CatBus

“Done.” Heheh. Nothing’s ever done.

Seriously, this is a geek project and a labor of love that will likely go on and on, under different stewardship. Even Despecialized may continue after Harmy moves on. Theoretically, incremental changes will likely get smaller and smaller as we get closer and closer to approximating perfection. But everyone’s got their own idea of perfection, and people’s ideas can change over time as well.

Look at me. I’ve been working on subtitles for something like eight years now. You’d think that would be sort of a closed field with limited variation, but it just keeps going.

Colors are a matter of strong opinion, so take absolutely everything with a grain of salt, including what I say. From what I’ve seen, the Disney+ colors are a marked improvement over prior official Star Wars releases, and because of the lack of boosted magentas, there’s also not as much clipping in the red channel, etc. I can’t think of a single example where they’re worse.

Yellows fade away first in some types of 35mm film, then cyans, and magentas hang on longest. That’s why old films are sometimes called “pink faded”. Even low-fade prints still fade a bit over time and can have more pronounced magentas. The famous magenta cast isn’t just a Blu-ray phenomenon, the 1993 VHS and Laserdisc releases had the same issue, and it may in part be because they failed to adequately restore the original colors to the faded sources.

The problem is, that magenta look from the 1993 releases is very nostalgic for a lot of OT fans, so when they restore the OT, they bring that magenta look with it, so it matches the most popular home video releases of the unaltered original trilogy.

This is why I prefer 4k83 1.6. It brings back the yellows, tones down the magenta, and bring everything back to more natural colors. I consider it to be the best reference we have for ROTJ’s theatrical colors, even if, as ChainsawAsh correctly pointed out, it’s a little flat by modern home video standards. It’s better than Disney+, if what you’re looking for is theatrical accuracy.

But 1.4 gives you that nostalgic THX boxed set feel, and it’s more vibrant as well. It really all depends on what you’re looking for.

The thing that really tied together the Special Edition of Empire was the Emperor’s scream.

When Luke lets go and falls into the chasm, the first thing you naturally want to know is: “What does the Emperor think about this turn of events?” And with the scream, you know. The Emperor is distraught! His well-laid plans have gone awry! He just starts screaming as if he’s the one falling into the void, not Luke.

But that’s not the most brilliant part. It’s one of those things that’s difficult to notice until someone points it out and afterwards it’s obvious, like the stormtrooper bonking his head, but there’s something else about that scene where the Emperor screams. I’m going to use spoiler tags, because it will blow your mind.

The Emperor is not even there. Really! Go check. Not on Bespin. At. All.

This gives us a few possibilities:

1. The Emperor IS there, in secret, hiding in the enclosed area at the other end of the bridge, certainly close enough to see what’s going on and be heard yelling about it. In fact, maybe he’s always been running the Empire from the dark, mechanical underbelly of Cloud City.
2. The Emperor is not there, but his hologram is there to witness events.
3. The Emperor is using his previously undisclosed “force yell” ability, where you can yell so loud that it can be heard several planets away. Note that this is not the same as the force telepathy Luke uses to contact Leia (the audience could not hear his voice on the Falcon, after all), but something much, much louder.

#1 is appealing, but flawed. Lando clearly knows all the arrivals, departures, and goings-on at Cloud City. If the Emperor was there, he’d have known it. And if he knew it, he’d have appealed to the Emperor directly when Vader unilaterally changed the terms of their deal. That’s not the sort of stunt you can pull when the boss is literally right down the hall.

#3 also has a certain poetry to it. But again, it’s flawed. A force yell of that magnitude would have deafened people between the Emperor and the chasm. And yet people on the Falcon, and on Vader’s Star Destroyer, are later shown talking to and understanding each other, even when their backs are turned. No, much as a force yell would round out the spiritual aspect of the force, it did not happen here. That’s not to say the force yell could not be a real thing, but for that, we must still wait, and hope.

This leaves us with #2. Vader was talking to the Emperor’s hologram at the other end of the bridge, before the last round of the fight started. There are two possible times Vader could have had a brief opportunity to talk to the Emperor’s hologram: before the scene where Vader blows Luke out the window, or after. To start up a call with the boss at such a critical time must have meant he had an important question that could not wait.

If it was before he blew Luke out the window, the question was clearly “Can I fight him two-handed now?” because right when Luke comes in, Vader makes the big show about fighting him two-handed. If it was after Luke went out the window, the question was clearly “Can I tell him I’m his father?”. But here’s the thing: Vader never ended the call – the hologram was still hanging out and watching, otherwise it wouldn’t have screamed when Luke fell. So it clearly could not have been before Luke got blown out the window, or else he (and we) would have seen the Emperor’s hologram when he was inside.

So after Luke’s out the window and struggling to climb back onto the catwalk, THAT’S when Vader makes the call to the Emperor. When Luke tries to re-enter the building, Vader reacts with the speed of a man with an embarrassing website on his browser (watch that scene again, you’ll see it), and Luke never sees the hologram.

So what does this tell us? Vader sought and got permission to tell Luke all of those things at the end of the bridge, and that the Emperor was watching the whole thing. So after Vader said they could join forces to overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy together, the scream allows the audience to know this critical fact (sit down for this one):

Vader was being dishonest. Ergo, Vader is actually… a bad guy! Think about this: how else would you have known this? Like Greedo shooting first, sometimes the audience needs these little cues to keep the heroes and villains straight.

And THAT’S why the Emperor’s scream was so brilliant, and why it was heartening to hear that, like all Special Edition changes, it was how Lucas planned the movie to be all along, but simply lacked the technology at the time to do it (in this case, the technological issue was that they hadn’t yet cast Ian McDiarmid, so his voice wouldn’t match the other holographic Emperor, and one thing I know Lucas would never stoop to is using two completely different voices or faces for the same character in the same film, so they obviously had to wait).

Although I am puzzled and disappointed that they removed it later.

The 93 masters certainly marked the beginning of that purplish, red-faced cast covering everything that affected most Star Wars releases from that point forward.

NeverarGreat said:

I am always delighted when I can re-post this image and it’s actually topical.

SilverWook said:

Edited a couple ancient posts as some Ackbar images hotlinked to circa ten years ago now are broken, and lead to a site that isn’t about SW anymore and is triggering virus warnings for some users. Hopefully fixed now!

I guess it really was a trap!

LeoneNut said:

Ben Burtt did a new mix which was a amalgamation of previous mixes, according to the notes included with the Laserdisc.
He also added more oomph in explosions etc.

“New” in this case means “new in 1993, and still relatively new in 1995”. There’s some minor differences even between different releases of the 93 mix, due to the variability of creating home video masters at the time. Any differences in a 95 release are of the same sort and degree.

IMO 1.6 is the way to go, entirely because of the color grading. Others will almost certainly have different opinions.

Shopping Maul said:

This will sound crazy but I just had the most bizarre flashback whilst watching TESB last night. I remembered (after 40 years!) that when I first saw TESB in the theatre and ‘Star Wars’ flashed up on the screen, I thought there had been a mistake and the cinema had accidentally loaded the first film into the projector. Of course the ‘Episode V’ thing followed and all was well.

It’s ironic given that we’ve been discussing the confusion of not having episode titles post-TESB but for me, however briefly, it was the episode title thing that threw me. Did anyone else have this experience?

I had the reverse experience. Star Wars didn’t throw me, but “Episode V” had me thinking I was watching the wrong movie, until “The Empire Strikes Back” came onscreen and all was well. Eventually I just retconned the weirdly high episode number into my Star Wars world and figured Episodes II through IV were left intentionally blank for fans to imagine things that happened between Star Wars and Empire. I didn’t realize Star Wars had been retitled Episode IV until I saw it on home video, long after seeing Empire.

It turns out I was not able to get either of the pre-97 Turkish dubs into a state where I wanted to replace the existing despecialized dubs. The theatrical dub, as mentioned before, was cool but pretty crazy and not quite the Star Wars experience. The Show TV 1993 dubs were also not something I decided I wanted to use, for different reasons. The Star Wars audio had been mixed with SE audio before I got it, presumably in an attempt to sync it and/or improve the audio quality, the Jedi audio was mostly okay but had some terrible moments, and Empire was so bad (audio quality) I didn’t bother to try syncing it.

However, I was able to use the Show TV dubs to further despecialize my existing Turkish dubs. Two “stormtrooper voices” scenes in Star Wars, the “Look sir, droids!” and the “Check the other side of the street. It’s locked.” scene – I could swap out the voices without really affecting anything since the voices were one-offs anyway, and also remove Special Edition music and sound effects at the same time, so that’s what I did. In Empire, I swapped in the Vader-Emperor dialogue from the 1993 dub, and now at least Vader’s speaking in Turkish now, if unfortunately in another actor’s voice. Also, the audio quality drops quite noticeably in that scene, but the goal wasn’t to make it seamless, it was just to get rid of that section being in English.

So the Turkish trilogy dub I’m sharing is still the same despecialized dub I’ve been sharing, just with a couple edits so that it’s all in Turkish now – let me know if you need a link. I also currently have the theatrical dub and the 93 Show TV dubs (SW and ROTJ only) synced for anyone who’s interested, but I likely won’t hold onto either of them very long, since I generally only keep one dub per language, and I personally favor the despecialized ones.

I’ll make sure Project Threepio is on board with whatever you choose to do (the subtitles are close enough to sync without any modifications – but explicitly putting the name of your preservation in the documentation should help forestall any confusion on the matter)

Stotchy said:

Jedi is theatrical, Empire is theatrical also (but theatrical and GOUT are the same for Empire IIRC). Are there additional frames in Star Wars theatrical vs GOUT?

For me it’s really about making sure each film syncs perfectly with the latest hairy_hen soundtrack.

Happy to take advice.

Jedi: 4K83 is theatrical and has the latest hairy_hen soundtrack

Empire: Theatrical = PAL GOUT, but has two more frames than NTSC GOUT (at around 1:44:24), 4K80 promises to be theatrical, but the latest hairy_hen soundtrack is NTSC GOUT, so he’d need to make a new one for 4K80. So this is one of those matters where GOUT isn’t descriptive enough because there are actually two GOUT frame standards.

Star Wars: There’s one frame at the beginning of the last reel (at around 1:40:08) excluded from GOUT but is visible on some other pre-SE home video releases, but it was not on the 4K77 print (so there can be some argument about whether that frame is theatrical, but I think it likely is, it’s not unusual for frames to get lost on reel changes). Latest hairy_hen soundtrack is NTSC GOUT.

So assuming you’re waiting for 4K80 before doing Empire, then you’ll be GOUT-theatrical-theatrical, just like 4Kxx.

I’d like to name this film preservation (soon to be trilogy preservation, I hope) as an officially supported preservation in the next Project Threepio release. I’m assuming since this is based on 4Kxx, you’re planning on sticking to that same frame reference (i.e. GOUT for Star Wars, theatrical for Empire and Jedi). Is that correct?

Schooled and humbled.

Hey, I didn’t find out what She Bop was about until fairly recently.

Sorry, on the Internet, I don’t know how old people are, so I didn’t want to spell it out. I’d have started off by saying, “Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much…”

pleasehello said:

Are you talking about the last line where he says “I haven’t got time for anything else”?

How is that innuendo?

Seriously? If you’ve gone this long without figuring that one out, I’m not going to be the one to spoil the scene for you. You just go ahead and enjoy the movies your own way.

“Captain, being held by you isn’t quite enough to get me excited.” That’s innuendo.

When someone’s grabbing you in a sexually suggestive manner, I wouldn’t call simply pointing that out and implying it’s very much unwanted “innuendo”. It’s just a lot more polite than pepper spray.

pleasehello said:

CatBus said:

pleasehello said:

CatBus said:

ray_afraid said:

You mean after he catches her from falling & is clearly trying to listen for something? Yeah. Ok.

Yep, that’s right when she tells him to let go and he doesn’t. She immediately repeats the demand and eventually convinces him to let her go, since his excuse of “I’m only continuing to grab you because I’m unable to hear anything without my grabbers extended” doesn’t seem to be resonating. Then after he makes a sexual innuendo and leaves the room, she punches the wall. That’s the scene, you’ve got it.

He makes the sexual innuendo? It seems more to me that she makes the sexual innuendo.

She tells him his attentions are unwanted and unreciprocated, which draws attention to the existing sexual element of his persistent grabbing.

He responds by going full innuendo.

Here’s the line:

• Let go, please.

• Don’t get excited.

• Captain, being held by you isn’t quite enough to get me excited.

So tell me again who goes “full inuendo”

Seriously? You intentionally leave out the line where Han goes full innuendo and ask me to point at it? That’s preposterous.

“Captain, being held by you isn’t quite enough to get me excited.” - I described this as “She tells him his attentions are unwanted and unreciprocated, which draws attention to the existing sexual element of his persistent grabbing.” And that’s what it is.

Han’s next line, for those who haven’t seen the film, is clear unabashed sexual innuendo.

pleasehello said:

CatBus said:

ray_afraid said:

You mean after he catches her from falling & is clearly trying to listen for something? Yeah. Ok.

Yep, that’s right when she tells him to let go and he doesn’t. She immediately repeats the demand and eventually convinces him to let her go, since his excuse of “I’m only continuing to grab you because I’m unable to hear anything without my grabbers extended” doesn’t seem to be resonating. Then after he makes a sexual innuendo and leaves the room, she punches the wall. That’s the scene, you’ve got it.

He makes the sexual innuendo? It seems more to me that she makes the sexual innuendo.

She tells him his attentions are unwanted and unreciprocated, which draws attention to the existing sexual element of his persistent grabbing (calling out his “I always grab people and refuse to let go when I listen – I grab Chewie and make him sit on my lap all the time, honest” excuse).

He responds by going full innuendo.

ray_afraid said:

You mean after he catches her from falling & is clearly trying to listen for something? Yeah. Ok.

Yep, that’s right when she tells him to let go and he doesn’t. She immediately repeats the demand and eventually convinces him to let her go, since his excuse of “I’m only continuing to grab you because I’m unable to hear anything without my grabbers extended” doesn’t seem to be resonating. Then after he makes a sexual innuendo and leaves the room, she punches the wall. That’s the scene, you’ve got it.

Or when she tells Han to let go of her and he doesn’t. Good clean fun. Boys will be boys.

We can track things to a new/changed/removed sound effects level, retimed dialogue, alternate takes, alternate dialogue without high-quality sources. We won’t necessarily be able to track equalization, compression, and imaging differences very well without high-quality theatrical sources though. But yeah, with access to the four-track master you could do a branching family tree diagram of every mix, with that as the root.

Dek Rollins said:

Lando’s cape is top tier fashion. He owns it too.

I suppose fashion critiques may be a bit outside my bailiwick. Unless sweatpants are a sign of keen, discerning fashion sense, I’ll concede the point.

act on instinct said:

Lando’s cape only got ruined by Solo taking it too far and making him officially a cape guy.

Never actually saw Solo. But capes seemed to be a superhero/supervillain thing in Star Wars up until the point Lando shows up wearing one, and then it’s just… pretentious.

44rh1n said:

(Plus, I have faith that this new 4K version will be good! If it ends up sucking though, I may change my mind and decide to do it, haha).

Your faith sounds about as steady as mine 😉