Fang Zei said:
Anyway, I was convinced George was eventually gonna get around to restoring the OOT someday. Didn't he make some comment at Celebration Europe about how it was still "too expensive" to restore the original versions? That right there pretty much sealed it for me: it was about money. All the Disney deal did was make it that much more of a sure thing, and pretty much guarantee it would happen sooner.
No offense but I honestly don't know if you're just playing dumb or if you genuinely bought that excuse. This was the film that practically made the company.
"Too expensive" said the billionaire who has basically declined a fully-paid-for preservation of the existing materials in the past.
"Too expensive" said the billionaire who never answered to film historian and preservationist Robert A. Harris offer doing it for free back in 2006.
This is a guy who doesn't want his original films restored and preserved, it's that easy. Of course there is time and expense needed for it to happen but when the mogul of a multi-billion dollar company like LFL lament such a thing as being too costly, you don't need to be Einstein to get what he says is just a really bad excuse. And that without even knowing about all the facts surrounding his revisionism crusade for the last two decades.
I mean this is the same guy who apparently had written into his contract with Fox, stating that any prints of the original film that are found must be hunted down and destroyed. Do you think LFL provided The National Film Registry with a 1980 print of The Empire Strikes Back when it was selected for preservation in The Library of Congress three years ago? I think Irvin Kershner would have liked the idea...
LucasFilm didn't fund the "restoration" back in '96, it was all funded by Fox. Maybe it's time LFL lift their fingers and give something back to its devoted fans that really should have jumped ship a long time ago after all the kicking in the nuts. If not for that, do it for American film history.
lightspeed2112 said:
But didn't George say that the originals were "destroyed" while making the Special Editions, so they couldn't be released even if he wanted to? Would this not make him out to be a liar then?
IIRC, Robert A. Harris mentioned years ago that the actual original cut negative wasn't altered (it was disassembled, cleaned up and reassembled). A new duplicate negative was what all the work was done on preparing Star Wars for the Special Edition. Everything else is just horror stories made up to conveniently make it seem like a restoration is somehow impossible.