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Preservation Project: "Bilder aus Amerika" - The Making of Return of the Jedi (1983) (Released)

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 (Edited)

On December 9, 1983 Return of the Jedi premiered in German cinemas. That same day at 21:15 CET a Making Of was broadcast on the German TV channel 2 (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen – ZDF).

It was the twelfth episode of a series of 45-minute reports related to the US called “Bilder aus Amerika” (Pictures of America) that ran on ZDF from 1982 to 1991. The two hosts, the renowned German journalists Dieter Kronzucker and Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs, were foreign correspondents for the ZDF at the time based in Washington and New York. With their new series they wanted to capture impressions, stories, and pictures of America (hence the show’s title) to bring the German audience closer to the US.

At the time the ROTJ episode of “Bilder aus Amerika” was one of the very few German TV shows - maybe even the only one - dealing at length with the making of the Star Wars Trilogy. It contains a lot of footage and a couple of interviews that were never included in any other Making-of-programme. So I think this is a real TV gem not only to German Star Wars fans.

It only aired once in 1983 and as far as we know it was not broadcast again anywhere in the world ever since. And this is where the problem with restoring it began. Back in 1983 a lot of German households didn’t own a VCR so there were limited opportunities to record the episode. This is one of the reasons why you can’t find the show anywhere on the internet today. I was one of the lucky kids who disposed of a VHS recorder back then so I was able to conserve this gem of German Star Wars television. In fact, this was the first recording I ever did on our then brand-new VCR.

A while back I got a hold of another copy of the programme. A friend of mine – who is a real video wizard – and I decided to restore and remaster the episode using the two sources available. We used the 640x480 25fps mp4-file we had, sent it through Hybrid / VapourSynth for a mild cleanup run and finally fed it to Topaz Gigapixel AI to upscale it to 720p. We also adjusted and remastered the audio, restored all the original title cards and credits from scratch and even added German and English subtitles. Since neither of us are English native speakers we had the English subtitles checked by a friend of mine who was born in the US - Thanks a lot for that, my dear!

We actually finished restoring the “Bilder aus Amerika” episode today, exactly 38 years after its initial broadcast. In the next months we will work on some additional details but basically the restoring process is finished today. And we’re glad about that because sometimes the project almost drove us to the edge of insanity …

In the next days I will post a couple of screenshots so you can get an idea of the rare footage contained in the programme.

The video is now released.

Project info:

x264 CRF14 720p/25fps inside a Matroska container (6,5 GB)
Reconstructed title cards based on the VHS copy
Reconstructed ZDF TV logo from 1983
Audio track 1 - Cleaned up German audio - Dolby Digital 2.0 @ 640kbps
Audio track 2 - Isolated audio (no German voice over in the interviews e. g.) - Dolby Digital 2.0 @ 640kbps
German and English subtitles
Runtime: 45 minutes

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This seems very intriguing, Corellian Sailor - and an impressive feat of preservation (plus the adding of subtitles too). 👍

Looking forward to reading more - and seeing some screenshots too.
 

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Corellian Sailor said:

Since neither of us are English native speakers we had the English subtitles checked by a friend of mine who was born in the US - Thanks a lot for that

You may know of him, but member CatBus here is the Star Wars subtitles master (and surely just a full subtitles master in general with his juggling 50 languages worth of…!) I don’t want to speak for him, but since yours is rather a short piece, something tells me he wouldn’t mind watching it (since you have such an exclusive and interesting item here) and giving you suggestions polishing your subs to perfection.

Or maybe not, I don’t know 😃 Here’s the link to his incredible thread, that he’s still fully on top of after almost a decade 😮

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-Threepio-Star-Wars-OOT-subtitles/id/13794/page/1

LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃

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oojason said:

This seems very intriguing, Corellian Sailor - and an impressive feat of preservation (plus the adding of subtitles too). 👍

Looking forward to reading more - and seeing some screenshots too.
 

The video is now released. Here are some screenshots:

Title Card
Title Card:

Hajo Friedrichs at the Lucasfilm Archives
Hajo Friedrichs at the Lucasfilm Archives:

Interview with Jerome Bernstein
Interview with Jerome Bernstein:

Paying a visit to the Kerner Co. in San Rafael
Paying a visit to the Kerner Co. in San Rafael:

Entering Skywalker Ranch:
Entering Skywalker Ranch

Interview with Sidney Ganis at Skywalker Ranch
Interview with Sidney Ganis at Skywalker Ranch:

Hajo Friedrichs interviewing Sid Ganis
Hajo Friedrichs interviewing Sid Ganis:

Dieter Korozucker at the Kenner Toys factory in Cincinnati, Ohio
Dieter Kronzucker at the Kenner Toys factory in Cincinnati:

A little logo we created - ROTJ-style
A little logo we created for our opening - ROTJ style:

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WXM said:

You may know of him, but member CatBus here is the Star Wars subtitles master (and surely just a full subtitles master in general with his juggling 50 languages worth of…!) I don’t want to speak for him, but since yours is rather a short piece, something tells me he wouldn’t mind watching it (since you have such an exclusive and interesting item here) and giving you suggestions polishing your subs to perfection.

Or maybe not, I don’t know 😃 Here’s the link to his incredible thread, that he’s still fully on top of after almost a decade 😮

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-Threepio-Star-Wars-OOT-subtitles/id/13794/page/1

Thanks for the info. Sounds interesting. I’ll get in touch with him.

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impressive work.most impressive…😃
thanks

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 (Edited)

I really enjoyed watching this - full of warm and good memories from the Original Trilogy for days long gone.

Corellian Sailor and his friend did a bang-up quality job on the preservation; both the image and sound quality are very good - the added subtitles are well done, and also an easy ‘read’ too.

Some interesting BTS stuff for all of the Original Trilogy, especially noteworthy is Obi Wan in Empire Strikes Back with a voice sounding much like Patrick Macnee’s Count Iblis from 1970’s Battlestar Galactica, and also Ewoks sounding like sheep in the background talking to Chewbacca during the Leia and Han kiss (maybe an early testing for sound effects - or used to mask actual dialogue and sound from the film itself?).

It is sometimes overlooked that for audiences in the real-life era of the nuclear war that the OT was a much welcome escape at the cinema. Also covered is the phycology of Star Wars with Jerome Bernstein - as well as the appeal to kids, an introduction to the Ewoks, and what the Ewoks in ROTJ says about the film’s message too.

Merchandise is also featured too - including toys actually being made in the US! Then onto some coverage on the Skywalker Ranch. Later on some Hardware Wars - giving an example of how it fired young people’s’ imagination and filmmaking efforts themselves…

Also loved some of the Empire Strikes Back footage of ‘snow lizards’ (a beautiful description given the animation shown to us in this) - and how Snowspeeders were shot on a wire for some of the scenes. It also features some great shots of the model-work across the OT - both large and small.
 

A really enjoyable watch. Much kudos and many to thanks to Corellian Sailor - a quality restoration and remaster! 👍
 

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Hi Guys !!

I saw this great docu on TV at that time !!! Its so good to read that is has been preserved. But The master question is: where to Download ???

Thanks in advanced and all the best from Western Germany!!!

Regs,

Calculon

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Oh, my, this looks amazing 😮 ! Where can it be watched or downloaded?

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rortiz77 said:

Oh, my, this looks amazing 😮 ! Where can it be watched or downloaded?

i’m interested too! Where can i watch this

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I rememberer having seen the documentary back in die 80s. I was very disappointed when an announced rerun in tv did not happen due to legal reasons a few years ago.
Where can I download this?? I really like to watch this one again!

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is the movie still available. the provided mega link doesnt work for me…

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Thank you Corellian Sailor!

This is a great documentary to have, and deserves to go in the pantheon of must-see vintage docs. While some portions overlap with the other makings-of, it does have its own spin that absolutely makes it worth watching. Nice to see the then-new Skywalker Ranch, with commentary on Lucas’ success and how it was filtered through making his dreams come alive as well as America’s appetite for Star Wars. Jerome Bernstein interview is very interesting from the meta perspective as a lot of that seemed like it wasn’t thoroughly dissected until the 90s.

Not sure how much BTS is previously unseen, but I think there is a tad more here from the Stuart Freeborn shop building Jabba than seen in ‘Creatures’ or ‘Star Wars to Jedi.’

Wonderful quality in audio and video. In the English subs I noticed a few typos that a spell-check would catch (lokk instead of look) and at least one near homonym (morale instead of moral.)

Strangely the narrator says Yoda was based on ET… (did he see ET?) also massive spoilers for the Battle of Endor. 😃

edit to add— is there really an audio track available that has the English interviews without German narrator? (That was not in the file.)

JFS

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Thanks for your appreciation! If you guys like what we did, then we obviously did a good job.

Yes, some comments in the show may seem quite strange to Star Wars fans - even to me as a German SW fan.

But you have to take into account that the two journalists who hosted the show and their team were sent to the US to report on all sorts of political and cultural issues. And I figure none of them were really familiar with the SW franchise at the time. They just got popped in the middle of the Star Wars hype. So I guess you can’t blame them for not being SW experts back then. In the end they didn’t really know what this was all about. And so they produced some really wonderful fails.

My favorite fail in the voice-overs is confusing the AT-ATs with the Tauntauns and calling the AT-ATs “snow lizards”. Brilliant 😃 And Yoda being the son of E.T.? Wrong, but even more brilliant, bearing in mind that Yoda showed up on the silver screen two years before E.T. 😃 Hail the 80s!

If you want to watch the video (including the Bernstein interview) in English without the German voice-over, use the VLC media player, click on Audio/640kbpsIsotaled, and you’ll get the English version without the German voice-over track.

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Corellian Sailor said:
If you want to watch the video (including the Bernstein interview) in English without the German voice-over, use the VLC media player, click on Audio/640kbpsIsotaled, and you’ll get the English version without the German voice-over track.

Hello, I don’t mean to be a bug, but there is only the German audio. If you are able to post the English track separately for people to add that would be great. I’m curious did ZDF provide “stereo” audio with live track on one side, and the narrator on the other? (I have seen archival videos on youtube with audio like this.) Otherwise how is it possible to have the dual audio?

Mediainfo.

Also as far as the narrator’s knowledge of Star Wars, it is actually kind of quaint. In some circles/times there would be people jumping down his throat about snow lizards (which are actually a cool idea.)

JFS

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In fact the ZDF video contained a stereo sound track and only one of them had the German commentary on it. I just downloaded the video myself. You’re right, the English track is missing. So thanks for the info. I don’t know what went wrong here, but we’ll fix this and upload the full file again soon.

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You guys really did a great job here! I was finally able to watch this documentary again after 40 years.
The first and only time I’ve seen it was on a small black-and-white TV set.

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Hello, great job there! I just have one question.

Theres a song in one of the episodes, which happens to be very obscure. someone posted a video about it, https://youtu.be/ceg-mNcQ83U?si=JbjKq43a0U6tXhk7, perhaps you guys could post the episode, so we can check the end screen at the end for credits to the composer…

The episode is from 1983, and not aviable on the internet, so far, you guys are the only ones who could help us identify the song!

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Is there any chance to get the file? The mega link provided doesnt work anymore. Thanks in advance

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Hi,

sorry, but I can’t help you with this. I don’t have all the “Bilder aus Amerika” episodes and, unfortunately, I don’t know which episode this song was in. But you could try to contact ZDF’s customer service (E-Mail address: Zuschauerservice@zdf-service.de) and ask them about it. ZDF only braodcast a couple of episodes of the show each year, so maybe they can help you out.

tom_wuba said:

Hello, great job there! I just have one question.

Theres a song in one of the episodes, which happens to be very obscure. someone posted a video about it, https://youtu.be/ceg-mNcQ83U?si=JbjKq43a0U6tXhk7, perhaps you guys could post the episode, so we can check the end screen at the end for credits to the composer…

The episode is from 1983, and not aviable on the internet, so far, you guys are the only ones who could help us identify the song!