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Post #1213745

Author
hairy_hen
Parent topic
Info: Star Wars - What is wrong and what is right... Goodbye Magenta
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1213745/action/topic#1213745
Date created
1-Jun-2018, 4:08 PM

Plenty of pinkish flashes happening during explosions and such. Some of it is the actual light of the exploding thing that was photographed, and some of it comes from laser impacts having the entire screen deliberately tinted for one frame when it happens, as an added effect. The laser battles of the first movie are unique in this way because of it; none of the other films do this the way the first one does.

Nobody had a problem with this until the 2004 DVD came out and overemphasized it to a hideous degree. I never even really consciously noticed it until then. The problem in that version is a combination of the terrible color choices they made, and the physical deterioration of the film negative which results in the ghastly magenta blotches that spill out into everything. With the colors of the negative literally falling apart, things like this become increasingly screwed up in appearance, to the point they can’t be fully recovered without using picture information from an alternate source.

When you go back and look at original film print material, you can see that those flashes were indeed there from the start, but they don’t look bad the way they do on the DVD and Bluray. Sometimes it even is a pink or purple, too, not always a red or orange; but it’s a soft pink or purple that doesn’t look out of place with the surrounding colors, unlike the uncontrolled mess that covers much of the frame on the 2004 version.