Just watched SW 2.7. It’s been a while and I was reminded how awesome it is. Thanks Harmy and towne32!
I watch DeEd a lot, what I don’t generally watch is the SE versions (unbelievable thanks for that ability, as always, Harmy and all), so, in a similar spirit, when I do watch the SE’s it reminds me how awesome the DeEd is… And I’ve finally gotten around to watching the Rifftrax for the OT (forcing me to sit through every bit of the Blu-ray versions), and by God the changes stand out (be it aging CG, or just badly implemented ideas) worse than ever… As angry as I get watching the DeEd when I can’t help but think that the stuff I’m watching had to be fixed to be watchable, at least it is watchable, so that anger in no way compares to what comes over me when I see the SE crapfest play out before me… There are so many show stoppers, and it is like they’re each designed to hit you hard just after you might have settled back down from the previous horror (which actually might be the best comparison, SE changes are like jump scares in a bad horror movie, they’re unexpected, cheap and annoying, all the while reminding you how bad what you are watching is). Hell, some stuff is changed just for the Hell of it, regardless of the intent of a scene, the one I went off on and ranted about to people recently was such a small thing, but when you think about the point of the scene it was huge… I’m talking about the Dug (is it an aged Sebulba? Who knows) that they insert walking around Jabba’s throne room when just about EVERYONE IS SUPPOSED TO BE ASLEEP, THAT’S THE POINT OF THE SCENE… That really got to me this time, it is a great example of things being changed with no regard to story or proper scene establishment… Hell, he stole the scene… who’s thinking about everyone being asleep when there’s this CG thing noisily lumbering through…
(And if you really want to ruin watching the prequels and the SE’s, any time there’s anything CG [creature or filmed people interacting with digital surroundings], try to focus on whether their feet convincingly touch the floor… it is pretty rare they do.)
Overall, it was worth it to watch it all with Rifftrax, and hopefully when I watch OOT there won’t be too many jokes I can’t get out of my head. I will say there was one thing in their jokes that was inadvertently telling about the varying quality of the SE changes… When Han was released from the Carbonite, as all of us here know, the effects in that scene were changed for the SE’s, but to the layman, as the Rifftrax guys would be when compared to us, the new effects can be confused as an old effect and reflect poorly on what they think came from the original, “They spent all that money on that CG song and dance and left THIS effect untouched???”. Not to say the original effect was amazing, but it is unfair to the original work to redo it at all if they weren’t going to dramatically “improve” on it, it just makes things confusing and skews where blame should be placed for how things look in the SEs, often to the detriment of the original versions, which previously had award winning effects.
Anyway, that’s a long way around to saying the DeEd is amazing compared to the official Blu-rays, which I often start to lull myself into thinking I’m too harsh toward and that the movies can’t be as ruined and unwatchable as I often bitch about, only to be proven it is even worse than I have been complaining about. every… single… time.