As you may have guessed by reading the thread title, this project aims to preserve the Italian version of the Original Trilogy, starting with Star Wars (I don’t have the other films at the moment), and is directly inspired by the other foreign language projects “Preserving German Original Trilogy” and “Preserving French Original Trilogy” . As a matter of fact, much like those projects, this one features the work of Laserschwert, who has kindly done the opening sequence. I will be handling the Greedo subtitles and end credits. The project will of course use Harmy’s STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD REMASTERED as a base for the video. The final product will be synced to the italian Gout and audio from ,^…^,'s GUERRE STELLARI [OUT ruLes IT]: A NEW HOPE.
The reference for the italian title cards, crawl and end credits comes from a 1991 tape, which was donated by a very good friend of mine, whom has never seen any of the Star Wars movies, and as a birthday present he bought me the tape on Ebay.
Please forgive the badly photoshopped pics, as soon as I get my hands on a scanner I’ll release proper scans of the cover art and tape label.
The tape itself was in excellent condition. I suspect it had only been played a few times, if at all.
The vcr I used to play it is an old piece of junk, and the usb stick I captured it with is a new piece of junk.
The transfer job is… questionable. After an initial Fox Video disclaimer, the movie starts with the 4:3 20th Century Fox logo, and then cuts to the italian title cards for “Lucasfilm LTD” and “A long, long time ago” and they are stretched to 4:3. The crawl is both stretched and cropped by a considerable amount, and I was able to measure it by overlaying the starfield and matching it to Harmy’s version. I then passed the resulting video to Laserschwert who was able to recreate the sequence in HD.
Back to the tape, as soon as the letters fade in the distance, before the pan down to Tatooine and in the middle of the flute solo, the video cuts abruptly to a letterboxed master with pitched down audio. It’s incredibly jarring.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3Wlp4clLq4da1FET1REMmxPakE/edit?pli=1
The rest of the movie is like that, and has <span style=“text-decoration: underline;”>no Greedo subtitles</span>. So I’ll just have to guess as to placement and timing, basing it solely on the english version.
The end credits have no iris transition. There’s a cut right after Chewie growls and the audio goes back to its proper “PAL” pitch. The original italian end credits have a typo, which will be preserved for autenticity’s sake. It says : “Musiche di JOHN WILLIAMS <span style=“text-decoration: underline;”>esegaite</span> dalla London Symphony Orchestra”. It should be “eseguite”, of course, “esegaite” is not a word.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3Wlp4clLq4dUjQwQkdVSmRMSlE/edit?pli=1
I’ll be posting Laserschwert’s excellent opening sequence recreation in a little while, as soon as it finishes uploading on my Google Drive thingy.
More updates as soon as they come, I guess. Keep watching this space.