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Post #1351668

Author
oojason
Parent topic
Articles & info that highlight / call for a classic version release of the Original Trilogy
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1351668/action/topic#1351668
Date created
3-Jun-2020, 9:54 AM

Star Wars original cuts on Blu-ray: the evidence’:-

Rumours suggest that original cuts of Star Wars are heading to Blu-ray. But how likely is that? Ryan weighs up the possibilities…

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/star-wars-original-cuts-on-blu-ray-the-evidence - a 2014 article
 

a snippet…
 

"For many Star Wars fanatics, the special edition release of the Original Trilogy back in 1997 was a bittersweet moment. On one hand, it offered us the chance to see George Lucas’s space opera films in their natural habitat: on a huge cinema screen.

Then there’s the restoration to consider: Lucasfilm took the original Star Wars negatives from its archives and cleaned them up, removing years of dirt and scratches, and restoring the colours to their original balance. Thanks to the efforts of people like effects supervisor Dave Carson and his team, Darth Vader’s outfit was once again black and imposing, not an embarrassing shade of faded blue.

During this process, however, George Lucas decided to make a number of small yet significant alterations: the insertion of new effects shots, an entire song-and-dance sequence in Return Of The Jedi, and, most infamously, a change to Han’s fateful meeting with Greedo in A New Hope. Further alterations were made when the Original Trilogy made its way to DVD and then Blu-ray, which quickly led to a persistent question among Star Wars fans: when might we see a release of restored yet otherwise unmodified versions of the original films?

For George Lucas, there was one simple answer: never. Back in 2004, Lucas told The Today Show, “I’m not going to spend the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.”

Fans, it seemed, would have to make do with the bonus feature on the DVDs released in 2006: some decidedly threadbare original cuts taken from an old Laserdisc edition released in 1993. Otherwise, there are the various fan-made ‘de-specialised’ edits to be found on the internet. For the past eight years, the chances of seeing an official, high-quality, remastered edition of the Star Wars Original Trilogy have grown increasingly slim.

But over the past few days, rumours have begun to circulate that, with George Lucas now in retirement and Lucasfilm in the hands of Disney, the original theatrical cuts of Star Wars could be appearing on Blu-ray after all. It’s a story that has generated no small amount of excitement, but understandably, quite a bit of scepticism."
 

and…

"When George Lucas argued against an unaltered restoration of Star Wars in 2004, he said that he wasn’t willing to “spend the […] millions of dollars” on the process of making it. Two years later, Lucasfilm stated that the “negatives of the movies were permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions.”

Taken at face value, this might suggest that a HD theatrical cut of Star Wars would not only be commercially unviable, but also technically difficult. Yet according to an Ars Technica article published in May this year, such a restoration would not only be possible, but also relatively cheap to produce. Star Wars expert Michael Kaminski suggests that a new, 4K scan of the trilogy would “likely be under a million dollars” – hardly a huge sum of money for a Hollywood studio.

What’s more, it emerged in July that a company called Reliance Media Works had created a 4k 16-bit remaster of the original Star Wars trilogy. Reliance’s demo reel even shows off its work on Star Wars:

While we don’t yet know whether Reliance’s conversion was based on the original theatrical cuts or the Special Edition, it seems highly likely that some kind of high-resolution release is being prepared."