CatBus

MrPib said:

MrPib Edition! Thanks for a good laugh on a shitty Monday morning.

Some time ago someone took the time to patiently explain to me why some folks want the 97 Theatrical edition. I didn’t really understand before then the draw to anything newer than 77. (I think I asked why it’s “less evil” than the subsequently altered releases.)

Edit: CatBus explained it to me:
http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/758554

Man, you really caught me on one of my more pro-97SE days. The “A New Hope” change was a 1981 change, though, as explained earlier. It would have theoretically been a fairly inobtrusive change, and most of the objections stem from it not actually improving anything and the poor technical execution (disregard for previous editing). In that sense, it’s like the SE changes, but that’s where the similarity ends.

Sure. If I understand correctly, the French GOUT subtitles are unique. Nearly every home video release (VHS, Laserdisc, GOUT, etc) got a fresh new translation – some good, some bad, and none of them matched the theatrical subtitles. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the French GOUT subs, so I imagine they’re not the best of the bunch – but DVDs are easy to rip, so everyone uses the GOUT subs anyway. I’d be happy with any corrections.

I’ve got someone working on a complete French re-translation (the current one seems to have issues in many places), but go ahead and mail me any changes, in case that complete re-translation plan doesn’t work out.

I’ve got someone redoing all the French subs for me, with better translations all around–but mail me any changes to the existing ones anyway, in case those plans don’t pan out.

As for the audio, it’s straight off the PAL GOUT, slowed down. If there are glitches, they’re from that source. German and Spanish tracks have been cleaned up using Laserdisc audio–I suppose we could do the same for French, if we had a click-free track to patch it over with.

There was this feeling during the buildup to the prequels that Star Wars was alive again after a long slumber. People dressing up in costumes, acting silly, sharing nerd camaraderie, camping out in crazy long lines, bringing their kids, and so on. Even the Special Editions didn’t shake it – we simply didn’t know at the time that the Special Editions were intended to supplant the movies we loved, we thought they were just an experiment gone wrong – a soon-to-be-forgotten footnote. This deluded, hopeful “it’ll get better, it has to!” feeling stayed with me, at least a little, until the second prequel. Oh, but as for something good that was actually IN a prequel… I got nothing, sorry. But that hopeful feeling was still pretty good.

Basically, the original trilogy was so potent that the fumes from the OT kept the fans happy for decades, even while the franchise was actively being destroyed. But that fume-y period was a happy, albeit naive, period.

I don’t think TFA captured that feeling at all. People were looking for something to rescue the franchise, they were really hoping it wouldn’t suck, etc. Relative to the prequels, people were pretty sober about it. Even now that TFA’s proven to be much better than the prequels, the fumes have cleared. We’re not naive anymore, which is a shame in a way.

Well, you could fake it, I guess. But the DeEd doesn’t have matching audio or video at all in some places, because it’s a different cut of the film.

Yes, Hungarian accents are already fixed in development and will be available in the next release (10.0).

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the backstory is this: Back in the pre-Unicode Dark Ages, both Hungarian and Romanian used substituted “similar” characters to cover characters that weren’t actually in the ISO-8859 code page they used. Hungarian and Romanian computers then could use custom fonts to map these similar characters to their correct appearance, and it all more or less worked, except when you wanted to exchange documents with someone else. And Hungarian and Romanian users probably became used to occasionally seeing the wrong characters and doing the substitution in their heads.

As of Unicode, there are now codepoints for the correct characters and there’s no reason for any of this substitution to happen, but it still does if the documents are old enough. For example, the Romanian subtitles on the official Blu-rays still display the wrong characters. I caught this and converted them over as they were being OCR’d. The Hungarian files came to me already in SRT format, so I missed the substitution. Sorry!

EDIT: Actually it looks like Romanian was a character substitution like I described, but Hungarian used an almost-but-not-quite identical ISO-8859 codepage, causing similar issues. Either way, it’s fixed in the next version.

No, 16mm mono is yet another unique mix, which really only has a few alternate C-3PO lines and some slightly different mixing. The 8mm digest (Puggo Edition) is way different in lots of places. Not to be confused with normal 8mm prints, which probably have the same audio as the 16mm prints.

I think a few people have thought about using this as a source for an HD 70mm recreation, since this source appears to have the 70mm audio/video differences in it. The problems are that since the source is incomplete, there may still be 70mm differences for which we don’t have any sources, and that the quality is so low that mixing it with better-quality sources would be pretty nasty. I think the 70mm audio mix is way more interesting than the video–I can completely see why they changed them, but it’s nice to hear the lines that actually match the onscreen lip movements, for example.

I was more pointing out that trolling has many modes of interactivity.

TV’s Frink said:

Trolls don’t interact?

NO. IT GIVES THEM AN I/O ERROR.

Yeah, but I’m Spartacus.

Yes, filtered shots were done on purpose, and yes, they present a problem. If I understand correctly, the best way to handle them is to correct an unfiltered shot on the same reel, then use that same color adjustment on the filtered shot. e.g. if the whole reel has a pink shift, but one scene has a blue filter too.

This is why the DeEd’s are also available in DVD9 AVCHD format, and DVD5 NTSC format. Now nobody has to download a 20GB file. Hooray, problem solved before it even existed! Incidentally, the DVD5’s are at least not historically made by Harmy himself, but by someone who saw the need for something a little more universally accessible, sought Harmy’s approval, got it, and then released it. Emphasis mine. The world does not need even more “Yo Dawg I see you like Despecialized” releases than we already have cluttering up the torrent sites.

There’s courtesy to the customers and there’s courtesy to the creators. Courtesy to the creators means not needlessly flooding the market with lower-quality knockoffs, so much so that it’s hard to tell you’re not getting the real thing. We get quite enough of that already (mostly from Lucasfilm, but I digress). It’s not like customers can’t take the real thing and re-encode it for themselves.

* cough * are subtitles a consideration?

Pants matter. We judge you by your pants. As well we should.

RDPlissken said:

Star Wars 35mm: POUT

😛

Certainly better than POOT.

Wazzles said:

He could go with “Team Puggo’s Despecialized Grindhouse: The Ridiculousness Revisted”.

It was already ridiculous the first time it got visted.

Dek Rollins said:

I’m still not sure why people noticed the title being “wrong” while not realizing that it’s the same as Empire. If you’re inspecting the crawls that closely, wouldn’t you have at least thought about the idea that one other film might also have used that font?

Personally, I prefer the Empire font. I don’t think I’d want Jedi to have it though; all the crawls being slightly different like that gives each film more character.

I don’t need them to be the same, but I think consistency is a good goal to have–and in choosing a font for TFA, Abrams definitely made the best choice for consistency. Assuming the prequels can all DIAF, and that Star Wars doesn’t have an episode title in the crawl to begin with, we’re really only talking about two precendent-setting films: one with Univers and one with News Gothic. There is no minority or majority, it’s a 50/50 split. So you’re either flipping a coin, or you’re weighing the merits of Empire versus Jedi. Given that, I’d have picked the Empire font too. And, having gone with that, it’s now the font used in two of the four Star Wars films, a clear plurality.

Density said:

God I just hope that an official release comes soon.

That hope, and the rumors supporting it, will be twenty years old soon. They grow up so fast.

It looks like in at least one case, international theatrical subtitles made it onto a Laserdisc release (French ROTJ). I doubt this would have happened for Star Wars, but it’s possible it may have happened for one of the international laserdisc releases for which we don’t have a theatrical subtitle reference for ROTJ.

So if anyone happens to have a Spanish or Japanese laserdisc of ROTJ, I’d be interested to know what the alien subtitles look like. For Spanish, I imagine the subtitles will be approximately the same font/style as the English subtitles. For Japanese, I have no idea. If it turns out to be theatrical, I’d like a screencap of each subtitle. You could try Star Wars too, but I’m thinking 16mm prints are our best bet there.

The commentary was ripped from Laserdisc as a commentary-only track (no other audio), and can be merged into whichever audio mix you like. But that initial rip, how it came about, and if there were errors in the ripping process, or different versions for different LD pressings, I just don’t know. I think schorman did made the initial audio rip, but I’m not sure.

TV’s Frink said:

IM NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW A POWER SOCKET FROM A COMPUTER TERMINAL

GETS ME EVERY TIME

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-without-Artoo-What-would-the-saga-be-like-if-there-was-no-Artoo/id/14932

I’ve transcribed the 16mm subtitles. Could anyone check if they look OK? Some of the subtitles are hard to read, and I don’t know French. Also, does anyone know if the tractor beam controls (around 1h23m) were subtitled in the French theatrical release?

Tu pars en voyage, Solo ?

Trop tard. Fallait payer en temps voulu.

Jabba a mis ta tête à prix, on te recherche
dans toute la galaxie pour te descendre.

Je vais toucher la prime !

Donne-le-moi et j’oublierai que je t’ai vu.

Jabba en a marre de toi.

Il n’aime pas que les passeurs…

…jettent la camelote par-dessus bord.

Jabba se contentera peut-être
de confisquer ton engin.

Je m’en charge !

Ça fait des années que j’attends ce moment.