The road towards my becoming a purist probably started the night of ROTS' midnight release. I'd heard there were laserdisc-to-dvd preservations fans had made, but during that long wait in the theater for the clock to strike 12 I noticed someone in the rows ahead watching the original version of empire on their laptop. I knew it was the original when it wiped to that shot of cloud city and a cloud car flew past the camera with no cgi gas refinery to be seen. It'd been so long since I'd seen the original version of the trilogy that I'd completely forgotten how that shot originally looked!
That Fall I got a nice fast computer. I guess it was just pure curiosity that eventually led me to seek out these "fan preservations" of the OOT. I must've looked it up on google or something. It led me to these forums, which I must've already heard about anyway by that point. I contacted Rikter Blacksvn, did some research, and got the cowclops v2 transfers off of myspleen. I specifically chose that transfer because it was anamorphic. Even though it made no difference since it was a letterbox 4:3 source, I still wanted the disc itself like that just to "future proof" it.
It was really cool to finally watch the original versions in their OAR, and in higher resolution than vhs. The closest I'd ever come to that was back in the early-to-mid 90's when I think I caught some of Empire letterboxed on scifi channel.
Also, the pcm soundtrack was nice!
As timing would have it, this was circa March of '06. It probably took a couple weeks for me to torrent all three movies over my school's network. Then one night in early May I visited thedigitalbits.com and saw that, completely out of the blue, Lucasfilm had set the OOT for dvd release in September. Yeah, did a double-take arright. The announcement noted dolby 2.0 audio and Jim Ward's statement said "this will be state of the art, 1993." Ah, whatever that meant, surely they were doing an anamorphic transfer from an IP or something, right?
Right??!?
Then a week later we all found out they meant 1993 in just about every sense of the word, short of the physical media being a dvd. What a letdown.
Couldn't believe how many people on the tfn forums jumped to defend Lucasfilm's actions. "They give you what you wanted and this is how you respond? You people will never be happy, etc." To think, just days earlier I'd been telling everyone on those forums that surely we were getting a new dvd transfer from the IP, the same IP used for the '93 laserdisc transfers. So, when LFL elaborated and I saw the total lack of outrage among fans, I jumped ship from tfn after four years.
Only the most succesful movie in history could get away with a new dvd release of a laserdisc transfer in an age of hddvd and blu-ray.
I finally registered here in October of '06 after lurking for several months. I noticed that a couple familiar names from the tfn boards, CO and zombie, were posting here too. What some saw as a community of "haters" I actually found to be a place where the actual history of the Star Wars films, their making and even their storytelling influences were respected. Above all, it was a place where they were looked at as films, not simply as Star Wars films.
This is probably when I became a purist. Watching those original effects shots from the death star attack in the '77 film, it became clear to me that the movies should've remained unchanged. 1997 was an opportunity for people to view a piece of film history as it was meant to be seen. Instead, it became an excuse for the addition of cgi. In time, my opinion extended to the prequels as well. It would have been better for the original '77 film to remain the last movie ever officially directed by George Lucas. Power corrupts, and absolute power, well, you know the rest. How often are a trilogy of big-budget films written, directed and executive produced all by one man????