Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
Here's the review I posted on Amazon:
In 1978, Star Wars was nominated for 10 academy awards (including best picture, best screenplay, best supporting actor, etc.) ultimately winning 7 including awards for editing, sound mixing, and special effects. The AFI lists "Star Wars" as #15 on its list of all time greatest films. Make no mistake, this isn't just a fun romp, it is a very significant and important film.
Understand that the version in this box set is NOT that version, but a version that has been largely painted over with 21st century computer graphics, does NOT include the academy-award-winning sound mix, and with many different and more recent editing decisions. On this version, the effects and edits you see may be from 1977, or they might be from 1997, or maybe 2004, or maybe 2011... they might be the original academy-award-winning animatronics of Stears Dykstra, Edlund, and McCune that have never been equaled, or they might have been replaced by dated-looking 1990s computer-graphics, or they might be new things that were thrown in a couple of months ago. The choice of scenes and editing of those scenes might be the academy-awarding winning ones made by Paul Hirsch and Marcia Lucas, or they might be newer ones made by people who are preparing the movie for future 3D-a-rama. The glorious academy-award-winning sound mix by MacDougall, West, Minkler and Ballhas remains unavailable and has been replaced here by a completely different, over-compressed one that is unlikely to have won an academy award in 1978, let alone today, and wherein the young remixer even inserted his own voice.
In short, this release not only fails utterly to preserve a major artifact of our cinematic heritage, it goes further in that its producer has made it clear that he will never allow that seminal work to be accurately preserved. This is not simply a bad product, it is a serious blow to art history and to our popular cultural heritage.
Right on Brother Puggo. Right on.