Broom Kid

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.

I disagree because describing the less than 5-10 minutes total of changes to all 350+ minutes of the movies as a “remake” doesn’t seem fair or accurate, even accounting for the flexibility of language.

The 1997 versions are the only ones to be have the title “Special Edition” applied to it, so they’re the only “Special Editions” that have ever existed (they’re also, amazingly, now the most rare versions of Star Wars), and everything else is a version or iteration. There are so many versions of Star Wars at this point the idea of calling most of them “Special Editions” increasingly doesn’t make any sense. The editions themselves aren’t even special anymore. The only one that’s actually in any way Special is the one with that title, that got theatrically released in 1997 and was sold/promoted on the basis of the changes they notified us of in advance, which is still the only time they’ve actually done that. And is, again, now the rarest, hardest-to-find version of the film.

DavidMDaut said:

I also get the impression that a lot of folks at Lucasfilm would love to see the original versions released, but they don’t want to thumb their noses at Lucas’s clearly and repeatedly stated desire to have the revised versions be the only ones widely available.

I know a couple people at Lucasfilm have said as much publicly, as well. It’s not a contractual thing, or a stipulation, or any of that. They just don’t wanna piss him off if they don’t have to, and they don’t have to. So they won’t.

Doesn’t mean they won’t ask every now and again, like they did for the 70mm re-release. And maybe they also asked, right around the same time, about putting the originals on as a bonus feature for the 2020 UHD/BD set. Who knows. They maybe didn’t. But they might have done.

Because that would have necessitated pressing up completely new discs with that completely new master, as opposed to the more cost-effective measure - simply repackaging already produced discs. I’m guessing they’d already decided by that point to forgo a whole new release until after the Saga was finished and they’d have those “new” masters pressed to disc then, after selling the Fox backstock through as much as possible in the meantime.

Why not? All they have to do is look backwards. “We have access to cloning. What should we clone. What did they clone LAST time they cloned something. What if we cloned something DIFFERENT?”

The show has already gone, and will return again, to Clone War period. It’s a pretty organic throughline if they choose to follow it. “Find me a Yoda” “We need it alive” “Well, even if we get one dead, I’m sure we can do something with it.”

or maybe I’m off entirely. Probably am. But it seems to me like there’s some built-in parallels there if you tie the protecting of this potential Imperial Target to this guy whose life and culture was irrevocably altered by the events of the Clone War.

On both Star Wars AND Empire, correct?

I think this Imperial Remnant’s last ditch shot at establishing some dominance comes in the form of a plan to attempt cloning historically force sensitive beings (Yodas) and genetically modifying them somehow, which would, of course, resonate pretty strongly with The Mandalorian, who remembers how a mercenary thief wearing his culture’s stolen armor agreed to a similar bargain before the Clone Wars started - said wars, of course, leaving him a foundling and scarring him for life.

Essentially, Herzog’s character might be asking himself “Why did the Jedi decide to clone a stupid bounty hunter when they could have cloned their greatest master?” and now a Mandalorian bounty hunter has to decide between restoring his honor (and his culture) by honoring this imperial’s requests in return for all the beskar he could want, or denying this imperial the chance to re-establish their rule through the exploitation of this Yadpole, and saving Baby Yoda from being cloned by the Empire’s mad scientists.

Or maybe it’s none of that, who knows.

3D conversion didn’t take that long, even in 2009. I don’t think they were working on 3D conversions that early, either. I think it’s much more plausible/probable that they got the idea to do 3D re-releases in 2011 (maybe late 2010), and decided that in order to make the 3D conversion as good as it could possibly be, they’d go back to the 97 negatives and re-scan everything in 4K (I believe the new scans were created in that year). Since the blu-rays were already more or less completed by that time, it was easy to take those changes and apply them to these new scans, plus add some extra changes that hadn’t gone into that home video release.

Essentially, it seems like the 3D re-release plan was the catalyst for Lucas to essentially start over from scratch in creating his preferred versions, the release of which would act as a guaranteed 3D income stream as well as promotion for whatever his sequel trilogy was going to be at that time - this is essentially the exact same purpose the Special Edition restoration served for his Prequel Trilogy: Sell the “old” versions on home video (1995: THX releases, 2011: blu-ray releases) screen “new” versions in theaters (1997: Special Editions, 2012: 3D re-releases) to generate hype for the new trilogy coming soon (1999: PT, 2014/15: ST)

And then TPM 3D came out, disappointed everyone financially, and the conversation surrounding the release was mostly negative. The 3D re-release idea was scrapped, and shortly afterwards he decided he was just going to sell the company to Disney.

My understanding is that all the original elements used to create the Original Trilogy were saved (or at least all the ones that WERE saved) and went over to Disney with the sale. So yes, if they wanted to recomposite original effects over the top of the restored '97 negatives, they could do that.

But even if those elements didn’t exist anymore, considering the level at which VFX have progressed since 1997, they could probably just duplicate what the original plates looked like in the computer. If VFX houses can de-age Robert De Niro and resurrect Peter Cushing, they can probably figure out how to re-comp/fake-comp 1977-era VFX at 4K.

But yes: These aren’t the 2011 blu-rays. Many of the same changes applied to the blu-rays are still here, but the 4K restoration Reliance did in 2012 was done by re-scanning the 1997 negatives.

But as always, the question isn’t whether Disney CAN do something, but if they actually WANT to. And then it’s a question of whether Lucas won’t mind - because the execs at Lucasfilm and Disney do still care about whether or not they piss him off, and they don’t want to do that if they don’t have to. Hence Lucasfilm and the MPAA deferring to him in the case of that 70mm print being screened earlier this year.

JawsTDS said:

This recent development has me wondering about those Blu-rays that came out a few weeks back. Everyone was aware that they had the 2011 changes on them, but I wondering if somehow they missed out on the fact that it could’ve had a new scan?

I read that it was just the 2011 discs rebranded / repackaged, but can anyone on this forum definitively confirm that?

It’s been confirmed, yes. They’re the exact same discs. They’re basically clearing backstock in preparation for the new set they’re releasing next year.

LexX said:

I’m hesitant calling anything Special Edition that isn’t actually the Special Edition, from 1997. To me, they are the SE, DVD edition, BD edition and now this 4K edition.

I salute, and thank you.

doubleofive said:

Is… is this a sign they actually went back to the 97 negative and redid all of the subsequent changes?

That’s exactly what Reliance did, yes. Their restoration started with a new scan of the 1997 negative, and then all the 2011 changes (plus a few more) were applied to it.

I guess I should pitch in on this:

S-Tier
1 - The Empire Strikes Back
2 - The Last Jedi

A-Tier
3 - The Force Awakens
4 - Star Wars
5 - Rogue One

B-Tier
6 - Solo

C-Tier
7 - Revenge of the Sith
8 - Return of the Jedi

D-Tier
9 - The Phantom Menace
10 - Attack of the Clones

F-Tier
11 - The Clone Wars

This show feels like a prologue, and not an actual episode. If that makes sense?

Like, whatever the next episode is, THAT’s the actual “Chapter 1”

Also, I guess this is basically Lone Wolf and Cub. I’m fine with that.

There’s no contract stipulation, and there never was. It was always just a guess.