CatBus

C.S. Lewis died over 50 years ago, ownership has passed well beyond personal friends, family and loyalists to the nameless faceless Harper Collins profit center, and yet it’s still not possible to buy a new copy of the Narnia series in the original publication order.

Yes, I know it’s not quite analogous to Star Wars because you can reorder the books yourself, old copies aren’t lower quality than newer copies, etc, etc. But nevertheless it illustrates that if someone widely perceived to be the creator of something, years after it’s already been released to the public, wishes it to be distributed in a different, boneheaded, mangled way that makes no sense to most fans, that wish carries a lot of weight for a long time.

EDIT: Yes, I know it’s also arguable that Lewis even wanted it to be distributed that way at all, or if he was just being accommodating in an exchange with with an enthusiastic fan. The idea that a desire that unclearly expressed can have such lasting impact makes it so much worse.

Past Lucasfilm releases have always been an exercise in how to get the most money from the least amount of effort. In the extremely unlikely scenario Lucasfilm issues a new improved OOT home video release, er, ever, it’s going to have the 81 crawl, the 93 audio, effed up colors, and degrain/regrain, at the very least–and likely some horrifying audio remastering as well, because that’s the established workflow and changing that would require effort. Access to the original negative only matters if you care about the film.

TV’s Frink said:

Everything with Dark Helmet is great. Everything else is meh minus to suck minus. And that includes most every other Mel Brooks movie as well. Including Blazing Saddles.

Harsh, Dark Helmet isn’t even in Blazing Saddles!

Sure–The Nordic language subs were all direct from the Nordic R2 DVD release of the GOUT, so those were all just the official Lucasfilm translations, problems and all (and possibly with a few more errors due to OCR, etc). And they all have more-or-less the same major problem, in that they use “summary” style translations–frequently skipping lines–which are popular there, I guess, maybe because Nordic words tend to be long. The Finnish subtitles have since been redone as a complete re-translation, but the Swedish (and Danish, and Norwegian) ones are in their original state, and I’m sure they could be improved.

I’ll send a PM with more info.

Heh, no. I’m hoping for this year. But things slide. Predictions have proven to be fairly futile in the past, Harmy himself was once off by over a year when predicting his own release.

cranyx said:

I’m sorry if this has been asked before, but I’ve searched and haven’t been able to find an answer.

Are the 3.0 versions that Harmy is (presumably) working on planned to be the “final” versions of the movies? Also, do we know which Harmy is working on currently?

Nothing is ever final. There’s always new sources coming in, problems being found, etc. The only question is long Harmy’s patience will last–so far, so good.

He’s working on 2.5 of Empire right now. I believe that’s the last of the 2.x series before moving to 3.x.

One of these days, bang, zoom.

Keep an eye out for me, thanks.

TV’s Frink said:

Well thanks for nothing.

I aim to please. But I miss a lot.

They were like that in the alternate timeline too. They’re a fixed point in time and space. That’s why it’s so hard to look at what they write.

Oh my God, what hellscape have I created? Somehow, the tape, it made it back to Lucas. It gave him ideas, made him think it was his plan all along. You used to be able to watch the original trilogy. No really, listen to me! You could… you could go to a store, buy the trilogy, watch it on TV, stream it, whatever you like. In the other world, the way it used to be. This site, it used to be full of cheerful Star Wars fans who just didn’t particularly like the prequels. Harmy got elected to the European Parliament because he had so much free time on his hands. Oh, I’m so sorry… What have I done?

Does anyone have another time turner?

My time turner only lasts five minutes. Is that enough? I figure we could give a VHS copy of ROTS to young Jay before he becomes a Star Wars fan.

I thought I had a pretty high tolerance for this stuff but I’m just tapped out.

I’ve despecialized the Slovak dubs (1997 VHS source) that have been included with various versions of the Despecialized Editions. The initial sync was already done thanks to pittrek, so I just handled pitch adjustment (PAL source), and despecialization (and Jedi was mostly despecialized anyway). They’re available at the usual places.

SilverWook said:

Frink’s head may explode when he finds out about this.

Ixnay on the onkeymay eepay aitbay.

Wookieepedia’s List of phrases and slang said:

• Frink: A Corellian expletive.

Hello new user titl… damn!

LuckyGungan2001 said:

And yet you gave it a six out of ten right? To me, a six out of ten means that it’s good, or at least above average.

Star ratings are really useless without context for this very reason–the abstract aggregate numbers don’t even mean remotely the same thing to different people.

To me, five out of ten means at no time were you ever wondering why you bothered watching the movie, but also at no time after watching the movie were you particularly pleased that you saw it. It passed the time, was worth whatever money you spent on it, but was pretty empty. Six out of ten means it’s somewhat entertaining when watching it, but still pretty empty. Four out of ten means you sighed and looked at your watch a few times, and hurried out when it was over.

I also give Jedi a 6 out of ten. It’s wildly uneven. Some parts are 7.5, some are 3.5. In the SE, the highs are about the same, but the lows drop down to 0 and are more frequent, so I’d say the SE hurt Jedi’s reputation much, much more than Clerks. I love it because it’s part of the trilogy. On its own merits, I’m not sure I’d use the word love. FWIW, I give Star Wars a 7.5, Empire an 8 (both OOT), and TFA a 5.5. TPM, AOTC, and ROTS get 0.8, 0.6, and 0.3 respectively. The Holiday Special gets a 2.

DuracellEnergizer said:

CatBus said:

Wait a sec… did I just out-Eeyore generalfrevious?

No. To do that you’d have to say that the OOT will never, ever, ever be released on Blu-ray/Ultra HD Blu-ray/Holographic Ultraviolet/Infrared 4D-ray, which will directly lead to Trump becoming dictator-for-life of the entire world, whose regime will almost certainly accelerate global warming a trillionfold, causing the Earth to go supernova and destroy one-third of the whole galaxy in the process.

I’m sure he regrets saying one-third.

Wait a sec… did I just out-Eeyore generalfrevious?

generalfrevious said:

TFA was literally built on elements solely from ANH & ESB.

Sigh, I wish that were so. There were still a few WTF moments in TFA, where I was taken out of the film by some prequelism. The mention of “clones” as something that actually might still happen as opposed to ancient history, and the mention of “Sith” as if we were supposed to know what the heck that was. Then for Jedi references, there’s Vader’s melted mask, for example. There were also some more buried prequelisms, such as prequel flags, etc, but yes the larger point is that is was almost exclusively OOT or original elements, which certainly helped it immensely. You could argue that “clones” was an OOT element that was just bizarrely anachronistic, and that “Sith” was a reference to OOT source materials and EU stuff that predates the prequels, but nevertheless they felt off to me (and they were both completely frivolous to the plot and should have been excluded to avoid WTF reactions).

generalfrevious said:

It’s interesting that SW’s “glory days” lasted only three years.

As of May 24th, 1983, there were only two Star Wars films. So if you’re saying the “glory days” are the years in which only Star Wars and/or Empire existed, that’s six years (1977-1983). That’s if I understand your intent correctly. If you intended to say Empire sucked all the glory out of the franchise, then you just go right ahead saying three years.

towne32 said:

ray_afraid said:

I think we’ve seen enough of it and know enough about his sources and his methods to say that this is the best restoration of Star Wars anywhere.
After watching his videos, I don’t see how anybody could even argue that.

I think the main reason is that it doesn’t have any competition. Reliance and TN1 (as great as it is, it’s not really in the same tier from what we’ve seen).

And Reliance isn’t an OOT restoration, which makes it inferior to all of the above.

I like Frink’s “Schrödinger’s Film” description of Legacy. Star Wars is both saved and not saved until you watch it and the wave function collapses.

Alternate dialects are welcome too (but someone needs to make the SRT files, ideally using the template files)

TV’s Frink said:

JUST HEARING THE WORD SKINTONE MAKES MY OWN FUCKING SKIN CRAWL!!!

Tempted to put that in my sig. Nice find.

Find? It’s bookmarked until the end of time. It’s the only post in my personal OT.com Hall of Fame. Unless -1 comes back and posts a “Yeah, I was just messing with you guys, I never left.” message, which would probably make the cut too.

clutchins said:

Will it be done by this weekend? I want to watch it with my dad.

Also, are the skin tones correct?

Wrong thread!