Broom Kid

I don’t know how you can give Lucas all the credit while also giving his collaborators all the credit, unless you’re going to suggest that all his collaborators credit actually belongs to him because he’s the one who chose to collaborate with them?

Historically, you can see Lucas’ abilities as a creator start to fade pretty fast around 1982, when his life started entering into serious upheaval, and his focus turned more to being a CEO than to a creative. It’s why Jedi (and Temple of Doom) seem as compromised as they are, and why the other films with his name attached to them (save for Willow - which didn’t really work) at that point had minimal (if any) involvement from him (Last Crusade, Labyrinth, Howard the Duck, Tucker, etc.)

Part of the reason the Prequels didn’t go the way he wanted them to is because he didn’t really want to write or direct them, and his headspace was completely shifted. He was trying to reverse-engineer a story from a set point, and tried aiming it at children/families without having spent too much time in that world, if any, in the intervening 15 years. Which is probably why we wound up watching a kids movie about bureaucratic malfeasance in 1999. It’s the perfect example of his two halves just smashing together and not really mixing.

THX 1138 was (and still is) a misunderstood satire of capitalism
American Graffiti was autobiography
Star Wars was nostalgia pastiche.

Those are his three. He executed those three ideas brilliantly, and the uniqueness of his voice rang out as strong as it could, and that voice has been echoing ever since. But he had one hell of a backing band behind him, too, and not everybody gets to be a belter for all their life. Or even most of it. Sometimes you shine as bright as you can for a short period of time, and no matter how talented or gifted you are, that’s all you get on your own, and you’d better learn to work with, rely on, and fit in with others if you hope to carry on that path. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with acknowledging that, either. I think it’s fair to say he did that.

I disagree in that “big picture” isn’t really a necessary ingredient. the OT didn’t really have one, either - part of the reason Lucas could blow up Empire the way he did is because he didn’t have any real big picture. He just made something up and stuck it at the end of his script and then had to try and figure out how that was going to work in Jedi. And then how he ended up having it work was ALSO something that didn’t have any big picture planning behind it. Same with the Prequels: The only real “big picture” was the status quo at the beginning of Star Wars. But the way he got to that status quo had no solid throughline at all, and that’s because he just made each story up as he went. Even the parts that he’d been telling us about for decades by that point weren’t the same when he finally got around to writing them.

Of course, those are semi-negative examples that sort of prove that a “big picture” might actually be necessary, but there are countless other examples of movies, film series, tv shows, books, etc. whose greatness is unquestioned, but whose creative paths were absolutely not mapped, or pre-ordained when they began. In fact MOST great stuff we all like and have copies of on our shelves wasn’t created that way. The idea of the “Big Picture” being a necessary element is mostly a myth, and it’s mostly a new one, created in response to TV fans reacting poorly to LOST and Battlestar Galactica. It’s less an actual recipe for making great art, and more like a security blanket for consumers so they can feel good about investing all their time and energy into following along with a story and feeling like they won’t be disappointed at the end. Since almost everything that causes someone to BECOME a fan was created without any serious “big picture” in place before it was started, the idea that the “big picture” is a thing that’s desperately needed doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re solely looking at it as an insurance policy.

Biggest problem with both changes (which I don’t think everyone consensus likes OR dislikes - but trying to find a consensus in Star Wars fandom is like trying to find a rose growing at the bottom of a sewage treatment plant)

McDiarmid replacing Revill: The makeup on McDiarmid isn’t very goooooood, and the dialog changes are just extraneous additions. Styrofoam peanuts.

Christensen replacing Shaw: It’s literally a headswap from a costume test. That’s bush league. Hayden isn’t even ACTING in the scene.

I am wondering if, much in the same way McDiarmid has replaced dialog in Rebels while working on TROS, they’re going to re-do Christensen’s appearance at the end of Jedi so that he’s actually ACTING in the scene? But I guess that’s really unlikely now that we’ve seen the 4K masters and that shot hasn’t been re-done at all.

Originality is vastly overrated as a key aspect of artistic strength. “Yeah, but it’s new” doesn’t carry a lot of weight when what’s new isn’t made well.

However - Lucas DID basically whip up Empire Strikes Back’s story/structure more or less all by himself once Brackett was gone. Kasdan contributed heavily, yes, but by the time he came on the bones of the thing were firmly in place. But on the other hand: The most famous twist of all time, probably, and the one that basically doomed Star Wars to forever be taken way more seriously than it ever really needed to, and trained its biggest fans to expect twists and turns and huge surprises in every chapter despite the fact it’s ALWAYS been a straightforward fairy-tale other than THAT ONE TIME… that twist was basically pulled out of his backside at the last second before shooting started. It wasn’t a deeply considered, thought-out idea. It was just a hand grenade tossed at the end of the story to create one hell of a cliffhanger for the next chapter.

It was also not really the newest of ideas, either. In fact it was, even by 1978, a pretty obvious staple of soap operas and pulp fiction.

I haven’t really gone through them myself. I think the DVD era more or less burnt me out on “extras” although I still find myself, out of habit, buying blu-rays based on how many bullet points are on the back.

But at some point it occurred to me that for all the weight I give “the extras” on any disc I ever bought, aside from a handful of very prominent examples, I almost never watched them more than once, and sometimes never watched them at all.

There’s a bunch of stuff on the 2011 blu-ray set for Star Wars I’ve never clicked on. That includes some of the deleted scenes.

Yeah, my list certainly doesn’t look like it did last year. And 5 years ago it probably would have looked a lot different, too.

Every year that goes by informs the way I appreciate movies, and that appreciation shifts and changes with the number of stories I consume. Lists like these are fun not only because you get a sense of what people like and what they value over other aspects, but because they DO change as experiences accumulate.

I swore up and down all through my teens and early 20s that Superman II was a better made, more interesting, more involving, more MOVIE movie than Superman: The Movie. Much older me understands why I thought that, but definitely disagrees. Same with Aliens and Alien.

I believe that some (but not all?) of the deleted scenes for included on the 2011 box set are available under each movie’s “extras” menu on Disney+

Again, not attempting to excuse or justify this hiliariously weird change by Lucas, but to attempt answering your question, I believe this is what he was intending:

Greedo at no point appears to believe Han is a threat, which is why he’s talking so big.
Han is content to let Greedo believe he’s unarmed, which is why he’s surreptitiously getting his gun ready.
Greedo keeps talking bigger and bigger
Han, with his weapon free, goads him to see what he’ll do.
Greedo now says “MacKlunkey!” which is apparently actually “Ma Klounkee” - Huttese for “This is the end of you.” or something like that.
Han shoots first.

So I think the intent (again, not saying he was successful at all) was to make it even clearer that Greedo was out to burn Han, and to have the scene play more like an actual showdown instead of a sneak attack. In this way, Greedo’s boldness and stupidity in needing to get the last word is what gets him shot.

Fourth time’s the charm, I guess? (It isn’t)

DominicCobb said:

Has anyone checked against the stills pulled from the Reliance reel that started this thread so many years ago? I know the obvious assumption is that it’s their work, but it might be worth confirming.

I believe Pablo confirmed this on twitter? There was only one 4K restoration being done when Lucas still owned Lucasfilm and it was by Reliance. The fact he was able to pinpoint it as “The 4K one” solely by hearing about MacLunkey basically eliminates any other option.

Mike Zeroh is always full of it. He’s one of the most notorious YouTube grifters there is. There is no benefit to giving him clicks and helping his monetization.

He came and he took without giving.

I think it’s just Solo and Mando (and Rebels)

Thank you Ash!

ChainsawAsh said:

JEDIT: Default forced subs suck. I tweaked them to look okay (200% size, depressed font edge, 0% background opacity), but they still alternate seemingly at random between the top and bottom of the screen, which is super annoying. And they are parly in, partly out of the letterboxing no matter what you do.

How did you manage to change them? I can’t even find a setting in the app to adjust… basically ANYTHING

But there are legitimately well shot, well photographed, well-lit and well framed Marvel movies. Especially in the last couple years. Thor Ragnarok, Black Panther… those are legitimately good looking movies.

The idea that Greig Fraser shot a poor looking television show just… I don’t get it. I don’t know by what metric you could possibly be judging that by. It looks just as good as his work on Rogue One, and his work on Rogue One looks amazing, period. It doesn’t look good “For a Star Wars movie” but it looked good as in “this is one of the most notable examples of photography for the entire year of 2016”

This is the same guy shooting Dune for Denis Villenueve, btw.

This show looks better than most Marvel movies.

Grieg Fraser shot the thing. Trying to say it looks cheap doesn’t even make any sense to me.

Good Lord, I said I get it. But it’s good to know that you all remember the catechisms after 20+ years. 😃

I’ll grab a pew and say my penance on the way back to the vestibule.

I feel like trying to properly judge stuff like fine detail and film grain via ANY stream is probably a recipe for inaccuracies. Disney+ might have a very good compression algorithm but it’s still going to be very compressed compared to what we’ll actually get on the UHD/BD set next year. Color/Contrast is going to be a much more fair assessment to make.

I just looked at Empire Strikes Back and the very famous “we fixed the opacity during the snowspeeder attack” lie is still a lie - you can still see through the canopies. I always thought it was funny they went out of their way on the LD and VHS documentaries to point out how they “fixed” that, and all they really did is tell people exactly where to look to see it still there when they put the actual movie on.

Do we have caps of some of the more egregious edge enhancement and DNR application on Phantom Menace to use as a baseline? I’m curious to see how those instances look compared to what got uploaded to Disney+ yesterday.

I looked at Phantom Menace last night and I don’t THINK it was a new scan. But I’m not sure I trust myself to make that call, either.

I’m also pretty curious about the garbage mattes (or the cockpit transparencies in ESB, which despite being made a key part of the documentary that came with the Special Edition sets, never really got fixed all the way so far as I remember) - I’m sure comparisons are coming shortly.

The Gonk droid sound effect WAS different, wasn’t it?

Yeah, in development is more accurate than “on hold” I think. Thanks!

I think classifying both Feige and Johnson’s projects as “on hold” isn’t really accurate. Both are in very early stages of development, with go-aheads still to be determined.

Further, describing Johnson’s project as “has not been officially canceled” seems a little weird to me. It implies there’s an unofficial cancellation that we’re not talking about.

Mocata said:

Well that depends on whether Disney wants physical media at all.

It’s not as large a market as it used to be, but it’s still a viable market. They’re releasing a Skywalker Saga UHD/BD set in 2020.

CatBus said:

In my sense of the term (described earlier), it makes sense. Are you talking about the originals or not? “Special Edition” means “not”, so it works for everything from 1997 onward,

You’d have to start with 1981 then. Which wasn’t called a Special Edition either.

The 1997 version is the only one that’s actually a Special Edition. Comparing the Special Editions to MST3K is just hyperbolic. I get not liking all the changes, but the idea that most of the movie got changed really doesn’t make any sense. Most of the movie is still there, and still intact. over 90% of each film is essentially the same as it was when they finished post-production in 77, 80, and 83. Fixing VFX, re-adding deleted scenes, and making VFX content changes on top of the film restoration isn’t the same as writing a comedy script and performing it non-stop over the soundtrack. One is a satirical transformation of the work into a completely different thing. The other is the 1997 release, named as “Special Edition”

All the other editions of the film are just that - variations. It makes much more sense to simply refer to the year their visual changes were adopted than to call half of the editions by a name they never had.

edit: FWIW I know this is some tilting at windmills stuff. It’s a lost battle already. Just like “Han Shot First” and other bits of fandom lore that got cemented in place as the internet made sharing memes the primary mode of fan communication - “Special Edition” is no longer the title of a single re-release made in 1997, but a blanket condemnation on post-release changes in general, applied to ANY film ,and not just Star Wars. I get it.