So is there any progress on this project? In the meantime can anybody point me in the right direction as to where I might be able to find HDTV rips at least? They don’t seem to be on MySpleen or public trackers.
Currently, there are 10 Star Wars films, and 12 if you count the Ewok films. The Last Jedi and the Han Solo film are just about done, it will only take editing the footage and it’s done.
Where are you getting 10 from?
7 main films plus Rogue One is only 8. If we count The Clone Wars that’s 9. Are you counting the Holiday Special for number 10 or am I missing something obvious?
A movie with Jabba as the protagonist could never work. You can’t make a relatable character out of a massive immobile slug. A movie centered around Jabba’s Palace and his criminal empire in general could possibly maybe work, but it would take an auteur to pull it off right. If it was done right though, it might actually be something fun and original. But I’m not holding my breath.
With all the discussions that go on with fans in the SW community about how disappointing the PT is, the things it should and shouldn’t have been, and people having their own personal canons from watching the OT, it’s hard to imagine a Studio or ambitious fan filmmakers to not take a crack at it.
None of that is mainstream though. The films were still enormously successful at the box office, still widely known, and most of the general public doesn’t have a problem with them. Star Wars is Star Wars to them. It’s definitely not worth Disney’s time and money to appeal to a niche group of jaded OT fans, and it’s delusional to think it will happen when they don’t even show any interest in releasing the OUT.
How much did control did George really have over that sort of thing at the time?
Well I know for a fact that he approved the Holiday Special at least. He claims he didn’t pay much attention to it as it was produced and has since disowned it, but still, he let it happen. So that kind of trumps all, doesn’t it?
It’s not gonna happen regardless. They are making use of the prequel properties that were part of their 4 billion dollar purchase (e.g. Darth Maul, Mace Windu, even Jar Jar) and are not going to stop. For instance, the prequels are going to be in the upcoming Battlefront sequels. And I was just at Disney World recently and rode the updated Star Tours ride, and they had spent who knows how much money and time revamping the ride to include prequel (and sequel) characters and locations. They’re not gonna overwrite all that now. Also they were using Maul and prequel footage in their Star Wars stage/firework shows and the crowd seemed to love it as much as the rest. There is a sizable portion of the fanbase (particularly the “younglings”) who would be outraged if they did it anyway. And there are many more movies they could spend money on that would cover different ground and would not piss off those fans. Just gotta accept it, the prequels are here to stay.
Lucas was an artist who became a businessman though.
Would 1970’s George have allowed this to be made?
Possibly, yeah. There was a TON of Star Wars crap that was made in the 1970s, and not all of it was quality. Remember, 1970s George allowed the HOLIDAY SPECIAL to be made.
Also the idea that he “became” a businessman rather than was one from the start is wrong. The smartest decision Lucas ever made was to forego his director’s salary for the marketing rights to Star Wars. From that moment on he was a businessman – an enormously successful businessman with an empire (no pun intended) at his disposal.
But what’s weird about George is that he never stopped being a somewhat insane artist either. I DO think that some of his more outlandish or controversial decisions were probably made with profit in mind, but others were undoubtedly the result of a mad artist letting his creative impulses run rampant without anyone to rein him in. Not to mention in the years between the trilogies it seems he became detached from the inventive spark that drove him in the first place, so those impulses were not as good as they were before (and they were never perfect mind you).
Obi-Wan Kenobi? Now there’s a movie I’ve wanted to see for a long time… A long time.
Seriously this is the only rumored anthology movie concept I genuinely wanted to happen. If they use Ewan and go for a kind of Western vibe, as some have suggested, it could be great. Why? Because even though the character is familiar, the concept is different for a Star Wars movie. A smaller-scale, character-driven movie that’s about more relatable struggles and not about saving the universe or giving us answers to questions we never asked? That would be refreshing. See: Logan. In fact I can see this having a lot of parallels with Logan.
I’m afraid this movie is going to suck. I have no desire whatsoever to see anyone, anywhere, ever play Han Solo but Harrison Ford. It’s not like James Bond; Solo IS Ford. There is no Han Solo without him, only an impostor. Indiana Jones I might be a little more open to re-casting, maybe, but not this.
So the movie is DOA for me for that reason alone. Add the fact that from everything I’m hearing it seems like just another fan service mash-up like Rogue One that, again like Rogue One, tells a pointless story which over-explains the background of the original film, and it just holds no interest for me whatsoever. I don’t want to know Han’s backstory dammit! Some things are better left to the imagination.
Disney is starting to worry me. I was initially excited at the prospects of expanding Star Wars with a constant stream of new movies, but they just keep milking the same cows over and over again. The possibilities for this universe are so vast that it’s incredibly disappointing they can’t seem to do anything more original with it.
In an ideal PT Maul shouldn’t have used light sabers either and Dooku shouldn’t have used force lightning.
The way it is now is so inconsistent with the OT. Vader and Dooku are fallen Yedi. Why would Dooku be able to use force lightning when Vader obviously couldn’t in the OT (and RO)? Despite the facts that there was more time between the PT and the OT than between TPM and AOTC and Vader beeing the chosen one and Dooku not.
Vader can’t use force lightning because it would fry his suit. That’s literally what killed him.
Rogue One was awful. I find it even less watchable than the other prequels, if not “worse” as a film. At least they weren’t just fucking boring. At least they were unique. At least they were memorable, with memorable moments and memorable characters. At least they actually felt like Stat Wars and didn’t feel like some generic shitty sci-fi would-be flop that just happened to have a Star Wars skin on it.
The fact that Rogue One has a terrible, rushed score from some random composer rather than a John Williams score is enough to demonstrate just how un-Star Wars this film really is. It’s dull, drab, and dreary. Star Wars films are supposed to be full of excitement, color, and life. Things Rogue One had zero of. Only thing it had less of was characters with personality, characters the audience related to and were invested in, and a story that was interesting and unpredictable. It did have a lot of cringeworthy and forced fan service though, I’ll give it that.
I don’t give a damn how “adult” the movie is, because adult movies can still suck. If anything it’s the opposite of what I look for when I watch Star Wars anyway, which is to revive the child inside me for a moment. Rogue One killed him.
They should have just stuck with the Tobey Maguire version and connected that to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Those movies were pretty good(with exception of the 3rd).
This was the only chance I would see the movie, if they did this. It was a brilliant idea. It would have retained some continuity with the only good Spider-Man movies (the first two – second one was one of the best superhero movies ever) and skipped out on the origin (and if they are indeed not showing that, it makes even less sense for him to be in high school) and all the teenage angst BS. Christ, it would have been different for a change!
Ironically, the only way for Marvel to really be original with this movie was to go back so they could move forward with new plots and ideas. Adult, married Spider-Man is a completely untapped aspect of the character on film and fits in much better with the other Marvel heroes. But no, they cast yet another fucking high school aged British brat in it instead.
I can’t imagine anything I want to see less than another Spider-Man movie about a “nerdy” teen learning how to superhero while dealing with high school problems (second reboot with this concept within five years!), let alone one intertwined with the incredibly repetitive and increasingly obnoxious and convoluted MCU. It would be hard enough to get me to spend my limited filmgoing money on either type of film these days. Making it both instantly made me lose any and all interest I might have had in this movie. I doubt I’ll even see it when it’s available to rent, no matter how good the reviews are, because I just do not care and absolutely nothing could make me.
People here are actually nitpicking about the precise meaning of “the same” as though it is literally intended to mean exactly the same, and are apparently doing so as a means of avoiding confronting the very strong overall points you make or engaging in any kind of serious discussion about them. What a surprise.
People can keep their heads in the sand all they want, but I’ve been saying for a while now that Disney’s Star Wars (like Disney’s Marvel) has a very strict formula it is going to continue to follow until it has milked it for all it’s worth. The result is that, like the endless stream of comic book movies, all the new Star Wars movies that come out each year are going to feel like they are essentially the same movie. It may not be a bad movie, but it is the same movie, and it will get old. The magic of Star Wars will be sucked dry, and the excitement around the release of each new film increasingly diluted. You can have too much of a good thing.
And for me, Rogue One wasn’t even a good thing. I genuinely enjoy watching the prequels more, if for nothing else than “so bad it’s good” value. This movie was just fucking boring and brought absolutely nothing new or interesting to the table for me. I’ll reserve final judgment until I see them, but if it is indeed an indicator of the direction Star Wars is going (especially the EU/“anthology” films), that’s a worrying sign for the coming films.
Movies made annually for the sole purpose of exploiting a financially lucrative property rather than out of any kind of creative impulse are not art. I’m sorry, but they just aren’t. And their appeal to me is very limited. If a day comes when I don’t even bother seeing the new Star Wars movie because they’ve just become so fucking endless and bland, that will be a sad day for me.
Not that I NEEDED more reason to hate the silly, mediocre fan-fic that is the nuEU
I hope you’re not implying that the original EU wasn’t also silly, mediocre fan-fic…
Also, since Darth Maul surviving was in the TV series, it’s technically not EU at all.
canofhumdingers said:
But there’s a reason it’s rarely included on lists like the AFI’s top 100.
Star Wars (the original/ANH) is number 13 on AFI’s top 100 list, and most people seem to agree ESB is even better.
Obi-Wan has a different scream when he scares off the sand people in each version. 97 is the same as the original, 2004 has a new scream that is OK (but, like so many other changes, begs the question of why it was made), and 2011 has an unintentionally hilarious and terrible new scream.
I think the Luke/Leia thing very obviously was foreshadowing, or at least a hint. Maybe they hadn’t decided definitively that was the road they were going down yet, but this more than conveniently left a strong opening for it. No one will convince me it wasn’t at least thought of at the time. The fact that she alone senses Luke in a very similar way to Vader in the same scene is too much to be a coincidence.
As for the Lando and Han line, pretty sure it’s only to emphasize how similar the characters are in terms of personality and background.
I like to think if I ABSOLUTELY had to give an in-universe reason, it’s down to the fact that Leia is Force-sensitive and can remember the strong emotions her mother experienced during childbirth etc.
That’s the BS excuse I’ve always heard.
Just FYI, “high res audio” is a fraud, a marketing gimmick based on pseudoscience. It is not physically possible to hear frequencies that high. A standard CD already captures everything within human hearing range and then some, after you’ve reached the age you’re likely to care about audio quality your hearing won’t even be able to reach that, and the vast majority of music does not make use of anywhere near the dynamic range supposedly offered by this “higher resolution.” All it does is waste disk space. It’s useful only in studios for purely technical reasons, utterly useless for the end consumer.
This explains it better than I could:
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
As for Star Wars, I would advise seeking out the 1993 anthology CD set for the best sound and more complete versions of the OUT soundtracks.
Last I heard, back in '97 they did “conform” the negatives to the SEs, but they did NOT destroy the original frames they replaced. They did in fact preserve them. They simply spliced them out and spliced the new frames into the negative. That’s why it is both true that the O-neg is “conformed” to the SE and that everything is preserved.
Regardless, we know for a fact that there is nothing stopping them from restoring the originals. Not only should everything from the original negative be preserved in one form or another, but even if it wasn’t, lower generation copies certainly still exist. There really is no excuse, even if it wouldn’t be absolutely perfect. If fans here can make acceptable versions with only publicly released materials (well, until the 35mm scans anyway - but even with just the upscaled GOUT it was OK), then they certainly can make better versions with the resources at their disposal no matter what condition the original negatives are in.
Bottom line is there is zero technical excuse for them not to do it. Films that were in far, far worse shape or come from far, far weaker sources that have far, far less demand have been meticulously restored. No reason whatsoever not to do it here.
I think I read somewhere that in the original ROTJ novelization (which I believe was supposed to be canon, might be wrong and not sure if it still is even if it was), Vader does disappear and Luke does only burn his suit.
That wouldn’t explain anything because we see Vader die on-screen and he doesn’t disappear immediately, unlike Obi-Wan and Yoda.
Obi-Wan disappeared more immediately than Yoda, who kind of faded away slowly after he took his last breath whereas Obi-Wan was gone instantly before the lightsaber even went all the way through him. So that’s already inconsistent. You can come up with some sort of convoluted Lucas logic to explain why Vader might take even longer, like the residual functioning of the suit kept his heart pumping or the Force had to take extra time to sort out his soul because he was Vader and the chosen one or whatever bullshit. We don’t actually see his corpse for long. It’s plausible that he disappears right after the scene cuts. Point is it makes at least a little more sense than him just not disappearing at all.
I guess the other explanation could be that something about the cremation ritual would allow both Vader and Qui-Gon to become force ghosts, like only if the body is gone can you be a ghost. If that is the case, then perhaps that is the “secret” Qui-Gon discovered and passed on to Obi-Wan and Yoda, who then used the Force in their last moments to will their bodies to disappear so they could live on as ghosts. (Which is consistent with the meditation stance Obi-Wan appears to take right before he dies, like he is putting all of his remaining energy into something.) But it wasn’t necessary for Vader since he was cremated anyway.
That only really works though if the Jedi did not routinely use cremation and Qui-Gon was an exception for some reason. If they did, you would think there would be lots of other dead Jedi ghosts who would have communicated with the living at some point. But I don’t know what else makes Qui-Gon so special, and is also consistent with Vader becoming a force ghost despite not disappearing on-screen. The fact that both were cremated is all they have in common, and the thing that all the known force ghosts have in common is that their bodies dissolved somehow, either by incineration or evaporation.
I think I read somewhere that in the original ROTJ novelization (which I believe was supposed to be canon, might be wrong and not sure if it still is even if it was), Vader does disappear and Luke does only burn his suit. It’s still possible that it happens off-screen in the film, though I don’t know why they wouldn’t show that and I also think I read somewhere that they originally did intend to. My guess it that perhaps they wanted it to be a surprise when he appears to Luke at the end.
As for Qui-Gon, no clue. Lucas probably didn’t intend for him to be a force ghost when filming TPM, but then he felt compelled to overexplain everything in ROTS so he made Qui-Gon the “original” force ghost Obi-Wan “learned” it from. Which is stupid and takes away from the mysticism of the originals like many other things in the prequels. The whole “I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” thing worked better in the originals as it was. And the fact that Vader looked surprised when Obi-Wan disappears means he did not know about this “technique” and it’s doubtful he somehow “learned” it before he died, so it would have made a lot more sense if they just made it a spiritual thing only accessible to the most powerful Jedi with the strongest connection to the force, not something they had to consciously learn.
SilverWook said:
Wouldn’t it be easier to have a character in the sequel die when they were supposed to, rather than alter the date given in the original movie though? 😉I don’t know, I’ve never seen the sequel. But a Google search tells me they wanted the character to die on New Year’s Eve specifically as part of the narrative, so the date had to be changed. Whatever.
Just like the OOT had to be changed to conform to three movies made two decades later. Whatever. 😉
A date being slightly changed in an on-screen text epilogue in a film that I don’t really care about is pretty different to me from throwing Hayden Christensen into one of the defining films of my childhood. I literally could not possibly care less about the former and don’t think it’s the same thing at all.
SilverWook said:
At this point, if I’m still alive in 2020, I will be very surprised.
And what’s to keep them from yanking the football away once again three years from now, in Lucy Van Pelt-ian glee? Not getting any younger here. 😉
Oh there’s no guaranteeing they won’t. I would not put it past them. Maybe it will be 2023 when the whole trilogy is 40 years old. Maybe everything will be VR by the time it comes out. Maybe they will wait until George dies. Maybe they never will and we’ll forever have to cling to these preservations until we all die out. In any case, at this point I would just say we shouldn’t count on anything. I was so sure it was going to happen this year and be announced this week and then… It wasn’t. That was it for me. That was my last “hope” for Disney, gone. I just don’t care anymore. I’m just glad this site is around.
If you go to other Star Wars communities (Reddit specifically in my example), what I end up seeing are people who know the SE was changed, but want a cut that reverts the meme changes (Han Solo shooting first, NOOOOOOO!) but retains some of the more drastic changes (like the CGI fighters, Hayden as Anakin’s ghost, nevermind some people don’t seem to realize anything’s wrong with the colour grading)
I.E. the Star Wars community seems to want Revisted, not the OOT.
Yeah, that’s another thing. The younglings who grew up on and like the SEs and prequels, who populate reddit and TFN and other boards… They represent a larger slice of the SW fan base now than this site does. The fact is the SEs in one form or another have now been around as long as the originals were pre-SE. Longer, in fact, in the case of ESB and ROTJ.