On December 9, 1983 Return of the Jedi premiered in German cinemas. That same day at 21:15 CET a Making Of was broadcast on the German TV channel 2 (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen – ZDF).
It was the twelfth episode of a series of 45-minute reports related to the US called “Bilder aus Amerika” (Pictures of America) that ran on ZDF from 1982 to 1991. The two hosts, the renowned German journalists Dieter Kronzucker and Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs, were foreign correspondents for the ZDF at the time based in Washington and New York. With their new series they wanted to capture impressions, stories, and pictures of America (hence the show’s title) to bring the German audience closer to the US.
At the time the ROTJ episode of “Bilder aus Amerika” was one of the very few German TV shows - maybe even the only one - dealing at length with the making of the Star Wars Trilogy. It contains a lot of footage and a couple of interviews that were never included in any other Making-of-programme. So I think this is a real TV gem not only to German Star Wars fans.
It only aired once in 1983 and as far as we know it was not broadcast again anywhere in the world ever since. And this is where the problem with restoring it began. Back in 1983 a lot of German households didn’t own a VCR so there were limited opportunities to record the episode. This is one of the reasons why you can’t find the show anywhere on the internet today. I was one of the lucky kids who disposed of a VHS recorder back then so I was able to conserve this gem of German Star Wars television. In fact, this was the first recording I ever did on our then brand-new VCR.
A while back I got a hold of another copy of the programme. A friend of mine – who is a real video wizard – and I decided to restore and remaster the episode using the two sources available. We used the 640x480 25fps mp4-file we had, sent it through Hybrid / VapourSynth for a mild cleanup run and finally fed it to Topaz Gigapixel AI to upscale it to 720p. We also adjusted and remastered the audio, restored all the original title cards and credits from scratch and even added German and English subtitles. Since neither of us are English native speakers we had the English subtitles checked by a friend of mine who was born in the US - Thanks a lot for that, my dear!
We actually finished restoring the “Bilder aus Amerika” episode today, exactly 38 years after its initial broadcast. In the next months we will work on some additional details but basically the restoring process is finished today. And we’re glad about that because sometimes the project almost drove us to the edge of insanity …
In the next days I will post a couple of screenshots so you can get an idea of the rare footage contained in the programme.
The video is now released.
Project info:
x264 CRF14 720p/25fps inside a Matroska container (6,5 GB)
Reconstructed title cards based on the VHS copy
Reconstructed ZDF TV logo from 1983
Audio track 1 - Cleaned up German audio - Dolby Digital 2.0 @ 640kbps
Audio track 2 - Isolated audio (no German voice over in the interviews e. g.) - Dolby Digital 2.0 @ 640kbps
German and English subtitles
Runtime: 45 minutes