I fell in love with it as the scratchy, semi-coherent version with a rock soundtrack that MuchMusic ran when I was high school. At university a friend of mine found an English translation of the novelization of Von Harbou’s script, which explained a lot of the missing plot elements (like what Jehoshaphat is off doing for half the story). Each restoration added a bit more back in, and there was a huge jump 10-15 years back when the Murnau Foundation did a frame-by-frame clean-up, and I could suddenly see that the acting and makeup had been much more naturalistic than I’d originally thought.

Recently I also found out that we kind of owe Curt Siodmak’s screenwriting career, and possibly his brother’s directing career, to Metropolis: Siodmak was a journalist who visited the set to write a behind-the-scenes article (I think he actually became an extra for the inside scoop) and decided to switch to moviemaking.