Voting with your wallet is the best any of us can do, and the question is if there are enough people to actually make a difference.
I'm not sure on the sales numbers for the 2004 DVD Box Set, but they announced I think it was about 2.5 million copies on it's first day. Of that group, figure how many people were honestly upset about the quality of the set?
To fix the audio issues on Episode IV's rear channels would be $20-25K Tops - that would get you a new encode / DLT Master and probably enough units to send out to those bothered - and to be honest a large part of that may be hit by the company who made the mistake, so the outlay to Fox would be very low - but they don't see the point, and I'm interested to see if they have ever admitted to a mistake.
Chewtobacca is correct, the wording for the product swap for Gladiator was hilarious in not admitting blame for anything - it could have only been written by a lawyer.
Lucasfilm actually made things worse by commenting on the issue at all as it enraged the fans who were bothered by the fact. But can you imagine if the response had been "Yeah, there is an issue, but our distributor won't admit there is one, so they're not repressing".
Same deal with Fellowship and Peter Jackson - everyone knows there's an issue, it's the elephant in the room. No one is going to admit it, and they reckon it only affects the minority of people anyway. Plus with AACS costs, doing a reprint is FAR more expensive than DVD...
I'm not saying it's right, I'm not apologising for it, but I am being pragmatic. Star Wars to most people is mass market sci-fi marshmallow - it's a movie which people watch and unfortunately, the majority of the world is comprised of a bunch of idiots who don't care enough about lightsabres and audio mixes. How many actually have their TV sets set up to actually watch anamorphic footage correctly anyway? We all know people like that.
Criterion, Eureka, BFI, Kino all take care over their products because they know they are aiminng at a smaller niche market of film fans who will expect the best they can do.
To everyone else it's a commoditised business.
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
But the changes that LFL is doing to SW is not at all "how the real world works". Changing the films so radically and then not restoring the theatrical versions is very unusual for a motion picture of this importance. Releasing a non-anamorphic laserdisc master is also not at all customary for a movie with such a significant theatrical impact, especially for a company with the kind of resources and capital that LFL has.
You're right Puggo, which is why I broke down some of the 'issues' people have with the 2004 DVDs. What Lucas is doing to the heritage of this film is very sad, but there appears to be nothing that anyone can or is willing to say to change this. There's only so much you can be at logger heads with your boss / client before you have to accept that they pay your wage / your bills.
What I am saying is that we should understand that not everything that is wrong with the 2004 DVDs is Lucas' fault. If the mix in the rears isn't reversed on the new Blu-rays, will everyone say "He's listened to us!" or is it more of the case that the encoding Monkey didn't make the same mistake twice?
Of course William's score will still take second place to Ben Burtt's effects track...
none said:
DVD-BOY wrote:
You're looking at 4-6 weeks beforehand to get stock into the logistic and fufillment warehouses.
So this is 4-6 weeks for production, there's also shipping/distribution. Working backwards from Sept. 19, going with 2 weeks for shipping/distribution worldwide (seems low, would crates of disc be shipped overseas by ship or plane?), that's two months which could make the drop dead point for revisions being mid-July 2011. canofhumdingers introduced the Humdinger to the public's attention June 26, so it's possible if LFL didn't know about it before then, they had a small window to fix it.
If they had gotten to that late stage to only then realise about the Humdinger glitch, they could have gone back and got it fixed - it would have been a real scramble but if your client brings up such a basic VT error, and let's not forget ALL of Star Wars work could be done at the same facility, then you would pull WHATEVER you could out of the bag to hit the defined deadline. Worse Case Scenario, they're scraping 1million+ Blu-ray discs and re-pressing - who do you think is going to pay for that?
Or maybe it was spotted and fixed - no one is going to admit they missed it the last time.
Replication you would just send electronic masters around the world and replicate in territory - hence the slight differences to packaging. Don't forget my original link was for a single replication machine - these companies will have 10, 20 lines by now. What big Playstation 3 games are coming out in October / November? What about Jurassic Park? Companies have a lot of discs going through right now.
