'm one of the few living geezers who actually saw the full version — on 2001's opening day in New York, which, as I'll never forget, was April 4th, 1968. I saw it again shortly after the cuts were made. They were obvious — and to me, at least, not an improvement.

The first time HAL opens the pod bay doors, and the pod launches, we see the whole sequence in what seems like real time — very slow and stately. In the original cut, the subsequent pod scenes were handled the same way. I'm sure the repetition got a lot of criticism, and made that an easy target for cutting. I thought it was audacious and brilliant, and that it added to the suspense and tragedy when Dave goes out to rescue Frank's body, and has to deal with the same slow procedure.

Other cuts were not so obvious, though HAL's cutting of Frank's radio was another one that would have been better left in.

Getting back to 1968: I left the theatre in the psychedelic trance that 2001 (especially on the big screen) can invoke... Walked out into Times Square, and felt like I was in a dream state — it was eerily silent, shockingly different from the usual bustle of voices and cars. Down into the subway, also weirdly still. Then I saw somebody's copy of the New York Post, with a giant black EXTRA headline. Martin Luther King had just been shot in Memphis, and the news had broken during the couple of hours I was in space.