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Is there a chance in hell that old Anakin would have even been replaced if a more famous actor had been used back then? Like, say, Peter O' Toole or Richard Harris or whatever. (answer: hell no, sorry Shaw. Stay classy, Lucasfilm)
That was really cool, thanks for making them.
Sluggo said:
SW had a theater run in '91?
It was just one of those local screening things. It's too bad Lucas doesn't allow that for the original version anymore, I saw Jaws just a few months ago and it looked pretty great.
The last time I saw it in 70mm was in 1991, my recollection is that the death star battle had very black space with no garbage mattes (and I was really looking for them after gorging on the VHS throughout the late 80s). A lot of the space battle shots did look rough in the sense of grain or whatever but not in a way that seemed "wrong" or objectionable. It even seemed like a deliberate thing (though I suppose it wasn't), but it made the models look more real, if that makes sense. I remember ILM doing a space battle for Enemy Mine and my friends and I wondering why it looked much faker than Star Wars, like it looked too clean.
Ah, 70mm. At most bigger theaters the screen opened up a LOT wider (and taller) for 70mm. It was totally the tits.
Yeah, I know it was the same with every popular 70s movie. I was just thinking more of the contrast between the 1995 campaign ("buy this again, it now looks perfect and amazing!") and the 1997 one ("buy this again, it looked like dying shit until we did this!").
It's interesting the way these things are characterized at different times. In 1993, the IPs were good enough to be the source of an elaborate 100 dollar laserdisc box called "DEFINITIVE", and 2 years later the whole thing is on the brink of death if not for the heroic measures of doing a re- release. (and now we're getting to the point where some dude on youtube with a beat up old trailer can get very nice results. look how cool this is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_OhgiNE0Dw
yet also strangely frustrating)
I remember it was in a HTF thread about Steve Sansweet's most recent non-info about Star Wars on blu-ray.
An interesting thing in zombie's article is the quote that the IP was scanned to replace certain damged parts of the original negative. Didn't Lucasfilm later (in 2006) claim that the IPs had been somehow physically "stripped for parts" or something for the SE, making them unusable for anything now? But if the IP was merely scanned and not cut, couldn't they just use them again and clean up whatever has accumulated since the last time they used them (1993 I guess)?
According to an old Cinefex they ultimately had a former ILM guy (who had done started his own company after Empire) do them. Maybe they had already lost precious time when they were still making Luke's saber blue? It was such a painstaking frame-by-frame thing back then, just those shots in the trailer where it's blue represents a fair amount of work that had to be tossed out. Anyway they look too fat to me in Jedi, I dunno.
Yeah, the lightsabers in Empire really are great. Apparently they were still working out the kinks in the first movie and unfortunately they were farmed out to an outside company for Jedi because ILM was too snowed under with the sheer volume of other shots.
Oops, never mind. Flipping through the cinefex, I see that it's mostly a retropsective on ILM's original work in 76. The only material on the special edition is a brief blurb that it's happening and Lucas giving a very enthusiastic tease about how much better the new digital Jabba is. (interestingly, the topic of a potential resentment/backlash and this being at odds with Lucas being on the board for film preservation comes up and GL considers it totally different, just an artist finishing his painting etc.).
Anyway, very recently some guy in a post at Home Theater Forum claimed the black and white separations weren't done right. He gave no source or explanation, he just said it was "his understanding." Has anyone heard this before?
Very interesting. Do you have the Cinefex from 1996? (with the Falcon the cover, I think it was while the Special edition was still being worked on) If not, I can look through mine, see if it has anything else to offer.
I've seen the Clone kids too, all the press tells us it is huge with boys age 6-11, that's very cool. I just think boys age 6-11 plus whatever is left of the adult superfans is still a pretty narrow thing.
I'm curious to know how much money this 3d star wars project has to make to be profitable. Probably a lot and yet the longer they wait, the more it seems like no one will really care. Star Wars is becoming such a specialized, narrow cult thing, like KISS or something. Right now there's a Star Wars Concert tour and deluxe Clone Wars Blu-ray set coming and you can just feel the not-excitement in the air. Converting (and releasing) SIX movies is really gonna cost a lot, it might not be viable/cheap enough for a very long time.
About Leia and the tracking beacon, I thought the whole idea was that the decision was made to attack the death star right away, that day, so there's literally nowhere else to go and no time to do it. (before "other star systems suffer the same fate as Alderaan")
I went to a lecture in the 90s that some ILM guys were speaking at and one of them said the garbage mattes were dependent on the color timing of each particular print, which varied wildly (and got worse as prints aged and faded back in the days of movies playing in theaters for months/years). Which drove Lucas crazy and helped make him yearn for digital projection where the movie would look the same no matter when and where you saw it. You can also see Spielberg on some interview talking about how "on a bad print" the Raiders cobra reflection is really noticeable. I saw a very good print of Raiders recently and yeah it's there if you are looking, but it's not even close to how noticeable it was on the vhs/laserdisc.
If they just transferred them right none of these things would even be that bad, especially on a properly calibrated tv. Plus, you could digitally fix every one of these things and you'll just notice something else and it becomes a whole endless anal retentive exercise for another 20 years. Fun! The movie is old, big deal. With all these changes (no offense to adywan) its starting to look like Joan Rivers' face.
I think a blu-ray of an old movie would be a very different thing than a toy. As much as Star Wars, I grew up watching the '82 Blade Runner and the '80 Close Encounters. The blu-rays of both look so good, much better than the cruddy vhs tapes I was watching back then, that I don't even care about any effects "flaws". Plus, a lot of those flaws (like the garbage mattes) are minimized or gone totally with a good transfer. Which Star Wars has never really had, in any version.
xhonzi said:
It kind of reminds me of Optimus Prime.
Exactly.
Wait, what?
I've been looking at the laundry lists of things some fans still want digitally altered and changed. I'm hopeful that it's getting to the point where expectations for the next CGI enhanced extra-special edition are way higher than Lucas is willing to meet. Because it would involve too much effort. And by too much I mean any. Right now the easiest and cheapest thing to do to add value to a blu-ray release is to say "just clean up the old versions".
At least with the Abyss it's a quality control issue, with Cameron unwilling to release an unsupervised transfer. We've seen from the 2004 star wars discs what can happen when the director supervises a transfer half ass and in a hurry. The end result is that both versions look like shit in their own special way. The upside is that this applies to all lucas products these days, it's ALL really 3d rate junk. So it's not like the original versions are singled out. With Disney (and even stuff like the new Beatles cds) raking it in with old stuff cleaned up and repackaged, hopefully LFL will recognize what an easy way it is to make a few million bucks. (let's say: a basic original-original trilogy blu-ray with 3 discs like that Star Trek II-IV thing, probably costing 75-100 bucks knowing Fox, sells half a million units which should be possible )
The weird unspoken truth is that Lucas/lucasfilm is always baffled or annoyed when people take the whole thing too seriously (about Greedo shooting or jar jar or whatever) but the entire company is built on exactly that: people being way too serious about Star Wars! And you can't have it both ways. If Star Wars was allowed to just be six old summer movies that you can pick and choose to revisit as you like, and nothing more (which I would love) there's NO lucasfilm as we know it.
The original Star Wars was a huge feat of pure directing skill. That movie would have been like The Cat from Outer Space otherwise. Those (very few) reviews were pure douche.
It's worth remembering that he can't be THAT embarrassed by the original versions, since they are available right now and have been since 2006. In fact, I don't even believe he ever really cared about his "vision", changing it was all about making Star Wars attractive to 8 year olds (and very anal adults) and zip to do with artistic ambition.
That 44 magnum gunshot was already an old library sound effect (see Dirty Harry). The live blanks just sounded like firecrackers. Maybe it was a temp sound that started to seem really cool after weeks of cutting and mixing.