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Preserving the German Original Trilogy Movie Trailers (Released)

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 (Edited)

Nowadays, when a classic Film comes to DVD or BluRay, the german distributors almost always won’t add the german movie trailers to the bonus features. They take the english trailers and put subtitles on it.
In times of VHS you got to see german trailers, if there were any on these tapes. The 1990 “Silver Screen Collection” Fullscreen VHS Tapes of the Original Trilogy contained the german trailers to all three films as well as to the first “Ewoks” film (these weren’t even on the LDs). I really loved these trailers and was very disappointed that they weren’t saved to the digital age.

With the DVD’s distribution in 2004, I started to think of recreating the trailers for everyone to see them as they were presented thirty years ago.
But it took another 7 years for me to finally get the first version of my favorite trailer out; “Das Imperium schlägt zurück”.

Learning to use After Effects from scratch, using Adywans color corrected HD version as a base I rectreated the trailer and finally got to see it in HD AND widescreen, since the titlecards were crammed in a 4:3 picture on VHS. I named it version 1.0, since there were a few scenes I wasn’t really satisfied with. Two scenes in the trailer were not in the movie, but I could replace these shots with, in one case, the exact shot from another trailer from the 2004 bonus DVD, and in the other case with an alternate shot from the same source. The Lightsabers were uncolored in the trailers, but I left the scenes the way they were, since that was a problem I’d solve with version 2.0, IF I would ever do one.

You can watch v1.0 of the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jfHfPr8nY0

With Harmy’s Despecialized Edition v2.5 of “Star Wars” getting closer and Laserschwert’s efforts to get a german version of it out, I remembered my trailer project for “Krieg der Sterne” wich I started in 2011 but left it alone since. With Laserschwert’s help, providing tipps and material I finally got v1.0 finished which will also be released on the BluRay of “Krieg der Sterne” Laserschwert is currently working on. Although I wanted to do it in 1080p, I later realized that there were a lot more SE changes in the HD versions than I thought. So I turned to Harmy’s Despecialized Edition and made a 720p version, which works fine for me.

You can watch v1.0 of the trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQLjvqcCBfI

So, yesterday I started working on the trailer for “Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter”. I took Harmy’s Despecialized Edition 1.0 and started editing. And then I relized that a lot of scenes from the trailer were not in the movie. The trailer runs about two minutes. If you substract the title cards and the fox logo (which also looks different in the trailer), it runs 1:26 (2064 frames). 38 seconds of material in the trailer, that’s 916 frames, are not in the movie. These are all alternate takes or the scenes are longer than in the movie. I tried to get the missing material from the trailers on the 2004 DVD but the scenes were eventually shorter or not available. So for now I can not recreate this trailer since I don’t have the right materials.

I made a small youtube video of the scenes, that are in the trailer, but not in the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClYZmolp-c

I will start to work on v2.0 of the “Krieg der Sterne” Trailer anytime soon…

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These are impressive, TK949 !

I wish my reconstruction looked as good as yours!

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Thats the best quality star wars trailer I've seen on youtube! great job.