I found a video of Le Grand Rex (a French cinema) showing an original French print of Return of the Jedi, mind-blowingly: https://youtu.be/1vQ8xsNtMWA
Actually I think that was ILM as well, since they did stuff for the 4K masters.
Well, if I were to suggest, if you want great special effects and fixed continuity, you’d like Adywan’s Revisited. But, if you were to watch something with SC-38 in it and edits that are also great, look for ForceGhostRecon’s A New Hope: Reimagined.
I guess we have as much iterations of the foreign crawls as we have of Star Wars itself. We had a few with the original releases of the OT, then that number more than doubled with the SE, then 2004 came along and new, Prequel-styled crawls were made which carried over to the Blu-ray and Digital releases, then in 2019 there were newer crawls which were possibly made by one of Disney’s graphic teams, as opposed to all the above which was almost certainly done at ILM.
Why do I freaking love learning about these things? I love preservation!
The original Latin American theatrical dub did not voice over the crawl. I’m not sure which crawl they used (Castilian or localized Latino), but at least one of the prints scanned by the 4K77 team was actually a Latino print. I know this only from the audio captured, I don’t think I ever saw the original scanned crawl itself. This may have changed for the later dub made for the Special Editions, which is on Disney+, but I don’t know much about it.
There is no evidence of a Portuguese crawl for the unaltered films. It’s possible one was made for some iteration of the Special Editions. Brazil’s first dub was for TV broadcasts, and I don’t think there was a theatrical run there until the SE. There was never a European Portuguese dub – Portugal is one of the countries where dubbing is very rare except for children’s programming.
So, Star Wars did, in fact, get an original theatrical release in Brazil in 1978. Little is known about if any dub was used or not. I also think there wasn’t any crawls made specifically for Portugal and Brazil. The wide translations only came by the time of the Special Editions.
This topic of localized texts in movies is so interesting to me, especially if the original studio/visual effects company is involved with it, because they gotta translate that to so many languages, especially the 2004 crawls.
I also noticed the Disney+ international crawls were…Done mostly by Disney’s graphic team instead of ILM. At least the case of my country is that the entire crawl has been color-graded and timed to fit with the US crawl. The “A New Hope” crawl is even curved at it’s left. But, all three OT Disney+ crawls except for A New Hope have different fonts for the Episode number and the main text. The Episode number in ANH, ESB and ROTJ is the classic Crawl font, but the main text is in a similar, but different font. Not the case for ANH, which has the classic font in both the Episode number and main text.
I’ve noticed the international crawls that were made for the non-English 2004 OT DVDs look like the ones that the prequels had at the time, which leads me to almost 100% believe these crawls were all done at ILM, with a bit of input from the local distributors (mostly Fox) around the world. What’s curious about these crawls is that the Episode numbers and the Crawl text (non-title) are in News Gothic instead of the usual font.
That looks super nice! Much more “Force Awakens”-y in terms of colors.
@SnooPac Hey there SnooPac! I was thinking if you could PM me the BD25 ISOs of the NJVC Despecialized set. It looks really cool.