I tried watching The Empire Strikes Back on mute while listening to The Wrath Of Khan score recently . It didn’t really work as a whole , but if you separate certain tracks and play them over certain scenes , it works pretty well . The track "Surprise Attack " from the Khan score worked very well when played over the battle of Hoth , just as the ion cannon fires .
I moved onto another weird way of watching the Star Wars movies , I call it the surreal flashback order. I patched in my little crt,vcr combo to my big 55 inch lcd through the vcr .Stereo tv in front , mono tv in back of me .Started with 95 pan and scan faces vhs of A New Hope , followed by 2000 collectors letterbox Phantom Menace vhs ( turned my tv settings to black and white ) and then TESB 95 pan and scan vhs , followed by pan and scan vhs of AOTC ( again in black and white )and then 95 pan and scan ROTJ. I have gotten this far in my marathon. I don’t have Revenge Of The Sith on vhs , so Iam thinking of watching either the dvd or 2011 blu ray . For that one , my 55 inch lcd is 3d enabled and has color settings which can put a green ,blue or red filter over the image . I am thinking of watching ROTS with a red filter over it the whole time .
While not the way I would watch the movies all the time , it’s been a fun experiment so far .Watching TPM in black and white after ANH , you can really see the parallels and how much it repeats things from the original movie .Plus ,in black and white , it feels more like a flashback and kind of a high tech version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis mixed with the old Flash Gordon serials .The only real “spoilers” are Yoda and Jabba and you could assume Anakin is just Luke’s father at this point ,as they don’t reveal yet that he is to become Darth Vader .Plus , it starts to set up and foreshadow that something is not quite right with Obi-Wan’s telling of events in ANH
Watching the 95 faces set in full screen vhs in this marathon , gives the whole thing a surreal , dream like feel with the slight fuzziness and softer colors .
For AOTC vhs fullscreen in black and white ,after watching TESB, the image gets larger as the back story is made more clear . In black and white , the film noir aspects of the film are enhanced , especially during Obi Wan’s detective like mission , harkening back to old detective film noir of the 30s and 40s .
And watching ROTS completely in Red , I think may give the movie even more of a decent into Hell vibe and be very surreal . It will provide the last piece of the puzzle for the original 6 films and end in tragedy ,with a note of hope at the end .Now that I think of it , I may switch back to full color at the end when Luke and Leia are on Alderran and Tatooine .
I may continue on with the sequel trilogy , but mix in the anthology films with them and watch them on different displays .