The trilogies are coming to blu-ray next year, but...
Fuck you, George.Originally Posted by NY Times
The trilogies are coming to blu-ray next year, but...
Fuck you, George.
He's just... Diabolical.
Oh don't worry, I'm sure he'll eventually release the original movies on Blu-ray so you can buy them all over again!
No he won't he has stated repeatably that the Special Edition is the only 'real' version in his head. He is not going to waste his time or money on what he thinks is the inferior version.
It would be nice if the Bearded One would take a page from the latest Blade Runner reissue and give us every version in one reasonably-priced package. See also the ultimate collector's edition of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
We'll have to wait till he dies then.
Who said anything about waiting?
How expensive can it really be anyway, considering the large number of films they've actually done it for?
George's reasons for not remastering the original trilogy are suspect. Too expensive? Bull. He is richer than God now, mainly because of the poor quality "original" Star Wars. Lucasfilm can and I believe has an obligation to restore the original trilogy. Unless the rumors are true and Lucas destroyed the original negatives.
Then we need to take the SE editions and unSE them. This is completely doable.
Don't worry you're getting a new special special edition of all 6 films in another few years in 3D
I kid you not.
I don't think 3D is going to last that long.
Ah, they've been saying that for years. Given how badly post-processed 3D has worked out so far, I have a hard time believing George still has that little demon on his shoulder.
The "upgraded" version of Episode IV is painful to watch. Not because of the Solo / Greedo thing, though that's bad, but because he does things like have CGI giant lizards walk in front of the camera in the middle of a scene, and inserted the Jabba / Solo dialog which repeats, word for word, much of the Solo / Greedo dialog.
I don't recall the edits to the other two films being that bad. Offensive in places, like putting the whiny Christensen's image at the end of Jedi, but nothing that really destroys a section of the films like he did with IV.
In any case, I won't be buying any versions of the "special edition." Not as a form of pointless protest, but because I really don't like that version. And I seriously doubt we'll see a Blu Ray version of the originals - my understanding is the only reason we have a non-anamoprhic DVD version is that they did a transfer from the laser disc version.
- Gus
Been done:
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk/...r-changes.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-iYH...ayer_embedded#!
Last edited by VSys114; 08-15-2010 at 12:34 PM. Reason: to add working video
Yeah, pretty much every change in the Tatooine section of ANH is awful. I'd also like to know how Luke's saber ended up a minty green in the Falcon training sequence on DVD. I don't really mind the Anakin ghost replacement, but the "Jedi Rocks" musical number in Jabba's palace is a crime against humanity and is probably tied with Greedo for the title of "worst SE change" in my book.
The funny thing is, if you watch the SEs now, the CG looks pretty awful. It hasn't aged well at all, and it's really the only stuff in the films that doesn't hold up. He's going to have to do SE SEs if he wants them to truly be "timeless" as he claimed back in 1997.
This.
I was so psyched for the SE having only seen Star Wars on telly. Those cinema commercials with x-wings flying out of a tiny screen and suddenly everything was widescreen, full surround and kickass new explosions really spoke to me... and then the reality was the slapstick entrance to the space port, Greedo shooting first, Jabbas tail and that song and dance act - the only thing worse was the new ending to Return.
Like Dickwolves raping my childhood to sleep...
There are some good changes. The entire Death Star battle is vastly improved, I like the opening up of the Cloud City sets, and of course making the snowspeeder cockpits fully opaque is great. If the SEs were about enhancements like that and fixing little errors like the white sabers in ANH and cleaning up the rancor in RotJ, it would have been great. Adding scenes and weird little moments of slapstick and fourth-wall breaking, not so much.
My take on all this is when the original Star Wars movies started making bags of money for George Lucas, he was very careful to archive a lot of Star Wars related items (costumes, props, models, etc.). I imagine he archived away several copies of the movies as well.
When the SE versions came out, there must have been master copies of the original films to work with.
The adywan versions don't seem to be all that great.
adywan AVCHD vs HD Source (WARNING: image files are large)
Whatever. The point I was making was that people have reverse engineered the SE versions. I picked the first one I could find.
I agree with Lucas.
Now before you burn me at the stake, accept that I am a major star wars geek. Fuck it, I have lucas's autograph, and yodas, for that matter. Plus I'm the original 1977 saw it at the cinema age, so I know why people like the original.
if you read 'skywalking', the story of the making of SW, or any of the later books on the topic, you will know it was not a movie made under good circumstances. It was real "we have no money so just fucking deal with it george, nobody will see this shitty film anyway" time. There were major blazing rows about money. He had a major falling out with the sfx guy (dykstra) and the cameraman doing the lvie action stuff. George was very stressed, and hated a ton of things about the final movie.
So lucky times, he makes money and goes back and fixes everything he hated. I bet he cringes in a hundred places when he sees the original. Maybe he was talked into han shooting first at the time and regrets it. Maybe he didn't realise han would be such a hero for kids and hates the fact that character did that. For whatever reason, he wants to change it, and keep it changed.
if you really want, you can continue to see the original version. Nobody came to my house to demand I hand over the VHS tapes. What is unreasonable is to tell a guy who funds a movie, how to make his movie. Nobody will force anyone to buy the movies on Blue-Ray.
The real story of this is:
Dude makes film
Dude decides he wants to change some aspects of the film later during re-release.
Dude changes film.
I don't see why this makes the guy a worse villain than Osama Bin Laden.
What's unreasonable is to suggest it's unreasonable to critique a film.
I believe there's a special place in hell just for you.
Seriously though, it's about more than liking the original. ANH was the first movie that truly blew me away and showed me that not all moving pictures are equal. Polishing the special effects of the original is one thing, but changing stuff (like Han shooting first) and proclaiming this new version to be the "real" one, Lucas is effectively pissing on my childhood memories.
I remember seeing Star Wars when it came out and I was a ten year old boy whose only exposure to science fiction had been old '50s movies like Forbidden Planet. So Star Wars (NOT "A New Hope" Star effing Wars) of course blew me away. I remember walking out of the Naugatuck Valley Mall with my parents and looking at the high ceilings and skylights and thinking it looked just like the inside of the Corellian ship. I was Luke and my best friend was Han and my dog was Chewie, for like a year.
Nothing Lucas can do now will change my experience.
you still have your memories. he isn't using a death ray or anything. He released new versions of old things that are different.
Like I say, nobody need buy the new versions.
Different and almost universally deemed a failure of epic proportions. A taste of things to come, really.
As long as we don't mind keeping VCRs around.
Fuck Star Wars.
Is it so crazy to believe that some people want to see the old versions again? I don't give a crap that Lucas is suffer some sort of auteur delusion and he refuses to allow me to watch the originals. I just want to watch the fucking things.
Spike is running an OT marathon today, and I caught the last 30 minutes of Empire. For the life of me, I can't figure out why Lucas inserted the scenes of Vader commuting from Cloud City to his Star Destroyer. Did audience members really struggle with the "How did Vader get back to the Star Destroyer" question? It's not like he was going to stay on Bespin forever; who cares how he got back? Plus, it ruins the reveal of the Imperial Shuttle at the start of Jedi.
I guess Lucas was just practicing for the prequel trilogy, 40% of which is just people commuting.
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