Broom Kid

I think it’s also worth remembering some people will want the best possible presentation of the Prequels, and even though the D+ versions aren’t as different - they’re still a better transfer than the 2011 blus, correct?

But yes, when it comes to this place and starwarstrilogy.com - it’s probably much more likely that these sets’ quality is only of note in regards to its utility for making better fan restorations. My interest in the set was primarily for the opportunity to get really good extras, and once it became clear that opportunity was going to be completely ignored, I lost all interest in the set.

BUT: for those who don’t really mind the changes to the OT, and who enjoy the PT, these blu-rays are right up their alley because the '19 versions are as good as all six films have looked on (officially released) HD.

adywan said:

Because they are a better transfer than the crap 2011 versions

This exactly.

Granted, we’re talking about niches of niches here (people who prefer physical media, prefer that physical media to be blu-ray, and people who care what version of Star Wars it is they own on physical blu-ray) but just in case you’re a Star Wars fan who wants an official release to look as good as possible and isn’t interested in either Disney+ or piracy - these blu-rays are the answer.

It honestly makes zero sense that Disney would go to the trouble of pressing up blu-rays with the new transfer (and new artwork) for the 4K releases, especially after clearing all the old stock with the most recent blu-ray release, only to put out a new blu-ray box-set and blu-ray only release with newly pressed discs that still contain the old transfers.

I mean, I know everything having to do with Star Wars’ home video releases has never really made any sense for a very long time now, but this really doesn’t make any sense, just from a production standpoint. The whole reason there was a re-release on blu-ray was to clear the old stock, get it repackaged, and put in warehouses and on shelves.

Anything being pressed up for this set, and put in new packaging, pretty much has to be the new transfers being put on new discs, with new on-disc art, etc.

We probably won’t find out for sure until someone gets a new blu-ray only version of this Skywalker Saga box-set and posts a video or writes a description themselves.

“A New Hope” has always sounded like a title that literally took all of 3 seconds worth of thought before being added to the film. I never liked it, just for aesthetic reasons alone. I’d probably be okay with a revisionist/retconned title, if it was a GOOD TITLE. A New Hope is just bland. The only other title in the series that suffers from that sort of rote-ness is “The Rise of Skywalker.”

I don’t understand my ranking either. I didn’t enter those numbers, it was counting backwards from 10-1.

I think maybe the board software auto corrected it?

yes, that’s exactly what happens. I went in to edit it and the order was correct. Just had to change from a parentheses to a hyphen.

StarkillerAG said:

Both are soft. Once you look past the technobabble, Star Trek has almost no scientific accuracy.

Vulcans alone are pretty much magic space elves. They can literally read your mind and TRANSFER THEIR SOULS by touching your head and reciting a mantra. And that’s before you get into stuff like “slingshotting around the sun” and Warp 10 salamanders.

I love Star Trek to death but the pretentiousness its hardcore fans have exhibited regarding how “serious” and “important” it is has always rubbed me wrong. Star Trek is hopeful, and idealistic, but it’s also very often dumb as rocks and silly as shit.

Just like hardcore Star Wars fans need it to be the epitome of meaningful, epic myth ALL THE TIME, and anything that suggests it’s more bad than good (and more superficial than meaningful) will set them off, Star Trek fans need it to be super-smart and intellectual ALL THE TIME, and anyone who reminds them it’s more bad than good (and more dumb than smart) just shorts them out.

I disagree, I think Williams’ score as presented across both the For Your Consideration and Official Soundtracks, is one of the best things he’s done in a while! I think I’d still place the Episode 7 soundtrack above it, but Episode 9’s music is stronger than basically every Prequel’s soundtrack, and I’d argue it’s stronger than Return of the Jedi’s as well. He’s doing a lot with that music, and even setting aside the musicality of the new themes, he’s got a lot of interesting underscore that isn’t tied to themes or motifs in this soundtrack. Not just repeated string rhythms and the sort of “basic action music” he’s kind of automatically turned out ever since his Harry Potter days (there’s a lot of it in his Prequel scores, too), but complex, interesting musical movements that aren’t connected to pre-existing thematic material. He hasn’t really done that to this extent on a Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back, and it was really exciting to hear.

Since this is the internet, and we rank things here:

11 - Attack of the Clones
10 - Return of the Jedi
9 - Rogue One
8 - The Last Jedi
7 - Revenge of the Sith
6 - Solo
5 - The Rise of Skywalker
4 - The Phantom Menace
3 - The Force Awakens
2 - Star Wars
1 - The Empire Strikes Back

And to echo Outbound Flight - even though Attack of the Clones is at the bottom of this list, “Bottom of this list” is A-tier soundtrack. S-tier stops at #6, and A-tier starts at #7.

IIRC this is what happened last time? I could have sworn this is now standard operating procedure industry wide. When they update/upgrade the file, that change propagates across to your library, because what you own isn’t the movie, it’s the license to play it.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t a Lucasfilm thing, but a movie studios thing.

DominicCobb said:

Here’s the thing about the opening, I get what you’re all saying. My thought is I’d like to see it in action. I can see why cutting out scene jumping would improve the pacing even though it’s reducing the runtime. I’m just not entirely confident that’d for sure be the case without seeing it first.

Of course! Any idea is really only proven valuable and worthy under testing in the first place. All these ideas are good ideas but good ideas can sometimes fail out once put into practice. Hell, that’s kind of the story of this movie, and almost any movie being worked on in this section of the board.

But I really do think the last line of your scroll as written in the OP really lends itself very, very well to the tilt down, nebula, Kylo jumps into frame, and we follow him from there. We’re literally finishing the sentence ended by the preceding ellipses in that case. Hopefully it works in practice, but if not, there’s a lot of very creative problem-solvers here, too.

Also, I like the idea of, if you’re going to use tracked/older music, finding alternate variations on that music as performed by other orchestras. It kind of neutralizes the sort of “pulled out of it” aspect that tracked music can lend to an edit. “Oh, that’s just music from X movie” becomes “hey…wow, wait a minute.”

Also, I believe someone’s posted a version of the Death Star duel that has the concert version of Duel of the Fates mixed in and it works REALLY well. I can’t remember where I saw it here though. Maybe there are alternate performances of it that could work just as well, or maybe better due to it not being so immediately recognizable to fans.

I do think you could go straight from the crawl, tilt down to the nebula, and then Kylo jumping in. (I know when LFL released that scene early, there’s a cleaner open to that scene than what’s in the movie, so there should be a few more seconds of silence/starfield to use, too. All that wayfinder stuff doesn’t even really matter ultimately, and you get a more direct echo to Return of the Jedi where the movie opens directly on one villain flying to the big villain base, where the big bad resides for the rest of the movie. Poetry, rhyming, yadda yadda, but I think it’s much more clean to pan down from the scroll to the starfield/nebula, and have someone pop in from lightspeed and we track them to the planet. It’s much, much cleaner than what’s happening in the theatrical cut, and once you get rid of the oracle, you might as well get rid of the rest of it, there’s nothing else in those scenes that is “explained” any further than just seeing the weird thing plugged into the ship and realizing it’s steering him. It’s pretty self-explanatory (The theatrical crawl basically sets it up in one line anyway).

Plus I think the big wham of Palpatine being there, ends up having more impact if there’s basically no lead in to it at all. He’s already the first spoken voice in the movie.

I also think that you could end the movie completely wordlessly, and maybe it should end that way. cutting the woman out should be pretty easy, and if the whole scene is wordless, Luke and Leia showing up could be cut together in a way where Rey doesn’t even really see them - you could arrange the scene so that she’s already turned to the sunset or something, and Luke and Leia appear and approve of what she’s done without her really knowing, or acknowledging, that they’re there and have given their blessing. Depending on how the music is mixed and chosen there, it could end up being a little more poetic/poignant that way.

But how is it a “cash grab” now as opposed to Tuesday? I mean, it’s just as much a cash grab THEN, too, isn’t it?

If you think it’s opportunistic you have to point out what opportunity you think is being exploited and how that exploitation is unfairly hurting anything.

It was coming out Tuesday anyway. Not sure how it hurts that it actually came out Friday. Or that it somehow changes a normal release to “making a quick buck.”

The whole world is on pause right now. I have no misconceptions that this is some sort of “gift” or however more gullible people might be framing it. This is still a major corporation selling consumer goods to a large audience. But it’s also not like they’re charging people more to get it early, or being predatory about it. The entertainment industry (sports, tv, films, concerts) is kind of just… stopping. For the sake of hopefully preventing the spread of a deadly disease. Nobody’s really going to theaters. Nobody’s making shows. Movies aren’t coming out. Ballgames aren’t going on.

If that means someone at Disney was like “you know what? Just put it out now. Everyone’s going to be at home for the next month or so regardless, what can it hurt?” then I don’t really have a problem with that.

I typically don’t get digital versions (I’m a physical media man, myself) but I’m curious as to how… robust these files are. I know the streaming versions are compressed down to like, 1/4 to 1/2 the size of a typical blu-ray or UHD presentation (and the quality DOES suffer accordingly) but are the for-sale digital versions to consumers any better than the streaming files, or are they pretty much the exact same files, but now you can directly save them to your hard-drive?

Looks like Disney just made the digital versions available… now.

hey-ooooooo

I don’t even think it’s that complicated. I think “I don’t understand it” means he was told “we don’t wanna.” and he was like “You own it, its yours, and you’re not putting it out because… you just don’t WANT to?”

I really do think that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is behind its not being released, and that’s all there is behind his confusion. Because the simplest answer (they just don’t want to) IS confusing and hard to explain. We still can’t do it and we’ve been dedicated to asking why since 2006.

I think there’s also something to be said for the fact Abrams did ask… and then let it drop. He didn’t push for it, or make any argument for it. He was kind of like “shrug” and then went and got the well-known and easily obtainable fan-restorations that everyone on both sides of the consumer/provider line know about.

The interview he gave where he mentioned it didn’t really get much traction and wasn’t repeated too many places, either.

The original version was screened, theatrically, in 70mm last year and it was barely news.

I think at this point, here in 2020, the reason Lucasfilm doesn’t give a press release or officially address why the original versions aren’t available is because the audience for it has become so niche that it’s no longer a concern they feel is worth addressing. The large majority of their audience doesn’t really care which version they get. This is unfair, of course. It’s short-sighted, and endlessly frustrating - and that reality has been artificially induced and then promoted by the company, and the company’s reticence to make those original versions available has further depressed any potential of that original versions audience ever growing again.

But the end result is the same. Lucasfilm knows what the audience size is for the originals, they know who wants it, and how bad they want it, and they’ve apparently decided that for reasons no amount of petitioning or pleading will change, that audience isn’t going to be served.

But at least they’ve also apparently decided to not get in the way of that audience serving itself. So there’s that, I guess. And that audience has gotten amazingly, shockingly, rewardingly GREAT at servicing itself over the past 15 years, too.

There isn’t anything specific to this box-set that won’t be duplicated on the individual titles. However, I don’t think anyone knows what each title is going to have so far as bonus content yet, and I’m betting that what IS included on each title won’t be known until either the discs leak, or they sell through on retail, because I don’t get the sense Disney Home Video is going to be servicing review outlets with pre-release copies.

The assumption so far is that it’ll be a collection of already available bonus extras from previous blu-ray releases, with maybe some DVD-only extras from 2004 mixed in? But that’s just an assumption, I don’t think anyone actually knows what’s going on with the release discs yet on that front.

FWIW (and this is sort of off-topic) I almost don’t see the point in doing an D+83. I think 4k83 is that good as a base scan. I’m sure if you did an A-B between 4k83 and the D+ version the difference would be clearer but honestly, watching 4k83 (especially the minimal DNR-no chroma noise) on a projector is an almost flawless movie-watching experience, especially as someone who definitely remembers seeing ROTJ theatrically a lot.

D+80 is probably the most “necessary” (as it were) because we’re apparently a pretty long way off from a high-quality 100% film-scan sourced restoration of the best Star Wars movie. (i.e. 4k80) so having a very good blend of the 2012 Lowry re-master and high-quality shots sourced from the 4k80 project should fill that bill almost perfectly. As it is, the version of D+80 right now, using the D+ streaming master, is 95% of the way there, there’s only a few little nits to pick (and the choice to leave a lot of the 1997 optical re-comps in isn’t one of those nits, for me personally).

I don’t believe there’s a thread on this forum about it, but instead it’s over at TheStarWarsTrilogy forums, where the 4KXX series and the Silver Screen Edition scans originate from.

Short version - it’s essentially a “de-specialized edition” that uses the Disney+ files as the base, and replaces shots as necessary from the 4K77 and 4K80 scans to make the 2012 Lowry re-masters as close to theatrical as possible. It’s not as involved as Harmy’s Despecialized projects, which involved a lot of blending and matte-work, it seems to mostly just be replacing whole shots when a change comes up. It’s notable that the 4K80 project isn’t very close to completion yet, but the scans themselves have been made available to Oohteedee for use in his project.

I don’t understand this, or your obsession with the Chosen One prophecy. It seems like you think all the bad parts of Star Wars tie back to the prophecy, when I never interpreted it as a retcon of the OT. If anything, it actually enhances the OT characters’ accomplishments, by giving them a wider galactic context. But this is all subjective.

Firstly: it’s not an “obsession” and I don’t really appreciate the implication behind my bringing it up here in this conversation. It’s not an “unhealthy fixation” or anything, or at least not beyond any “unhealthy fixation” that prompts any of us to still be visiting web forums about Star Wars in 2020, haha.

You may disagree with it (you obviously do) but I think there’s nothing wrong with pointing out how and why the decisions made in the past affect the stuff we’re looking at here in the present, and despite the fact you don’t look at it as a retcon, it’s still a retcon. Retcon isn’t an inherently negative term, either.

Secondly: don’t think ALL the bad parts of Star Wars tie back to the prophecy, but I also think it’s pretty much inarguable that “The Prophecy of the Chosen One,” especially being introduced as the means for Anakin’s discovery AND fall AND redemption (which, again, didn’t become the central focus of the Star Wars saga until AFTER Return of the Jedi finished its theatrical run) is a key point of many of the other story decisions made in the prequels, and thus, many of the discussions (and arguments) people have on web forums about Star Wars regarding the Force, and Lucas, and “the rules” as they were.

People like to discuss this fiction as if it’s not fiction, and that’s a huge stumbling block. This isn’t a documentary that only Lucas has the ability to tell correctly. It’s a pastiche of myth and adventure stories, and it’s never actually had a singular author, no matter how fervently we’ve all fed into the myth that it did (and does, and should) It’s not original, and there’s tons of outside context to look at and take into account when talking about what Star Wars does and doesn’t do well.

Lucas’ ideas aren’t infallible, and if you’ve got room to improve them, and you’ve been given the green light to do that, then do it! Prophecy was a lazy conceit, applied haphazardly and fairly terribly. One of the unintended results is that the very nature of this hazy, vaguely-formed mystic fictional religion is JUST solidified enough for people to stake out positions and issue challenges based on their understanding of it.

This seems like it’s kind of a cousin to the recent conversations about Canon and its percieved importance, and a thing Lucas used to believe (I think it’s one of the things he learned from Roddenberry, in fact) is that canon doesn’t really matter, and if canon is a hindrance to making your story better, then change the canon, or disregard it. I think that if that’s what Rian did on TLJ, fine. Good.

I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what I think is a pretty obvious oversight regarding the nature of the force on the part of RJ but I’m open to hearing any possible explanations.

I think NFB’s post above is a great response, but if I could add my own counterargment on top of it: whether Rian broke the rules or not - those rules being broken led to a better movie, which is the most important thing.

Because as everyone here should be painfully familiar with by now: George Lucas doesn’t always have good ideas, and sticking to something he dreamed up simply because he dreamed it up is a pretty unnecessary set of handcuffs to put on yourself if you don’t have to.

And Rian didn’t have to.

And that’s all IF I agree with the notion he didn’t get The Force, which I DON’T agree with. We can’t even properly wrap our head around REAL religions, much less half-baked fictional ones that more or less only exist for the sake of giving a fantasy movie its magic analog. The Force being shaded and re-interpreted for each trilogy (or even each movie, really) is just as much a Star Wars tradition as the opening scroll and blue closing credits.

Once again, one of the bigger discussions i’ve seen in the past 20 years comes down to rules-lawyering a fictional religion in a fantasy movie - but the only reason that rules-lawyering has been allowed to go on so long is because Lucas had the brilliant idea to retcon Return of the Jedi with the Prequel Trilogy, retroactively making the OT and PT into Anakin’s story, and using a tired “CHOSEN ONE prophecy” arc for him, created a shaky, and almost ALWAYS misunderstood concept of what “balance” means in the force as the engine for that prophecy to run through the prequels.

If I agree that Rian Johnson tweaked or changed the idea of how people interact or concieve of the Force in-universe, I’d say that’s fine. Adhering to bad ideas, executed badly, for the sake of keeping canon sacred, is just another form of bad storytelling. If there’s room for re-interpretation (and there obviously is - Lucas himself keeps doing it both in the movies and in interviews ABOUT the movies, as NFB showed above) then I think that re-interpretation should be done if you have a good angle or idea on it that helps YOUR STORY.

I know this is way beside the point but man… I just love the Ewoks. Completely unironically. I think they’re great.

It’s bizarre to me how even back in 1983-1984 (and of course, continuing all the way til now, really) people thought they were somehow a stain or a mark on Star Wars. They fit so perfectly. Guerrilla-warfare with teddy bears. That’s Star Wars as hell. The idea that they didn’t fit really doesn’t make any sense. I could see how you could make the argument, and to be honest I DID make some variations on that argument (to a lesser degree, at least) myself when I was younger and took Star Wars way too seriously as a teenager and young adult. But from here, now that I’m old and looking back from 2020? Of course they fit. They fit beautifully. I kind of wish they were used a little bit better, of course (that’s a general wish about everything Return of the Jedi, honestly, I wish it was just done a little bit better in a lot of ways) but they never felt “out of bounds” or anything.

Bounding into Comics is a terrible website that probably shouldn’t be getting eyeballs or attention from anyone. It’s essentially a mouthpiece for some of the absolute worst elements of “geek culture” or “fandom” in general.

It’s essentially Breitbart or OANN for “fanboys”

Oh wow, yeah, that shot of Luke on the Skiff with Chewie and the weequay is STRAIGHT out of my memories. I’m a little startled by the flashback I just had, haha.