Originally posted by: klokwerk
You're from Australia, boris? No, wellington actually.I can say that yes, that's true. While the Theatrical version of E.T. was released alongside the digitally altered version, Australia didn't get it at all.

No, but here I can go down to the local shops and have them import a version for me, if its not released in NZ and if they haven't already imported it and put it on the shelf (or if I just specifically want the overseas version). Of course I can also order online, as I sometimes do. A majority of the DVD's on our shelves are imported from Australia, and so as I've not seen an Aus DVD of E.T. being sold with the theatrical version lead to me to assume it's not been released here, nor there. We're not the only country in the world which relies on international releases either, which is why it would bother me greatly if Blu-Ray and HD-DVD tried to impose region coding on us - as you probably know, it is illegal to sell region-locked DVD players in NZ - and how Playstation and XBox get away with it I don't know, but the fact of the matter is that retailers are responcible for ensuring that every DVD player they sell will play all DVD regions or they can't sell it.

From what I've heard Aus has 4-5 times the number of movies released by local DVD distributors then we do, and the USA/Canada have more then 50 times the number of movies we do (which is why it's legal to import them from foreign distributors for retail - they call that parallel importing, and it's legal to parallel import movies, music, books and I think software and computer games too). Removing the vaseline smudge under the speeder in SW is roughly the same as removing the cobra reflection - its digital fudging and something they couldn't have done when the movie was made.