Broom Kid

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.

Now Dre just has to actually make a prediction!

I still think they’ll do it eventually.

75th anniversary, maybe. If they can wait that long. 60th is probably a better bet.

JUSTICE FOR DEL

I’m very familiar with Mr. Collins - his Soundtrack Show is very, very good. I like those old Oxygen shows, but I also wish there were versions of it where it was just him. His co-host doesn’t add much and is usually just distracting.

I too was like “I don’t know that Williams really brought it with this release” upon the first month or so with the soundtrack. And then it was like something unlocked one day. I couldn’t even tell you what it was, but I very much remember one day not just realizing how packed full of goodness that score was, but how well it fit in with his original trilogy work. It really did feel of a piece with the original score in the way it sounds, the way it moves through various emotions, the way all the motifs are knitted together in ways you seriously have to listen for to discover.

It’s a soundtrack that is KNITTED together, really. And if you don’t know what the design is, you might just confuse it for a lot of basic (or even bland) underscore. But once you realize just how many motifs and themes are being moved around and interpreted/re-interpreted, that Force Awakens score just opens up.

I’d love to be able to see one of those live-to-picture concerts for Force Awakens some day.

At the time it was released, it was probably the prettiest Star Wars film ever made. At least until Rogue One came out.

But so far as technical filmmaking craft, I have a hard time knocking anything about The Force Awakens. Creative decisions in storytelling, directing, editing… sure, I get a lot of the criticisms, some I agree with some I don’t. But the way this movie was shot, and the way this movie sounds? Damn near flawless. It is one hell of a pop confection. Abrams, Dan Mindel, Ren Klyce and Matthew Wood were literally at the top of their game from an audio/visual perspective.

20th Century Fox paid for the Special Editions, yes. It was on their dime, and I believe it was initially their idea, too. Lucas ended up negotiating with them further, and used the money they’d initially earmarked for a 20th anniversary restoration and re-release of Star Wars to be a “Special Edition” trilogy project (I believe they got Fox to increase the budget at that point as well) but the story of the Special Edition starts with 20th Century Fox approaching Lucas about getting the original film back in theaters as an event, and Lucas then using his leverage to fix things he wanted to fix then, and add things he couldn’t have added, especially since Fox agreed to pay for it.

Now the quality of the “fixes” can be debated, and have been for over 20 years now, I’m not going to argue that the execution was successful. But the intent of the Special Editions was definitely different than the intent behind the DVD release, and the later blu-ray release. The Special Editions were initially begun with a bigger idea of “fixing” the movies so that they looked and felt more like he wanted them to back then. The DVD and Blu-Ray additions - not paid for by Fox - were undertaken more along the idea of “this seems cool, put it in there.”

The actual Special Editions (the 97 theatrical releases are really the only ones that are actually “Special Editions,” everything else is just Star Wars) seemed a lot more concerned with “fixing” things, and a lot of errors were tackled. The Special Editions were also on Fox’s dime, entirely. Some of the more egregious additions to the Special Editions were done as a sort of testing ground for prequel effects, but the SEs did do a decent job of removing “mistakes” from the original releases.

You’re right however that the 2004 DVD release and the 2011 blu-ray release (which were Lucasfilm budgeted, I believe) were less about fixing anything and more about adding stuff if they could. Those releases didn’t really have the same mandate as the Special Edition did, and likely had a smaller budget. So the idea there was different, and the execution reflects that - those releases are definitely more along the lines of “put that thing in there, that’ll be cool” instead of “here’s a list of errors I’d like cleaned up.”

LOL, that’s pretty crazy. It seems obvious to me they’re all the exact same person (it’s definitely not two different characters in the same Empire scene)

Should we start a petition to recognize the efforts of Del Goren in his fight against the empire?

JUSTICE FOR DEL

Yeah, I just looked at the clip and I’m pretty sure this is Burnell Tucker in both instances. But the “It’s metal!” guy ISN’T the same Rebel as “Enemy Fighters” guy?

Star Wars
https://youtu.be/2WBG2rJZGW8?t=246

Empire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmi5sreXVMA

If they’re not the same rebel, seems like a missed opportunity.

Only just recently noticed this in Empire, but I don’t know if I really noticed it or if I think I noticed it.

The guy in Star Wars who says “enemy fighters coming your way” is, I think, in Empire too? As the same rebel?

I looked it up and apparently that guy’s name is Del Goren, played by Burnell Tucker. IMDB is showing that Burnell Tucker is also in The Empire Strikes Back, and I think he’s the guy who is monitoring the Imperial Probe Droid transmission before Han and Chewie go out after it.

Thank you everybody for your responses!

Are you actually streaming it in 4k right now? Every other account I’ve read from the Netherlands is that they’re marking things as being available in 4K but none of the content is actually encoded at that level. If you’re getting an actual 4k stream and not a 1080 stream marked as 4K, it means they’re already starting to update/upgrade the files they’re serving since the platform went live.

Also, I’m guessing the Ewok movies and show isn’t up there? I have yet to see anyone say they’ve watched them, and considering people are finding stuff like the '90s X-Men and Gargoyles episodes, Ewoks should have turned up by now.

I love that it’s Father Roderick doing the walk through

I also noticed that in the D23 trailer, they made sure to go through the saga in chronological order. Which makes sense, as the saga really only works in that order. Watching them in episode order really handicaps the prequels more than they’re already handicapped, since there are things in the prequels that basically don’t work at all unless you have a working knowledge of the three movies that preceded them. not just from a plotting perspective, but a tone and feeling POV. A lot of those movies rely on you knowing what’s being referenced, or what’s coming down the road in the original trilogy.

it seems like they haven’t made any sort of official announcement (I don’t think they ever would, either) but based on their platform, their pages on other platforms, and general practices like in the D23 trailer, Disney now believes the best way to work through the Star Wars saga is in chronological/release order, and not episode order.

I’m feeling comfy that most of the general stuff we’ve heard in the last couple weeks is more or less right, myself. It’s weird as hell in a lot of ways, but weird in ways that sound pretty likely, considering the motivations of the characters, and the history of the people in control behind the scenes. I’m certain a good third of it is off somehow, with some of that being completely wrong and/or deleted from earlier in production, but the big bullet points of who is doing what and why seem sound, to me.

I honestly think a opening night screening where people are primed to let out that huge cheer for the main title card and then it… doesn’t come? That could be great.

It seems like the last couple weeks have essentially gotten us to a pretty solid place in terms of basic plotting and motivation for the movie.

The most intriguing thing to me, honestly, is the idea that the movie might not start with the main title and scroll, but a flashback following the “A long time ago” card, and then smash cut to the main title at the end of the flashback, like Rogue One.