It’s been a while, but we did it. The complete German Das Imperium schlägt zurück - Despecialized Edition 2.1 is finally finished!

Based on Harmy’s The Empire Strikes Back - Despecialized Edition 2.0 (encoded from his lossless raw footage, thanks again Harmy!) we‘ve yet again set out to re-construct the German theatrical experience from December 1980 as closely as possible. Picture-wise this “only” means we had to re-create the German title cards and opening crawl (the latter sourced from a 35mm print of the original crawl - including the ZÜRUCK-typo), as neither TESB nor ROTJ featured German end credits.

So, why is this called 2.1 you might ask? Well, this version is different from Harmy’s 2.0 in a few more aspects: The end credits are now completely sourced from a 35mm scan (no more GOUT-upscale here), plus there’s one shot of Han and Leia in the Cloud City apartment that somehow always bothered me in Harmy’s DeEd. So that shot is now completely replaced with a cleaned-up version from TN1’s Grindhouse release. That goes for a few other shots as well (Harmy, you sneaky bastard!).

Still, most of the work went into synching and editing a selection of German audio tracks (Thanks to cvs and J.J._McQuade for their help on these!), first and foremost a GOUT-based stereo track with missing material re-inserted, to mimic the theatrical audio experience from 1980. Furthermore we’ve added two Laserdisc stereo tracks, the 1993 SilverScreen Edition and the 1995 THX release. As a fourth audio option we’ve included a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track, edited from the 2011 Blu-ray. English 5.1 (by hairy_hen) and 1.0 (by Puggo and Mavimao) are also included, as well as an isolated music track containing only John Williams’ film score. Optional German and English subtitles were added as well, taken from Catbus’ Project Threepio.

Technical Specifications:

      FORMAT:   MKV  
        SIZE:   18.2GB  
       VIDEO:   1280x720p h.264 23.976 fps  
       AUDIO:   TRACK 1) 1980 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]
                TRACK 2) 1993 SilverScreen LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]   
                TRACK 3) 1995 THX LD 2.0 @ 384 kbps [German]  
                TRACK 4) 2011 Blu-ray 5.1 DTS-HD @ 768 kbps [German]  
                TRACK 5) 1980 5.1 DTS-HD @ 1536 kbps [English]  
                TRACK 6) 1980 16mm 1.0 DTS-HD @ 192 kbps [English]  
                TRACK 7) Isolated Score 2.0 @ 224 kbps
   SUBTITLES:   German, English

Screenshots:

The German Blu-ray-sized covers, labels and inserts can be downloaded HERE.