ATMachine

Ave, Caesar! Maclunkey te salutant.

I wonder if there’s a connection (beyond the obvious debt of influence) with Rogue One and Book of Eli scriptwriter Gary Whitta.

Apparently the Janie and Marie Antoinette dolls both have the same model but with different textures, including the color change on that dress.

I honestly think this might be a deliberate flub, since it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it goof that ensures the film’s original version remains superior in at least one way. Plus the blue/pink dress color swap feels like it could be a tongue-in-cheek nod to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

JonathanArthur19 said:

Imagine this, if before they altered everything, they restored the O-Neg and printed it on newer film stock to preserve the original versions for future years and they just, have never told us anything about it and they put the it into the Twentieth Century Fox Film Vaults and hid it from the world, then they go and create the Special Editions. Then they’d go on in 2006 and give us a Laserdisc Master with the original crawl spliced on.

Which has me thinking, did they really restore the original versions, then printed it on new film stock, and then just went and made the Special Editions, then went onto say that they printed over the O-Neg “When these were completed, they apparently were printed onto film and re-cut into the negative, replacing the original negs, which were undoubtedly put back into storage.” - The Secret History of Star Wars, 11/03/09

But could this be a coverup and the “Original” (I use that term loosely due to the fact where my theory is that they restored the Unaltered Versions and reprinted them on newer film stock) Negative, which could still be in the vaults and they’ve kept it under wraps because George acts like a big baby when someone questions the original versions.

I suspect this is exactly what happened.

Beskar being a lightsaber-resistant metal raises the possibility of beskar swords. Or even other things, like staves, or maces…

“Third generation” brings to mind the Phase III Dark Troopers from the original Dark Forces video game, where that applied to a version that could be worn as an exoskeleton by flesh-and-blood Imperial troops.

I think “family portrait” was the phrase used inside Lucasfilm to describe the parallelism of the final shots of the OT (minus ESB) & the PT.

Another sad loss. Rest in peace.

Oh, thanks!

Harrison Ford’s alternate “I’m that one!” take in responding to Threepio’s rattling off the odds during the asteroid chase is also amazing.

What new brief deleted scene? I’ve seen a GIF of Han picking Leia up in the Echo Base hallway on Twitter but don’t know where it’s from.

An interesting moment at 4:55: Anthony Daniels testing a C-3PO bodysuit with a silver arm.

“You probably don’t recognize me because I have a silver arm now.”

Indeed. One wonders whether the sale was in part engendered by the fact that Lucas evidently views the late “Uncle Walt” with rose-colored glasses.

Despite all the ill effects Disney has had the multimedia landscape. And the fact that the nostalgia-fueled worldview of Walt Disney and in particular the Disney theme parks arguably fed into the resurgence of Reagan-era conservatism in a way that would’ve horrified the Lucas who so abhorred Richard Nixon.

As far as I know it’s in the Lucasfilm archives along with a bunch of other studio models. George Lucas was able to pose with it among a bunch of other models in a 1983 photo, for example.

One thing visible in that image that’s interesting that I don’t think many later adaptations have picked up on is that the B-Wings are marked with circular squadron markers on their wings.

What’s even more amazing is that the ILM crew were working on other stuff also for ROTJ, that might or might not have been on the chopping block for Black Friday - eg, there was apparently an attack on a giant Imperial “communications ship” that had some form of modified Star Destroyer model, glimpsed in a couple of reused shots in the finished film.

And unlike Jerjerrod aiming the Death Star at Endor and flooding the tunnels with countermeasures, this wasn’t even in the script! So they were doing it for reasons not connected with simply making the shots the film needed for theaters.

You are transparent. I see many things. I see basements within basements.

Pity “Yavin” was already taken.

(And side note - isn’t it interesting that Lucas had that name already in 1974, yet Tolkien’s decades-in-the-making Silmarillion published in 1977, somehow also used the name “Yavanna” for the goddess of plants and greenery?)

A true loss. RIP.

Also, and may God forgive me, I do find the idea of Vader having sideburns under his helmet hilarious.

Very well put. In the rough draft even “the Force” was sort of a general precognition thing, but not telekinesis, lightning, etc. The Jedi were fantastic warriors because they were super well trained, like DUNE’s Bene Gesserit or Sardaukar.

But the second draft veers hard into mysticism, making Force powers much more like magic and putting a heavy emphasis on it being passed down via familial lineage, which later drafts actually dial back.

“In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society.”
– George Lucas, 1988

In the years since he’s done a very good job of showing us why that’s a prospect to be feared.

Not that the Lucas of 1988 is inconsistent with the Lucas of 1997 and onward. Far from it. It’s more like an angel and a devil making the same point. (A bit like Palpatine masterminding both sides of a war, one might say.)

Off the top of my head, I’d guess it was symbolism of the “triune God” represented by three colossal Star Destroyers/one colossal asteroid. Coupled with an allusion to ancient Byzantium, used to symbolize Heaven the way it does in some of WB Yeats’ poetry; since Byzantum’s two major chariot teams bore the colors Green and Blue, with the Emperor usually bestowing favors on the Blues rather than the Greens. And related to other stuff in the Lucasfilm vaults that uses this symbolism, eg, perhaps some WILLOW sequels.

Other than that, I don’t really have any ideas.

screams in the void said:

I’ve mentioned this before elsewhwere…on the VHS 1995 THX fullscreen release , there is a gaffe with the lasers on the TIE Fighters being blue instead of green in ESB. It happens right after the Star Destroyers take evasive action and goes into the asteroid canyon chase . It looks more like the laser fire from the Cylon raiders in the original Battlestar Galactica for a few moments , then reverts back to the normal green fire . I wonder what the story behind that was ? Any speculation or definitive answers out there ?

Update - no screenshot, but I did confirm that this exists, after spending most of a morning digging through my closet to find my old VHS player and tapes.

Specifically, there are three affected shots just after Han says “Great. Well, we can still outmaneuver 'em” (in between which there’s the scene where several Star Destroyers nearly collide and an officer shouts “Take evasive action!”).

In the next shot where we see TIEs firing lasers (just after Han says “We’re in trouble” and leaves the cockpit), they’re green. But in the next two shots where TIEs fire lasers (as the Falcon is skimming the surface of the gigantic space-slug asteroid, just before the TIEs slam into the canyon walls), they’re blue again.

All the shots with blue lasers have either three Star Destroyers or the giant asteroid on screen; whereas the shot in between with green lasers (besides the TIEs & the Falcon) has just an empty starfield.

That’s all I noticed so far, though I haven’t checked other scenes on that VHS tape. And I don’t have any other pre-1997 VHS tapes (fullscreen or widescreen), so I don’t know how far this issue extends.

screams in the void said:

I’ve mentioned this before elsewhwere…on the VHS 1995 THX fullscreen release , there is a gaffe with the lasers on the TIE Fighters being blue instead of green in ESB. It happens right after the Star Destroyers take evasive action and goes into the asteroid canyon chase . It looks more like the laser fire from the Cylon raiders in the original Battlestar Galactica for a few moments , then reverts back to the normal green fire . I wonder what the story behind that was ? Any speculation or definitive answers out there ?

Does anyone have a screenshot of this?

Yep. Somebody posted a screenshot from 4K77 and he deleted it.

Indeed, that tweet has already been vanished.

That’s what puzzles me. I wouldn’t think Marquand or Lucas would go out of their way to use step-printing for such a small sequence. And we know the footage was originally done for ESB because the meditation chamber set wasn’t rebuilt for ROTJ. So was the step-printing baked in during ESB for a deleted scene? And if so, what was it?