WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING ABOUT VIDEO? NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE VIDEO WILL BE LIKE! LASERDISK RIPS? WHERE IS THAT MENTIONED IN THE NEWS RELEASE??
Seriously. People are talking about LD rips as if it were fact. Was there a second press release i missed??
Jim Ward said the video will be from 1993 and inferior to the Lowry-restored 2004 release. Duh!! How does that translate to "we are taking the Laserdisk masters and putting them on dvd"? Were that the case, would it not make sense to use the 1995 THX release??
I'll tell you what Ward's comments MOST LIKELY mean. When the SE was first being worked on, the first thing they did was return to the original negatives, and it was found that they had deteriorated quite a bit, and so they began restoration work to clean them. When that was done, the newly-cleaned OOT prints were handed to ILM for the CGI additons. What year was this?
1993.
Did i hear complaints about the image quality in theaters in 1997? Hell no. But Ward is correct--they are inferior to the 2004 Lowry-restored prints. There may be a bit of dirt and scatches. But still. It looks good. Had Ward not informed us that the transfer will be from inferior 1993 prints we would have all assumed that we were getting Lowry-restored OOT's that look as good as the 2004, and then we would have seiged Skywalker Ranch in september when we discovered this was not the case.
The Lowry 2004 editions are the SE. They did not even touch the OOT for this--their starting point for the digital restoration was the 1997 SE print with CGI additions. That is why they must use the 1993 OOT master that they made for the original SE.
This is all of course unconfirmed but it is the only logical explaination. Time will tell and until we know more--KNOW ANYTHING, in fact--about the actual video we will have to shut up about. Dolby 2.0? That was what the films were originally released. I for one am pleased that we get this instead of a phony 1990's DD 5.1 mix.
There is so much complaining here about NOTHING that it is making me sick. We got what we wanted, and more i might add--the original theatrical edition of Star Wars has never been available on home video. So what the fuck is everyones goddamn problem?? Yeah, this should have been out years ago, and yeah i dont really want the 2004 disk with this, but so what? I mean thats not a big deal for gods sakes. At with a suggested retail price of $30, meaning it will actually be sold for $20-25 (no one sells for the ACTUAL retail price) I'd consider this the dvd bargain of the year.
Fuck.