danny_boy said:
To be fair it looks like the film was restored to the best of Lucasfilm's ability given the technology and expense at that point in time.
HD/2K scanning of an entire film was in it's infancy and also incredibily expensive in 1996.
New prints were made of Close Encounters(20yrs),Saturday Night Fever(20 yrs) and The Godfather(25yrs) to mark their respective anniversaries in 1997 and none of them had scans at all-----the new prints were struck directly off new internegatives -----compared to those films above -----I think more effort was put into restoring Star Wars(which at least had partial scans---allbeit to produce/add effects)
(Even fellowship of the Ring which was made in 2000/2001 was 70% scanned and 30% photochemichally produced)
The original negative was disassembled cleaned and reassembled. The original film was never restored, no matter what you say. Restore means; to return something to an original or former condition. This was never done. Instead, 748 of the 2,228 shots in the film were redone, that's a little bit more than one-third of all the shots in the film.
danny_boy said:
And in a literal sense-----the supression(of the 35mm prints) of the "original film" of Star Wars can go right back to 1981 when "Episode IV" was tacked onto the begginning-----because the theatrical re-releases in 1981.82' 83'and 85'(in 83' and 85'---Star Wars was part of a triple bill with ESB and ROTJ) all featured these new "altered" prints------ but no-one complained back then!
Why didn't VHS and laserdisc fans complain in 1982 when the "altered" version of star wars was released for the first time on home video?----- why did'nt they complain that they could not hear the mono mix on that 82' video tape/laserdisc?
Yes, but who says there weren't complaints? You can easily compare it with American Graffiti which also got an updated title sequence in '98. There are fans who don't like it but most people don't care or first take notice when they suddenly see a big walking dinosaur in front of the camera. These minor alterations have a better chance to succeed with going unnoticed by the large crowd, you can still to this day hear people that are confused by or unsure if Star Wars had a title number in its crawl back in '77.