Fang Zei

I remember…

In 1994 there was a magazine called Science Fiction Universe and the first issue had a cover story stating that the next Star Wars trilogy was only three years away.

Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but the 1995 Faces/THX vhs of the OT was literally advertised as “The Original Version, One Last Time.” For whatever reason, I don’t think I’d put it together that it meant George would be making changes to the films.

In November of 1996 I saw Star Trek: First Contact on opening night (with vfx by John Knoll!) while my mom took my sister to see Jingle All The Way, which of course co-starred Jake Lloyd not long before he would be cast as a young Anakin.

When we met up in the parking lot afterwards, they mentioned that they saw a preview in front of Jingle All The Way announcing that the Star Wars movies were going to be released in theaters again starting in January.

This was news to me.

I also vaguely remember them saying something about there being new special effects, and at some point in January I very clearly remember seeing an ad on tv with the “praxis shockwave” added to the Death Star explosion.

Anyway, I remember my mom taking me to see ANH on opening weekend. Maybe one or two of my friends was with me. I somehow didn’t notice the change to the Han/Greedo scene until almost a year later watching it on letterboxed vhs. The newly added Jabba scene kinda overshadowed it anyway. I always loved how funny and goofy and cartoony this cg Jabba looked and kinda missed it when the model was redone for the dvd in 2004.

My mom took me to see Empire a week or so after it opened in late February. It was during the week, so it was a much different experience than the huge crowd for ANH.

The thing that still sticks out in my memory about RotJ, which I saw with some friends on opening weekend in mid March, was how LOUD Luke’s lightsaber was. I was eleven (closer to twelve) and had seen the movies multiple times either on USA Network or on vhs, so pretty much all of the changes were noticeable to me. The new piece of music John Williams wrote for the ending felt much more epic and went along well with the sweeping new Galactic Celebration montage.

Of course, in the years since I’ve come to appreciate and mainly prefer the original versions that much more, maybe because they’ve been suppressed by the very man who created them.

As cool as it was for me as a kid growing up in the 90’s to see these three films I’d known as classics for the very first time on the big screen with updated technology, I think George would’ve done better to leave well enough alone and not change a thing.

But in November of ‘98, as I watched that first teaser for TPM and saw the newer Lucasfilm logo and cg dewbacks and rontos, I got the feeling deep down that the Special Edition was going to be considered the “official” version of the OT going forward.

Still, I never would’ve imagined that George would not only make further revisions (if only logical to make the OT of a piece with the prequels) but also take such a disdainful view of the unaltered versions. The enthusiasm and ingenuity demonstrated by the community on these forums is what brought me here in the first place and I am grateful to have found fellow fans who care about preserving the legacy of this franchise.

I’m assuming the error of The Beginning: Making Episode I documentary getting put onto the disc in letterboxed 4:3 (as opposed to 16:9 as it is on the second disc of the TPM dvd from 2001) never got fixed?

Unless of course that was done intentionally for some weird reason (maybe so the lower resolution wouldn’t be as obvious? I doubt they finished it in anything higher than SD all the way back in 2001, and most of the footage is from ‘97 to ‘99 anyway). But if your documentary is already formatted for 16:9 tv then I don’t know why you wouldn’t keep it that way.

Just thought I would let everyone know that over on 4K80’s page at thestarwarstrilogy.com the progress bar for reel 2 (the only remaining reel yet to be fully restored) has already been updated several times just within the last couple weeks.

It was sitting at 62% for a good long while, but now is almost at 70%!

Encouraging news. Anyone awaiting this release should head on over and send them a donation if they haven’t already. Every dollar helps.

Three different cuts of The Godfather Part III will be released on actual physical 4k UHD discs this year.

How ironic that these 4k masters were prepared almost a decade ago for 3D conversions that never ended up happening.

Of course, it’s never too late for Disney to change their minds about that. They could put it out later this year ahead of Avatar 2 just like the cgi dino edition was first released only a few months before The Lost World.

It would be like poetry, it would rhyme.

yotsuya said:

From several comments I’ve read about what George intended if he made a sequel trilogy, was it really Disney who pushed the EU to Legends, or was that from George? It happened after the purchase, but so did the real development of the sequel trilogy. The way I’m reading the events is that this was an internal Lucasfilm dictate because the films trump the books and related materials.

The 2008 Clone Wars set a major precedent when it basically disregarded the entire continuity of the 2002-2005 clone wars multimedia project.

So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that even if George had been more directly involved with Episode VII he still wouldn’t have felt beholden to the existing EU in any way.

Anyone else remember when Labyrinth of Evil came out right before the final episodes of the Tartakovsky clone wars and we basically got to see the EU contradict itself in real time?

That guy with no name said:

Fang Zei said:

That guy with no name said:

Mocata said:

I’ll be interested to see if 3D is still a thing by that point in time.

That’s what I thought until I saw Jurassic Park 3D: unwatchable.

At least the 3D version of Jurassic Park was from a newer scan than what the blu-ray used.

The OT, on the other hand, still hasn’t even been projected theatrically at modern 4k quality. To the best of my knowledge, that dcp of Empire that’s been shown here and there since last summer is still based off the 2011 master.

Damn, I never thought about that.

Yup

Even with the 4k master finally available at home in late 2019 / early 2020 (after apparently being in the works for years), Disney still puts out the 2011 revision of the 2004 HD master of Empire for actual movie theaters to show.

That right there makes me think that they don’t want the newer masters being shown theatrically at all until they’ve been prepared for a rollout in grand fashion. That means remastering them for dolby cinema, Imax, and 3D.

That guy with no name said:

Mocata said:

I’ll be interested to see if 3D is still a thing by that point in time.

That’s what I thought until I saw Jurassic Park 3D: unwatchable.

At least the 3D version of Jurassic Park was from a newer scan than what the blu-ray used.

The OT, on the other hand, still hasn’t even been projected theatrically at modern 4k quality. To the best of my knowledge, that dcp of Empire that’s been shown here and there since last summer is still based off the 2011 master.

Mocata said:

I’ll be interested to see if 3D is still a thing by that point in time.

Probably not any more or less than it is right now. The main point of 3D from a financial perspective was to help offset the expensive conversion from film projection to digital. The studios and theaters realize there’s still an audience for 3D, though. There’s just not a particularly big one, which is why you’ll see less 3D showtimes now and mostly normal 2D.

3D is all the rage in certain parts of the world outside the US, though. That’s probably the big reason why the studios continue to spend the extra money in post on these big budget productions to convert them. Otherwise it wouldn’t really be worth it for them.

A 3D re-release of all nine main saga films in theaters in 2027 with a trailer attached to Avatar 4 in December of 2026 seems like a no-brainer to me.

Putting each of the Skywalker movies out one week after another in chronological I-IX order, just like the Saturday matinee serials that inspired them, seems even more obvious.

As for physical media, I’ll never say never regarding the OOT. Disney knows it’s the last thing the vast majority of fans will ever need, so they’ll keep it in their back pocket until they’ve exhausted every other possible selling point. That said, the 2020 release represents the first time they had the rights to all of the Fox era films completely under their ownership and they still didn’t include the unaltered versions, so who knows?

Not sure if anyone heard the news yesterday, but Criterion is finally going 4k:

https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/my-two-cents/081121-1200

Did anyone else go to the Imax event the other night?

They showed the first ten minutes, as well as a scene from later in the movie that was shot entirely for the taller aspect ratio. They also highlighted Hans Zimmer’s score and closed with the new trailer (this was still the night before it went up online for all to see).

Trust me when I say that this thing looks and sounds incredible in a proper theater.

The AFI Silver here in the DC area will be showing ESB in August. I remember hearing last year about how the ESB screenings here and there were actually still the old 2k dcp, so I suspect this will be the same. Kinda puzzling why they wouldn’t be showing the newer 4k version, but then again LFL/Disney might not want to prepare new dcp’s until it’s time for an actual grand re-release in 3D and Dolby Cinema and Imax.

Of course, AFI Silver could theoretically be showing an actual ‘97 print (the info listed says 1980/1997, so it can’t be any older than that), but I doubt Disney even wants pre-2011 versions out there anymore.

Rodney-2187 said:

The “Vintage” section sure seems like a perfect place for them to eventually release the unaltered originals. I know that wouldn’t be the ideal scenario for many reasons, but certainly better than nothing.

It’s worth remembering that the 2019 D+ versions showed up there mere months before hitting physical UHD just over a year ago (they ditched Dolby Vision on the actual discs, but whatever).

So, a new transfer of the films hitting D+ ahead of a physical release wouldn’t entirely be without precedent.

Ryan-SWI said:

JJ himself admitted Palpatine was not the intended outcome of the Disney trilogy and they just kinda winged it.

He did? Then why was Kennedy saying at the convention that they “always intended Palpatine to return?”

I just stumbled across this clip that was shared by someone in a comments thread on twitter:

https://youtu.be/93DzOXD_91o

Did Harmy use a really, really good LD capture for the ‘97 Jabba shots? Is it an hd upscale from either an ld capture or one of the broadcasts? Is this a 35mm scan? Or is this another of his meticulous recreations?

(btw, here’s the original tweet if anyone wants to boost its signal: https://twitter.com/danslott/status/1365894127515299840?s=21 )

yotsuya said:

Currently the only versions not preserved in any form in HD are the 97 SE of TESB, ROTJ, and the theatrical version of TPM. The original TESB and 97 SE ANH are currently unfinished and only in grindhouse form.

What about the theatrical AotC (and, technically, RotS)?

Thanks for the info, everyone.

Yeah, Schorman’s I-VI was the one I was racking my brain trying to remember the name of.

As for the ‘97 versions, it sounds like we basically have a “4k97” for ANH and a “D+97” for RotJ, but the ‘97 ESB is basically in a Harmy-esque 720p form with some of the less obvious later changes still left in?

JadedSkywalker said:

The 97 35mm scan is damn near perfect, not sure why someone would want to go from that to the horribly compressed Digi Beta tape version.

I was finally able to retire my Laserdisc for that film and no pink tint/orange tint, unlike the LD and no dnr smear like the broadcasts.

Right, but isn’t that 35mm scan only of ANH? I was curious what the best source was for the entire 97 OT.

doubleofive said:

I’m not sure 97SE was ever shown in HD, but you’re right the 04SE was and that should be the highest quality version that I’m sure someone has on a hard drive somewhere.

Well, no, the broadcasts of the ‘97 version wouldn’t have been HD per se, but IIRC there were captures done of digital broadcasts in 16:9, letterboxed in 2.35:1, and these may or may not look better than the best laserdisc preservations out there.

But yeah, I didn’t see anything in the indexes about a simple hd broadcast preservation of the 2004 version.

With all the good work being done by Harmy and TN1 on the OOT, I thought it was worth asking about the pre-2011 officially revised versions and the best available preservations that are out there.

The 2011 OT blu-ray was based off of the exact same hd master created for the 2004 dvd release, but the 2004 version was never seen at 720/1080 home video resolution outside of hdtv broadcasts. I seem to recall seeing screengrabs of an hd recording back in 2005 or so. Would there still be any preservations intact all these years later?

While the 2004/2011 master was finished at 1080 resolution from a scan of the original negative, the 1997 restoration was done photochemically. Aside from some attempts at scanning in 35mm prints, it seems like the best available preservations out there would be based on hd broadcast captures.

Apologies if there’s a basically identical thread about this already, but I thought it would be worth asking for people’s thoughts on the various efforts over the years to preserve these two revisions of the OT at their highest possible quality.

Mocata said:

Disney frequently enjoys keeping movies they own locked away, and they’re certainly not in the business of releasing old versions of anything.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Jeffrey Katzenberg made the executive decision to remove “The Love is Gone” from the theatrical release because he thought it would be too sad, but it was reinstated for the home video release. When it came time to release the dvd, widescreen and fullscreen versions were both included on the same disc, but only the 4:3 version had the deleted song. Apparently they’d lost the original negative for the deleted footage, so the only known source for the longer version of that scene was whatever film element they’d used for the 4:3 transfer, assuming that wasn’t simply the old fullscreen laserdisc master dumped to dvd. It’s kinda like the GOUT in reverse.

When it came time to remaster the movie for 4k and hdr for Disney+, the o-neg for the song was still nowhere to be found, so the version that went up on the service was once again the theatrical cut just as it had been on the blu-ray and the anamorphic dvd transfer. But it just so happens that the missing pieces of o-neg were finally found just a couple months ago, leading fans of the movie to speculate whether Disney will offer that version for streaming at some point in the future.

This actually brings me to something I was going to bring up earlier. We live in a post-#ReleaseTheSnyderCut world now, where something that no reasonable person thought would ever happen is now being financed to the tune of $70 million. The studios are all looking for ways to make money on the cheap with their business disrupted due to the current unpleasantness, and an OOT restoration would cost a small fraction of what AT&T is spending to finish the Snyder Cut.

On a long enough timeline, the unaltered versions get restored by Disney simply because they run out of ways to keep repackaging and reselling the same movies again and again without including them.

At this point there’s no logical financial reason why they haven’t done it yet, other than to keep milking these releases as much as possible (the deleted scenes should’ve been among the bonus features on the 2004 dvd but they saved them for the blu-ray, the 2011 blu-ray should’ve been remastered in 4k but they saved that for the uhd, etc).

Like, they’re honestly going to tell me that they thought the Maclunkey version in hdr would sell like mad but there just wouldn’t be enough interest in the OOT to make it worth their while?

I seriously doubt George cares one way or the other anymore.

As for a potential botch job, I’d gladly take a grainy transfer even if it had less fine detail than the DNR’d 2019 version.