No joke - a voice actor I work with, Daniel Geduld, wanted to do a dub of The Turkish Star Wars. So that was going to be something I was going to be working on. That may or may not happen - it's on the backburner now. It's his project, not mine.
Anyway.
Yes, I was planning to release a Return of the Jedi Classic Edition before Christmas. However, there have been some delays, so that isn't going to happen in time now. I made the mistake of upgrading my copy of Final Cut Pro, and the new version wouldn't run unless I bought a bunch of new memory for my Mac .... six days later it still isn't here, for some reason.
I've moved on to other, more personal projects in the meantime, but Jedi Classic Edition is still something I intend to do.
I did watch the splitscreen film very carefully in preparation for this. It's clear that the biggest challenge is going to be the Ewok celebration at the end. (Lapti Nek being second.) Annoyingly, when the editors recut the scene, they cut pretty much all of the live-action shots short, splitting many of them up into two bits and removing a lot of original footage to obtain a faster, choppier pace.
I learned in the previous Classic Editions that it's easy to replace a single, self-contained effects shot and have that look fine, even if the quality of the sources differs. People expect effects shots to look a little different. But a normal, ordinary live action shot, that doesn't work ... when you have to cut from a DVD version of a normal live action shot to a laserdisc version, right in the middle of the shot, it never works and I always spend forever trying to make it look less horrible.
Han's "Yes, I'll bet you have" in the first Star Wars was a headache, and so was Lando's "Attention, this is Lando Calrissian" in Empire (which I eventually got a good version of, and I'm proud of the edit I did on that, but it was horrible and took many tries).
The Lapti Nek sequence in Jabba's palace poses some similar troubles, but less worryingly. The dumbest thing is that the special edition cuts to new footage of Boba Fett flriting with the dancers, twice, during otherwise untouched dialogue scenes.
As for the lightsabers, once again I'm in hell. Huge amounts of footage that are otherwise fine have to be redone by me because of the screwed up lightsabers - which are much worse in Jedi than in any other film. Palpatine's lightning, and all starfield backgrounds in the film, are also screwed up, but I'll generally leave that untouched.
As with the previous releases, there will be some very minor deliberate creative decisions made that will differentiate this restoration from previous versions of the film.
Han saying "It's all right, I can see a lot better" from the 70mm, album and Special Edition will be used rather than "It's all right, trust me." (I don't know if there are any other alternate line readings from Jedi - if anyone knows, clue me in, I might use some of them.)
The rancor will appear as recomposited in 2004. That's how the comp should have looked in the first place.
I am considering including the extra scene of Femi Taylor as Oola that was shot for the 1997 special edition. Although new it contains no CGI, and improves a scene which had a weak ending originally.
It's interesting to note that portions of the Jedi Special Edition feature previously-unseen footage which seems in all cases to be from the original 1983 shoot - for both Lapti Nek and the Ewok celebration. Some extra band shots, Luke hugging Wedge, lots more wide shots of Ewoks (unless somehow Lucas still had lots of Ewok costumes lying around), an extra shot of the three Jedi ghosts ...