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Originals: A New Preference

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I've bagged on you guys for years. YEARS. I love the whole saga (yes, including the prequels) and my preferences for the OT veered to the edited versions. I thought you guys were making a big deal out of, fundamentally, nothing really.

But I watched the original ANH and ESB the other night and I gotta tell ya... somehow they just seemed BETTER to me. The models, Clive Revill's voice, the original matte paintings, the monkeywoman, it all just rocked my socks. It also blows my mind what ILM was able to pull off with such limited resources, something that gets lost in the CGI brouhaha of the '97/'04 editions.

That's not saying the SE flicks don't have their moments (the expanded approach to Cloud City in ESB, for one) but if it has to be one or the other, for the first time I'd probably stick with the originals.

Every Vaseline blob under Luke's speeder, every jacked up matte line, every translucent box around the space ships, every flickering lightsaber, every effect in the originals tells a story -- even if unintentionally so.

I want that story preserved.
My preference is simple. I want remastered versions of precisely what we saw and heard for each Star Wars film on opening day.
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Welcome to the right side.

You know, it doesn't always have to be OOT versus SE, because why can't the two co-exist? It doesn't seem to be a problem for virtually every other film ever made in the history of the medium. And regardless of whether some people prefer the SE, theres a certain charm in the originals, in their low-tech unpretentiousness--and I think thats really the defining trait that they have. But more importantly they are a part of history and deserve to be preserved.

I remember, I had a sort of epiphany like you did. It used to be that I loved the originals but liked the SE more because I thought the effects were better and the image was cleaner. But then I put in my old tape of Star Wars--and somehow it just "clicked". It all cohered as this charming, old-fashioned adventure story. I remember the shot where the X-wings take off--I had always loved the SE revision of the exterior shot of them taking off from Yavin because the original version was so poor. But then I got it. Somehow, that low-tech shot of animated white streaks racing to the sky worked, and I think it was because I realised the "Saga" wasn't working and let go of the need for it to be a totally consistent, modernised 6-episode serial and finally saw Star Wars for what it was for the first time in many years: a terrific, old-fashioned adventure fairy tale made in 1977. Somehow I had forgotten that in the hype that laid in the wake of the SE/prequels.
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Yea, there's not much else to it.

Now that I've been able to watch both versions on the same format for almost two and a half years, I'd like to be watching them in the same quality. I'm not asking for something on the level of Lowry since I know it would never happen anyway ("ummm, didn't we restore most of the scenes we're seeing here just a few years ago?"), but I am asking for them to dig up those interpositives or WHATEVER their best film elements are of the OOT and transfer them to video.
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I remember the shot where the X-wings take off--I had always loved the SE revision of the exterior shot of them taking off from Yavin because the original version was so poor. But then I got it. Somehow, that low-tech shot of animated white streaks racing to the sky worked

It's funny you should say that. That's pretty much the shot that convinced me too. Not Han/Greedo, not the Jabba thing, not Episode III-era ghostly Anakin. That quick shot of the ships taking off is just PERFECT in it's imperfection. I too preferred the '97 version for a while but when I watched the original the other night, the shot was just *functional*. It didn't have obnoxious ships claustrophobically crowding the camera and slowly crossing the frame, as if to say "look! We've made it BETTER! See all the detail? See the pilot in the cockpit scratching his... knee? So much BETTER!" The original shot, while simplistic, carried the pace and urgency of the Death Star attack quite nicely without a lot of obnoxious CG bullshit to distract from everything.

Obviously, not every single revision Lucas made sucks (I'd never say that) but the originals just seem better to me now than the '04 versions.

I am asking for them to dig up those interpositives or WHATEVER their best film elements are of the OOT and transfer them to video

I'm no expert on this stuff but I'd bet that the laserdisc masters from the GOUT could've been spiffed up a little bit and released in anamorphic format without too much trouble. A remastering job would be even better but at a minimum I'd accept anamorphic DVD's from those masters.
My preference is simple. I want remastered versions of precisely what we saw and heard for each Star Wars film on opening day.
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Regarding your sig:
thecolorsblend2 said:

I want ... precisely what we saw on opening day for each Star Wars film in the original mono. An alternate 5.1 track is strictly optional in my book.

Only Star Wars had a mono track, and it was actually created some time after the opening day. The initial theatrical engagements of all three films had Dolby Stereo tracks on the 35mm prints and Dolby 6-track "baby boom" mixes on the 70mm prints.

The 6-track is obviously the superior format, and it wouldn't take much to transfer the original elements to a 5.1 mix while remaining true to the opening day (see Blade Runner).

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The irony of all these changes, is I actually didn't mind the '97 changes, and for a long time had a bootleg of those versions when I first got a DVD player back in 1998.

Then Lucas put out the '04 DVD, and Hayden was in there in ROTJ! I remember saying, "WHOA! He is changing actors now? What the hell is he doing to these movies?" So I bought a bootleg of the OOT, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid on HBO, and realized how much better these versions were, and how stupid and unnessecary alot of the changes were.

I guess the irony is that Lucas couldn't stop changing the OT, and he was able to fool me with the '97 SE, but after he made more changes in '04, I had enough and explored the OOT versions again.

Fool me once, shame one me, fool me twice......
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^ Agreed. I'm not hip to most fanedits for that very reason. They've done phenomenal work, don't get me wrong, I just don't see much of a point.

The 6-track is obviously the superior format, and it wouldn't take much to transfer the original elements to a 5.1 mix while remaining true to the opening day

I thought they were all released in mono. And also since most theaters (at least at first) likely projected the film with a mono mix, that was Burtt and Lucas' preferred soundtrack since that was the one they invested the most time in.

Learn something new every day, I guess. I'll revise my sig accordingly.
My preference is simple. I want remastered versions of precisely what we saw and heard for each Star Wars film on opening day.
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Yeah, since it only debuted in 32 theaters on may 25, they were all stereo and 70mm screenings. Then when it opened up a little later the mono mix was done for the mono theaters it was expanding to.