My ideal way is to wait a long period of time between viewings of one film that I liked. This way, I can forget that one film and come back to it so that I can get that same enjoyment of when I first viewed it. In the case of the first three Star Wars films however, that is no longer possible since I’ve been involved in doing audio projects for them and I have to watch them to see if my work is done well. It’s like listening to a popular song. You first heard it over the radio and you’ve enjoyed it so much in that first listen. You would listen to that song repeatedly for hours and days to get that same ‘high’ of enjoyment. After a while, when you reached that 100th listen, that enjoyment starts to wear-off.
Before that, I had the first two films on CED disc in the 1980’s and I would watch them often for a year until my player broke in 1985. I, then, got a VCR (finally), but I never bothered buying the Star Wars films on tape. Fast-forward to 1991, I made a visit to a once-popular department store and I saw a home-theater display that contained a Toshiba 4:3 47-inch big-screen TV, a Sony laser-disc player, two Sony tower speakers with powered subwoofers and a comfortable sofa where people were watching a movie on that TV without a care in the world-the salesmen nor security men weren’t telling these people to move along. On a whim, I bought the Star Wars Trilogy “Definitive Collection” Laserdisc box set (despite my not having a LaserDisc player), went straight back to that department store and started playing ANH. Because of the size of the TV, the letterboxed picture was enough to put the black borders in my peripheral version. The remastered soundtrack was crisp-sounding coming out of those Sony speakers. Those speakers also did a good job in making the explosions rumble.
Into the playing of these discs in the store, customers and even the salesmen were gathering around the ‘living room’ area to see how this movie looked and sounded in that home theater set-up. One mother came in with her children and the kids were sitting close to the TV-screen in front of the sofa to watch the flying space ships. Each week, I brought in a different Star Wars movie to play in the store without objection from the salesmen. The store didn’t have any LaserDiscs to sell, so, I like to think that I was doing that store a favor by my playing these discs with the store’s equipment.
Having not seen the films for over 6 years, watching them with that home-theater set-up was the best that I can get of enjoying the films outside of the theater when I first saw them.
Nowadays, after viewing the SW films via ‘film-with-live-orchestra’ concerts, I can go for long periods of time without seeing the Star Wars films, so, I can wait forever for the completion of ‘4K80’