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Post #1093335

Author
danny_boy
Parent topic
4K restoration on Star Wars
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1093335/action/topic#1093335
Date created
28-Jul-2017, 4:39 AM

Cobra Kai said:

DominicCobb said:

Cobra Kai said:

SilverWook said:

And Spielberg has re-edited the movie so many damn times, I don’t even know what his preferred cut is anymore.

Well, in fairness to him, he really only re-edited it once, which is his preferred “director’s cut”.
Since the theatrical version had to be rushed into theaters to save Columbia from Bankruptcy, Spielberg didn’t have time to shoot everything and so he requested extra money the next year to finish his cut.

As for the third “special edition” cut with the footage from inside the ship, Spielberg was 100% against it from the beginning, but the studio would not give him money for his cut unless he agreed to do it.

You’ve got it a little backwards. The special edition was second, and the director’s cut was third. All three have gotten proper home video releases of course, showing it’s actually not that hard to include multiple versions of a film in one set (there is however a TV cut I believe that’s basically the theatrical and SE put together that’s never gotten a true release).

I’m personally hoping it’s the director’s cut that goes in theaters as it’s sort of the best of both worlds in terms of theatrical vs. SE (though I’ve still never seen the SE - Spielberg said the Mothership’s interior wasn’t meant to be seen and that sounded about right to me).

Yeah, I know I didnt mean to imply that was the release order, but rather that the special edition was the least significant, since Spielberg never wanted to do it. I agree with him on not showing the inside of the mother ship, and I dont consider that one a legitimate cut of the movie.

Yeah

But what is interesting is that when Close Encounters was released on homevideo(VHS) in 1980-1981 it was the special edition. Yet there was no outcry regarding the fact the original version had disappeared into obscurity.
In fact a lot of “new” fans(i.e post 1980-81) simply assumed that Close Encounters always had looked the way it looked in the Special edition.

And for 10 long years it remained that way, until 1990, when the theatrical cut debuted on laserdisc.
Although technically, it was not 100% the theatrical cut because there were 2 special edition inserts that remained(at the behest of Speilberg himself)—the shot of the shadow of the alien ship looming over the darkened countryside and the end credit sequence which has the Copyright Caption marked: 1977,1980!.
Sure you had the the early 80’s tv versions too, which included all/some the excised footage of the theatrical + the special edition stuff.

But the 100% theatrical cut debuted on Blu Ray (to mark the 30th anniversary in 2007).
30 long years…yet at no point was there a movement to bitch about the fact that the original version had been suppressed.Even when the 20th anniversary came round in 1997/98 and Spielberg released his directors cut(which is inferior IMHO)…there was still nothing in terms of a reaction regarding the conspicuous absence of the 77’ cut.

Just goes to show that if the changes occur to something that does not have a lot of exposure then those changes get passed of as the definitive version.