Broom Kid

I was watching “The Andromeda Strain” tonight, and there was a character in it by the name of General Sparks, played by an actor named Peter Hobbs. The entire time I was thinking “I swear to God I recognize this guy’s voice from somewhere” and after about 20 minutes, I thought I finally placed it: General Dodonna from Star Wars.

But Peter Hobbs was clean shaven, didn’t very much look like General Dodonna, and as it turns out, isn’t the guy who played Dodonna. That guy’s name was Alex McCrindle. So I thought “well, that’s weird, but maybe old officious dudes in the 70’s talked like that frequently, I don’t know. In the 30’s everyone sounded like Cary Grant, maybe it’s one of those types of things.”

But then I looked up a video of Alex McCrindle in a role that WASN’T General Dodonna (he ended up having a role in Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle, in fact) and Alex McCrindle sounds NOTHING like General Dodonna. And even if he wanted to pitch his voice down and make it crunchier or more officious, he very likely still wouldn’t sound like General Dodonna. So I started wondering if Peter Hobbs overdubbed Alex McCrindle, and started googling around. There’s no official recognition that I can see, no crediting on imdb, and I couldn’t find anything at the usual wiki places, but when I googled the phrase “Peter Hobbs Voice-Over Star Wars” I found this post from four years ago at filmboards.com

https://filmboards.com/board/p/2370744/

Relevant quote:

“My Dad was Peter Hobbs. Years ago I remember him pointing up to a Star Wars marquee, “I’ve only got one line in that, but it’s a doozy. ‘May the force be with you.’” Not sure if that’s what actually happened, but he definitely did some vo on SW. He died a couple of years ago so I can’t ask him for more details. You guys have incredible ears!”

That’d be a really random thing for someone to just make up, of all the things to make up… so I’m pretty sure Peter Hobbs was the voice of General Dodonna.

I understand why this question is asked so frequently, but I also think the best answer is to just let them discover it on their own, however it is they discover it - whether that’s hearing about it from a friend, picking it out of a home video library on their own, or stumbling across it on TV (or netflix, or youtube now, I guess? Twitch tv maybe?) I don’t think I missed out or lost anything by not having my dad set me down to watch Star Wars with him after having figured out the optimal viewing order. I became a fan of the original trilogy by myself, and that sense of discovery is a big part of why it stuck with me all this time. There’s a big difference between finding this very cool thing “on your own” vs. having it carefully curated and presented to you like a rite of passage. Kids can and do recognize this, even if they don’t have the words for those concepts yet.

Almost anything you hear on the soundtrack referring to Jabba the Hutt doesn’t exist in the movie. I do wonder if there’s a way to get all of that music back in the film - and there’s a lot of it - without it feeling cut-up and disrupted.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

I think they had to because Fox was not involved in digital distribution.

I understand why they initially pulled the logos - they wanted digital versions up very, very quickly, and hadn’t worked out a better deal with Fox - before buying them outright, that is - what I don’t understand, especially considering their strategy for The Force Awakens and every other movie that followed, is why they thought the Lucasfilm logo needed a fanfare at all, much less the chopped up “Finale” from Empire as that fanfare.

Everything about it just sounded like a thing decided upon, started, and finished in less than an hour before someone hit publish.

I don’t think Dash Rendar is ever getting resurrected. Shadows of the Empire as a story has aged so amazingly poorly, and Dash specifically is the butt of so many jokes… I just don’t see it happening.

DavidMDaut said:

EDIT: What I could see, though, is them getting McDiarmid to voice Palpatine for the upcoming final batch of Clone Wars episodes coming to Disney+. If they already got him in the booth for that, it’d be easy enough to have him read this one scene from Rebels.

That’s what I was referencing in my post.

Although honestly, if they were willing to pay him for 2 or 3 days of vocal work, they probably could have retrofitted him into the old Clone Wars episodes too. But I agree with you that such a scenario seems unlikely.

RE: the other examples of tinkering: That decision to re-do the fanfares is so weird, in retrospect. I don’t understand why they even tried it, or further, why they thought that edit was a good idea.

This is, I believe, the first time post-release tinkering has happened at Lucasfilm since the purchase. Up until now there’s been no “versions” of anything.

Of course the question now is if his voice work stops at this one scene for Rebels, or if they went ahead and put him in Clone Wars, too.

It seems to me like it’s a theatrical feature. I can’t imagine you’d team up Kennedy and Feige on a project and not have it go to theaters.

It’s also weird in that Disney seems to be otherwise forgoing homogeneity in their marketing, going out of their way to use the marketing logos from the time of release in a lot of material. The D23 announcements of material specifically had OT-style logos, PT-style logos, and ST-style logos representing each era. They didn’t “hamburger-logo-generator” every title like they’ve done for these blu-rays.

If only Bob Iger had gone through with buying Twitter, for no other reason than to have wiped every single tweet from existence, buried all the servers, and glassed the landfill. I would have loved for Twitter to just one day have become the comments section for D23 members and that’s it. That would have been GREAT.

semi-on-topic: This thread is really interesting as a time-capsule starting when trying to upscale and de-noise laserdisc rips was at the forefront of fan-preservation attempts, going all the way through to the “wait, we can scan our own film prints!” revelation that brings us to the here and now.

weird thing I just noticed - the titles between the Star Wars sandwich-style logo aren’t stretched to fit. The Last Jedi and A New Hope are the primary examples. It’s almost like they just typed the words into a “Star Wars logo creator” and printed it onto the image.

If the 4k/BD set next year had the actual Special Editions in them I’d buy them in a second. They look better than the DVD or BD cuts, and they otherwise haven’t been released at a resolution higher than laserdisc. Honestly the Special Editions are probably rarer than the originals are at this point.

I still think this one actually SOUNDS the best.

https://streamable.com/7ky47

All the further enhancements are increasingly highlighting the time-stretch and reverb processing, and instead of making the performance feel organic and connected, it’s making it stand out more. I don’t know that you even need to slow down ‘Your mother’ so much as you probably need to slightly pitch shift it down a few cents and maybe eq more carefully. As it is, it sounds a little extra-crispy with the time stretch and reverb effects being added to it.

of the variations posted, I honestly believe it’s this first one that sounds the most like James Earl Jones is saying the line as written in the ADR sessions. The others, in an effort to make it “time out” correctly, are calling attention to the fact it’s two takes stitched together. If time stretching has to be employed, I’d suggest only stretching the “err” syllable of your mother.

True, but this is some Ant-Man quantum-realm fiddling, haha. But it’s also not like I’m the one in the lab cutting the stuff together either, so my two cents aren’t even worth that, I understand. Just wanted to put it out there that as someone who is very tuned to this sort of thing through consuming untold number of fan-derived projects, the first example posted in here would read as “seamless.”

I think this is starting to become an exercise in splitting of the finest of hairs. The first one was more than good enough, and iterations on it have all been minutely incremental improvements at best, if that. The fact it works as well as it does at all is pretty damned cool.

I think anything that minimizes, neutralizes, and de-romanticizes the making of these movies is a good thing, ultimately. The mythmaking should stay in the movies, and not be equally applied to the making of them.

I don’t think they’re pushing the 3D set (3D was basically dead when they released that disc) they’re just trying to do the least to move the dead stock as attractively as they can. If these discs seem lacking, that’s fine - the contrast will be even more pronounced when they’re stacked against the upcoming 4K set.

Disney and Lucasfilm haven’t officially announced any new sets for next year, but this repackaging of on-hand stock has almost every time meant a new Disney release is imminent, and that lines up with the (fairly credible) rumors of a “Skywalker Saga” 4K set not just in the works, but ready to go for 2020

The most recent example of this practice was Marvel repackaging all their MCU movies to clear out old stock in advance of the Infinity Saga box set still undated for next year.

Between Solo’s botched release (largely Iger’s fault) and Iger’s latest strategy of releasing a memoir full of stories where he makes George Lucas feel bad literally one week before the marketing campaign for the end of the Skywalker Saga starts, you have to wonder just how angry Kathleen Kennedy is at her boss right now.

This might be faulty memory kicking in here, but I’m vaguely remembering that the Sci-Fi Channel (pre-SyFy days, pre-Battlestar Galactica reboot) used to intermittently show the original versions in rare marathons, post Special Editions. I can’t verify that though, and I really might be remembering it incorrectly, but I think it happened?

I also believe the Special Editions were still being shown at some outlets even after the 2004 DVDs had come out. Now, of course, everything is the 2011 blu-ray versions, but for awhile there I vaguely remember it being kind of a crapshoot as to which version you were going to be watching if you caught it on television with the commercial breaks and everything. Was it the SE’s? Was it the DVDs? The only real consistency was that no matter who was showing it, they were definitely cropping it, whether it was to 4x3, or 16x9.

2012 is when the Phantom Menace got the 3D re-release. A tomatometer of mid-60s isn’t particularly well liked. It’s not really hated, though, but the argument that people HATE The Phantom Menace has always been a more fan-focused one. General Audiences and critics. may not have liked it a whole bunch, but they didn’t hate it, either.

The audience ratings at rottentomatoes were suspect even BEFORE the act of brigading became common practice in 2016. I wouldn’t give them much credence in any respect, not only because they’re easily (and often) gamed but because the self-selected sample-size is fairly biased towards a specific kind of filmgoer.

Again, I appreciated the attempt, but I think it’s really one of those cases where there’s simply not enough unique and interesting footage to make that thing feel faster or more intense with what’s there. It’s the equivalent of trying to re-edit the Tusken attack on Luke to run 30-40 seconds longer, but all you have is five or six swipes and that celebratory stick action to rock back and forth. It’s partially why the Sc. 38 re-do was so exciting, and then so disappointing: The only real solution to updating that scene is to literally re-shoot it. Someone finally did, but they decided to make it look like a Netflix action movie and not like Star Wars.

I think that fight, short of someone coming up with a box full of alternate takes that can be scanned and rotoscoped, or another group of people re-shooting and re-choreographing the fight and using face-replacement and deepfaking for Ben, is probably best left alone. For all the fixes and re-edits in Revisited that are legitimate improvements or “invisible” upgrades, it only makes it all the more apparent when an edit DOESN’T work, and I think Adywan did as well as he could with what’s in the film proper, but I don’t think it actually improves on the Special Edition the way all his other edits do.

coming to this conversation a little late, but regarding The Imperial March in Vader’s Entrance:

I like the choice of Imperial March statement being used for Vader’s entrance on the Tantive, in the example Invar used. It’d need better mixing and eq-ing to match with the orchestra around it, but it could work. But sound issues aside, I think it would also seem a little jarring overall in that the march wouldn’t show up anywhere else in the movie. But I think if you replace that original flourish Williams did with the original Imperial Motif statements Giacchino did in Rogue One, it might fit a little better? Specifically on “Krennic’s Aspirations?”

it would also need to be re-eq’d to fit with the 1977 recording, but I think it might flow better with the rest of the movie? You might not even need to remove the original fanfare that announces Vader’s reaction, it’d simply be a matter of dropping in a new, menacing version of the original Imperial theme from Rogue One over the top of it.

Along those same lines - I know Adywan isn’t going to be using that one remake of the Vader/Kenobi duel, but I am curious if there are going to be any changes to the duel at all. The attempt to extend the duel and make it look and feel more exciting was a good attempt, but I felt like the re-edit was mostly seamless in terms of how the changes were thought up and applied, except for that duel, where it became pretty obvious it was just rearranged shots we’d already seen matched up with Episode III music, and that was one of the only places where the re-edit pulled me out of the film. Is it going to be the same approach, a new and different one, or a reversion to the original duel with fixed VFX?

You are a bold one, General Kenobi!

I think it’s interesting how people are guessing at the domestic/international split. Star Wars has never really been a series that goes much over 60% international, and I don’t think that even if Rise of Skywalker ends up being a near perfect film that has astounding word of mouth, that it’ll do much more than a 50/50 split. I think I’m predicting closer to 55/45 in the domestic direction? But I think that domestic turn-out is going to be really, really big.

Star Wars has always been more a North American phenomenon than an international one, and as the box-office markets have exploded in the last 20 years, that has only gotten more true.

MonkeyLizard10 said:

nah, more just like the sort of sneering hipster crowd took over forums and spread hate and then it became cool to hate > everything

Fandom isn’t influential enough to change the minds of the general audience NOW, and almost everybody’s on the internet. They were even less influential back in the early 2000s when hardly anyone was on it and the people who were, were all considered to be weirdos for spending their all their free time online talking about Star Wars movies.

Sneering hipsters didn’t really have anything to do with making it “cool to hate everything.” The much more plausible idea is that people actually believed in the opinions they were sharing. Those opinions could have been misguided, or not fun to hear, or really flimsy and easy to knock over, but I don’t think the large majority of them were being said simply because they thought that’s how you became a “sneering hipster” who is cool and respected.

What happened then is the same thing that’s happening now. The Star Wars fandom isn’t good at processing new Star Wars for what it is, until it’s become canonized to some degree via time. I don’t really like the movie myself, but time, and acceptance, has me in a place where if a 1080 fan-preservation from a 35mm film scan was announced here I’d be one of the first scrambling to try and download it because there are aspects of it I DO like, and I’d like to see them the way I remembered them that opening night.