Baronlando

The industrializing of Endor  comes up every once in awhile, I wouldn't mind Lucas doing that for a Final Cut. I remember thinking in 97 that there would certainly be more dishes or reactors or whatever on Endor, having just seen what was done to mos eisley. Instead we got...an extended musical number? the hell?

And yet the disc does have a written message from Lucas  saying how great it's been to "restore" the movie. It's really weird, it has all the classy-sounding buzzwords like "restoration" and "director's cut" but it's deliberately misleading and a little creepy.

I wonder if Warner Bros could release the original THX1138 even if they wanted to. Maybe Lucas gained control of it when they made the deal for the rerelease (by Lucasfilm paying the bills for an extensive restoration and new effects for a movie that has never been a big catalog title)

On side note, the making of documentary on the THX dvd has an anamorphic clip of Star Wars and it's the original version (Luke looking at the sunset, before the little mountain in front of the lower sun was digitally erased). I wonder what the source was, it looked pretty good.

geez, what a boring answer:

I had a great letterboxed bootleg of it though! Now 25 years later I have an official dvd of Jedi that looks slightly better. Way to push the envelope of quality into the bold new millennium, LFL!

Please tell us more about your beliefs.  The world must know everything about various dudes with inner Star Wars peace.

Remember the montage of second-unit-hands-building-stuff from every A Team episode? It's probably like that.

I'm pretty sure Jedi Rocks is prohibited by the Geneva Convention.

In a Gary Kurtz interview from 1981, while talking about film preservation, (a starlog magazine with Cronenberg's Scanners on the cover!) he says the 3-black and white negative seps were made for both movies. I suppose it's possible they didn't do it for Jedi but that would be weird.

G E Predator said:Honestly, I'm happy with my DVD's..both the 2004 remastered versions and the Unaltered Theatrical Versions.  Nothing's about the films has really changed for me. 

Why does every TFN-superfan-type guy feel the need to share their own feelings of contentment as a way of telling you you're wrong about some crappy dvds? It gives me the creeps.

Well without a time machine, you can't really be optimistic about something that already happened. (p.s. the negative wasn't any worse off than Jaws or Grease but somehow it wasn't necessary to reconfigure an animated dinosaur's ass into those movies)

There's a very old Gary Kurtz interview where he explained the importance of those. I wonder if that's something Fox would still have for the first Star Wars or if Lucasfilm has them for all three.

Yeah, dvd/home video is a situation where complaining/being the squaky wheel is literally the only thing that makes anything happen. If the trilogy was restored (and yeah, the garbage mattes wouldn't be a big deal if it was done right), not only would I forgive everything from Howard the Duck onward, I might buy some of the new video games. Maybe I'd give the cartoon another try.

The 77 version of Star Wars is by far the movie Lucas has been the most outwardly unhappy with. Success and widespread appreciation can't make up for a blob under a landspeeder and a lack of cartoon dinosaurs.

I wonder what it takes for someone to check on the condition of the Library of Congress print. Is it accessible in any way or is all that just intended as a time capsule for long after we're all dead and the talking apes want to see what our world was like?

Some gossip: I worked briefly with a guy who worked at the lab in L.A. where the 97 film restoration was done and he had worked with the negative just after Lucas had taken possession of it from Fox and he felt it wasn't in abnormally bad shape. At least not moreso than other 70s movies that used that troublesome stock (such as Jaws and Close Encounters) it needed restoration obviously but so what? This is the most annoying type of thing about LFL-I don't see the people who restored Saturday Night Fever acting like they deserve a fucking medal just for doing what you're supposed to do. (to say nothing about actually doing it right, or doing it at all in the case of the original versions)

IMDB has a bit of THX 1138 trivia I had never heard: That the original theatrical version had a clip of Things to Come before the credits and not the Buck Rogers serial? It was supposedly changed to the Buck clip in 1979 for the small post Star Wars re-release. (when 5 minutes were restored and they did that sort of Star Wars-y poster for it) Anybody know if this is accurate?

http://www.maverick-media.co.uk/movies/thx_1138_1971/changes_001.html

It's funny though, the THX re-do is often very clever and subtle (not always of course) and clearly had more thought put into it than any of the SIX (!) fricking passes at redoing a Star Wars movie (97 and 04). If both versions had been included and the changes acknowledged in the doc, like Blade Runner, we'd have a really great release.

probably true. Maybe it's worth bringing it up at the next Warner chat with Home Theater forum. For some reason the THX1138 dvd is extra off-putting because it includes a full documentary about the 70s indie film scene in Northern Ca., and THX in particular, and how it was made guerilla style on a shoestring. Which is about as far removed from using million-dollar modern hollywood CGI enhancements as you can get.

Yeah, that description of the SE is right on (I would also have accepted "desperate older skank on Rock of Love".)

Does anyone know what the home video ownership/control status of THX11138 is? In other words, could Warner include both versions in a blu-ray if they wanted to? I recall that Universal had control over the release of Graffiti on dvd, not LFL- which may be why we didn't have to wait 7 effing years for it to come out and it was a very high quality dvd for 1998.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

(Every version I saw, in three different theaters in 1977, included that line, and it always drew laughs.  I still don't understand why it was removed.)

I thought it wasn't removed, it was just a late addition, appearing only in the last mix that was done? (Then the various home videos over the years used the stereo mix, maybe I'm confused)

The blu of Star Trek The Motion Picture actually looks really good to me! (and VI looks the worst).

As for Star Wars on blu-ray, I've given up trying to guess how it's going to go down. 2004 version first? New version first? 3D release first? Smell-ovision? Gay porno version first? Originals first like every other series? At this point I have become like a frustrated profiler, trying to get into Lucas' head in an 80s MANHUNTER-style montage.

Every special effect wasn't recomposited. The whole speeder bike chase for example wasn't. Outside of running the major battles/ setpieces twice, there's not an unsurmountable number of alternate shots, and modern branching can probably handle it, especially Jedi. That one was really half-assed in 97.  (The Close Encounters blu-ray is branching a whole lot of subtle differences among the 3 different versions it has. On the other hand, the people who did the Superman restoration in 2000 didn't even consider recompositing to be a "change").

Those cards are very cool. I'll never understand why they don't just stick with that design in the current era, they've never come up with anything nearly as striking. (I wonder if people in the future will have nostalgia for a sea of red/green/white etc.) Are they done on a sticker that is then attached or can you actually print stuff on cardstock these days?

Eventually, couldn't some bizarro adywan make a version that was skillfully and substantially de-changed? I think I could probably live with it (if the only alternative is nothing ever). I just want out man! I'm too old for this shit, Riggs! I feel like I'm flattering this billionaire too much just by caring at all and by pining away for the privelege of buying the movies again.

Well, I do think we'll all be able to make something that's close enough in the near future (adywan already erased that stupid dinosaur from Mos Eisley, and that's one of the trickiest shots, very cool). If lucasfilm is too lame to get AHEAD of the ball for once and do something now, that's their loss.

I only WISH he was a whore! He's more like the hostile psycho ex-girlfriend who still has all your CDs!