Funny Girl may not be so old, but she still needed a major facelift.

The 1968 musical bio of stage comedienne Fanny Brice that won Barbra Streisand a Best Actress Academy Award (she tied with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter) has received a major restoration from Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has brought it back to its original “road show” format with overture and intermission.

The restored 155-minute version recently received a limited theatrical release. Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment is set to release the movie on DVD Oct. 23 at $24.95.

The restoration process began around 1996 — before the advent of DVD — as part of the studio’s ongoing effort to restore and preserve its extensive library of films, says Grover Crisp, v.p. of asset management and film restoration for Sony Pictures.

“This was not done for the DVD. It was done because it needed to be done,” Crisp says. “One of the benefits of it was that we were prepared with good material when the DVD came up on the schedule.”

Literally hundreds of fixes were made to the film, ranging from covering up tears to replacing entire reels, he says. It was well worth the effort. “To look at the film now, you’re not going to see any of those repairs,” Crisp says. “You can’t tell what has been replaced — it’s that good.”

The reason for all this work is simple: the original negative was used some 300 times to strike prints for the film’s initial run. It was a common practice among studios through the 1970s, Crisp notes; as a result, it sustained some major damage.

“It’s a very punishing process to put a film through,” he says. “Funny Girl is the perfect example of this — they made a lot of prints off the original negative when it was being released and the film was damaged during that process in quite a few places.”

For the restoration, Sony replaced about 20% of the negative, using “a pretty good set” of separation masters — black and white positive film elements made from the original negatives and containing the yellow, cyan and magenta color records.

“When you recombine these three separation film elements you can make a new negative that essentially replicates the original,” Crisp says. “Using these negatives we were able to create new replacement sections for virtually all the damaged sections.”

The rest of the negative needed hundreds of repairs to fix torn perforations and splices and the like, he says. The “People” song sequence illustrates one gauge of just how badly the film was damaged over the years. The negative for that section was destroyed in 1968 from overprinting. It was simply junked and replaced with a subpar dupe, Crisp says.

“It was so poor that it actually had superimposed over it another scene — it was very faint — from another part of the film,” he says.

The soundtrack for the sequence was also out of sync by a considerable measure, he says. “That was an example of where we replaced it in its entirety and it looks pretty good now, I think,” Crisp says of the sequence.

In addition, the restoration team dug up the film’s original six-track stereo sound masters and digitally restored them. It marks the first time since its original release theatrical audiences have heard Funny Girl in stereo. That stereo sound is preserved on the DVD’s Dolby Digital 5.0 soundtrack.

Over all, the film’s restoration consisted of old-fashioned, painstaking lab work over three years, Crisp notes. “That’s one reason it takes so long,” he says. “It’s a long process.

"It’s not an easy thing to work with those kinds of materials and make those new sections and have those sections match in well with the new material.”