Cobra Kai said:
OMEN, I would be very interested in your project. I just want the Trilogy in the best available quality, but without all the really offensive special edition changes. There are some minor changes that aren't distracting for me and which do not alter the original intention of the story.
In a perfect world, yes I would obviously prefer to have the unaltered originals in all their glory, but it does not have to be a true 100% theatrical version for me to enjoy the movies as I did when I was a kid. Here are my thoughts on each film:
STAR WARS: The only big SE changes that I wouldn't mind keeping are the new death star attack shots. They blend very well with the original scene, in my opinion. Everything else, though, has to go. All the new cg creatures on tatooine, greedo shooting first, jabba, etc.
EMPIRE: Basically, change everything back to the original except maybe the new Cloud City shots where they added windows revealing parts of the city outside. This is much less distracting to me, than inserting backgrounds from an inferior quality source and rotoscoping movement around the old backgrounds. This was really my only problem with Harmy and Adywan's Empire restoration, as it was really noticeable.
- Obviously the old emperor scene MUST be restored. I'm surprised more people dont talk about this more, as it is one of the most harmful changes that Lucas did to his movies:
From the opening title crawl we learn that Vader is "obsessed" with finding Luke. Then later during his conversation with the emperor we hear Vader almost defending Luke: "He's just a boy. Obi-wan can no longer help him." He also expresses reluctantance to kill Luke and offers an alternative - "If he could be turned." It becomes clear that Vader's "obsession" has to do with the fact that Luke is his son. His dialogue in the emperor scene starts to reveal that Vader still has a small piece of his humanity left. Later of course in Jedi we learn that Luke was in fact correct about this as Vader redeems himself in the end and is able to save his "soul".
The new emperor scene removes all of this cool character development and even implies that Vader didn't know Luke was his son: "How is this possible?". Not to mention the fact that the new dialogue is simply horrible and is the same ridiculous, wooden, lifeless nonsense that plagued the prequels.
- Also, the new shuttle scene during the climax has to be taken out and restored so that we hear the classic "bring my shuttle" line. That new scene only breaks up the action anyway, and is completely useless.
- Original wampa scene: I'm "ok" with the new wampa scene but I much prefer the original.
- Restore the original Jeremy Bulloch / Boba Fett audio
JEDI: I'm ok with the '97 SE ending. To me the new John Williams score combined with the new shots are a more fitting way to end the Star Wars saga than the original "yub-yub" song. Still I'm completely happy with the original ending, and yub-yub brings back memories from my childhood, so either way...
- Jedi Rocks must go.
- original sarlaac.
- Hayden Christiansen - please make him go away.
- Vader does not yell "Noooooooo!" when he throws the emperor down the shaft. Seriously, George? What the hell were you thinking?
I'm sure there are more abominations that need to be restored - I'm just going off my memory of the last time i watched the 06 dvd's several years ago. I refuse to watch them today. I also don't like the new over-saturated color correction from the new versions.
All this being said, yes I can't wait for Harmy's new version 2.0. I would just like to have these "mostly-despecialized" versions, as another option.
Hey Cobra, i'm pretty much with you on most of those changes. 95% of those video changes are included in this version and 100% of the audio changes you suggested. There are some changes like the original Sarlaac pit that would be too jarring to insert though IMHO because there is no high definition source that has the original sarlacc without all the CG tentacles, so you would either have to have the whole scene in uprezed GOUT quality or be constantly cutting between blu-ray quality and GOUT quality that would be very distracting to say the least. I personally don't mind the new Sarlacc pit all that much anyway, the tentacles make it more of an active participant in the scene. The only footage i've used from the GOUT for my version is Lapti Nek to replace Jedi Rocks and Sebastian Shaw replacing Hayden Christensen at the end of ROTJ. Lapti Nek is one continuous scene taken from the GOUT, so its far less noticable because its not constantly jumping between GOUT quality and blu-ray quality, just at the start and end of the scene. Everything else is either from the blu-ray or german hdtv streams to maintain as high quality as possible.
As for the colours, I've left the colours as they are, albeit with the blue tint removed, because I always felt the original star wars was a little too desaturated and didn't want to start messing around more with the blu-ray's colour scheme but that really is easy for anybody to fix, you just lower your colour setting on your tv and problem solved, star wars as desaturated as you want.