When you think about, that must've been a cool, clever way of surprising everyone. It's like "oh, by the way (like it's nothing), this is Episode V, not Episode II."
I wonder what all the fanzines and newspapers (and, heck, the nascent internet) made of it in the days after Empire hit theaters.
People wouldn't have even been familiar with the concept of Star Wars movies having episode numbers until May of 1980.
As for the title being smaller, that might just be the mystery box at work and them thinking it would be a fun way visually to unveil the title. I'm sure the marketing departments at Lucasfilm and Disney are gonna be busy trying to come up with a catchy-looking logo a la Empire and Jedi. The selling points for all three prequels were the "filling in the blanks" of Episodes I, II and III, hence that was the biggest part of the logos. Episode VII is, arguably, an equally big selling point, but I think they want to avoid anything that will remind people of the prequels in the marketing.
I remain very curious as to how they're going to open the movie without the Fox fanfare. At this point I'm assuming Johnny's just gonna come up with a new piece of music to play over the Disney and Lucasfilm logos and then the rest of the opening will be identical from there.
There are literally thousands of blu-ray releases out there more worthy of your cash than the 2011 Star Wars set. The deleted scenes, which should've been on the '04 dvd anyway, were pretty much the only selling point imo. That wasn't enough to get me to buy what was essentially the '04 hd master at its full resolution and with a few tweaks.
Episode VII's production has managed to generate enough consistent buzz to distract from the complete and total lack of any OOT news whatsoever. Disney's radio silence on the matter is the reason we flipped out both times those rumors popped up.
But they can't expect to just keep ignoring the gigantic elephant in the room. Maybe something really is blocking them from releasing the originals, I just find that hard to believe. If Fox and WB can work out an agreement over the Adam West Batman series, I really don't see what's stopping Fox and Disney. Could George have made it a condition of the sale to Disney? It's possible, but I think $4 Billion speaks a little louder than that. The only other possibility is the rumor of people at Fox feeling "uncomfortable" having anything to do with a restored OOT release while George is still alive.
I have a feeling the radio silence may be part of the plan. By April/May we will have heard something.
Don't spend a cent on the 2011 set.
Lucas waiting two whole decades and not doing any credited directing in all of tnat time are two big strikes against the prequels that the Hobbit movies don't have. It helps that LotR was made after the digital vfx wave had really got going, so that even the cgi overload of The Hobbit doesn't seem too out of place by comparison. The RED cameras are a much closer match to the Super 35 of LotR than the sony 2/3" hd cameras are to the cinemascope of TPM and the OT. You can bet that if The Hobbit actually had gotten made pre-2009, they would've just shot it on film.
The comparison comes from doing the prequel (written first by Tolkien before he wrote LotR) after you've already told the "main" story on film. You suddenly feel the need to force all these connections to the originals. The irony is that the Star Wars prequels, titled episodes 1-3, feel so disconnected from the ones titled 4-6 while a movie of the Hobbit, which could've done its own thing, feels bolted to a movie titled Lord of the Rings.
Bingowings said:
Ironically I have more HD-DVDs than Blu-Rays and I have nothing to play them on thanks to that flipable Star Trek OS remastered box set of mine.
Haha, wow, you just brought me back with that comment. Wasn't that during the hot minute when Paramount and CBS dropped blu-ray?
Do you have any Universal hd-dvd's? Some (not all) of those look slightly better than their blu-ray counterparts no thanks to a needless application of DNR.
The truly jaw-dropping moment for me was when I saw a breakdown of the vfx in Zodiac revealing much of the crime scene - including the moving cars - to be entirely cgi.
It's been two whole years since Disney bought Lucasfilm and we still haven't heard a peep regarding the OOT. It's mind-boggling to think that this thread was started nine years ago and we're still waiting.
Yup, but this has been Jackson/Walsh/Boyens/del Toro's glorified fanfic from the beginning, and I'm sure their argument for stuff like Lily's character is "but Tolkien never said Legolas didn't have a girlfriend!"
I don't mind the added stuff in concept, it's the execution that was bad. When they first talked years ago about padding out The Hobbit movie with stuff like the White Council, I was picturing something more along the lines of The Council of Elrond and not a long scene with .... just four people standing/sitting/walking around a table.
Wow, nevermind about 60p, it's sounding now like Cameron is going to shoot Avatar 2/3/4 in the 120p "Showscan Digital" format devised by Trumbull within the last few years. I recall seeing the demo video on youtube. If you take every five frames and blur the first three together while deleting the last two, voila, you've got a 24p version.
Anyway, getting back to The Hobbit, someone once summed up the difference between these movies and the PT pretty well. The Hobbit movies' flaws make you appreciate what worked in LotR even more whereas the PT actively hurts your enjoyment of the OT.
Erik Pancakes said:
Would there be a filter that one could use on the Blu-Ray to make it look more like it was filmed at 24fps instead of 48? Like a subtle motion blur or something?
I thought I remembered hearing that they applied a motion blur to the 24p version. Maybe they did and it looked even choppier beforehand, but if that's the case it still looks choppier than it should to me.
Cameron wants to shoot the Avatar sequels at 60p, which makes me wonder just how the hell they'll make a 24p version since you can't evenly extract 24 from 60. He did say that he might just go with 48, though.
With that first Hobbit movie, I remember the first few minutes being very jarring in the theater at 48p. The opening logos looked like a video game! Bilbo walking around his house looked sped-up! I'll reiterate: even in the 24-frame version, the altered shutter speed makes everything look choppy and unnatural.
The tradeoff, however, was that the first wide shot of the inside of Erebor literally took my breath away in 48p. Like, I gasped and teared up. This is what Doug Trumbull was talking about with his Showscan experiments.
I should also say, and maybe it's just me, but the 48p digital Imax presentations of the first two Hobbit movies have probably been the brightest 3D presentations I've seen so far. I don't know if the increased framerate has something to do with that, but there it is.
Didn't George himself basically admit he only had one movie's worth of material for the entire PT and that he saved most of it for Episode III?
Anyway, I actually kind of see the argument for making The Hobbit into three films. PJ had the disadvantage of having already made LotR. He'd wanted to make The Hobbit first but the film rights weren't available at the time. So now The Hobbit is following the massive success of LotR instead of preceding it, so it now needs to "live up" to the originals.
To me, the big difference going into The Hobbit movies was knowing that many of the same people behind the cameras were back. Obviously it was PJ directing again, but it was also Andrew Lesnie shooting. The fact they were using RED Epics (they had to use digital cameras to shoot in 3D) was a worthy tradeoff to me, since LotR was shot in Super 35 and the Epic's sensor is only slightly bigger. Unlike AotC and RotS, the look of these digital prequels would be very close to their film-based counterparts. Native 3D seemed like a natural choice for something like The Hobbit anyway
When they announced (the week after they started shooting, lol) that this (these) would be the first 3D movie(s) to be shot at 48p, something Cameron had wanted to do for the first Avatar, I was enthusiastic. I'd actually assumed that all 3D showings would be the 48-frame version, until I found out the projectors required expensive firmware upgrades and they'd be differentiating the higher framerate version - and only at select locations - with the moniker "hfr."
When I saw that very first teaser trailer, there was something I couldn't quite put my finger on. It looked "kind of" the same and yet different at the same time. They seemed to be using more wide-angle shots, perhaps to show off the 3D, sure, but there was something else...
When the first movie came out, I saw the 48-frame version in Imax 3D and was, overall, blown away by it. The stuff they added definitely slowed the movie down, but the prologue floored me and the movie looked gorgeous.
But here's the tradeoff.
In order to shoot in 48p they had to raise the shutter speed slightly, so that each individual frame was sharper. This makes the 24p version look a little choppy. This is how The Hobbit trilogy will always be "stuck" in the same way AotC and RotS are "stuck."
I think we all knew deep down that Episodes VII-IX would happen someday. George was always gonna go back on that because $$$ just like he's gone back on a lot of other things he's said over the years because $$$. To me it was just like an official OOT restoration. It was gonna happen eventually, it was simply a matter of when.
The real shocker was that it ended up happening so soon (barely a decade after the last movie) and under these circumstances (Lucasfilm getting bought out by Disney). I would've thought that by the time Jedi's 3D version arrived in theaters in 2017 we'd be hearing about an ST coming our way in 2021 or something, probably shot in native 3D since George is crazy about digital and would want to one-up Avatar. My thinking was that the 3D I-VI would be the '97 SE to the ST's PT, if you follow my analogy. The only difference is that George would hire other directors and screenwriters and stick to just writing the story and producing.
By that point the live-action show set between the PT and OT (haha, remember all these things that were gonna happen?!) would've finally gotten off the ground and they could make little connections (think TNG while Star Trek V and VI were coming out, or Enterprise with Nemesis) and start "ramping up" to Episode VII in the 40 years later EU books (no EU reboot, Chewie would still be dead).
When that out-of-the-blue announcement happened almost two years ago (and I'll never forget how I got the news), one of my first thoughts was "they're saving Star Wars from its own creator." GL got his independence from Hollywood back in the day, and that was a good thing ... for a time. Then we got the SE and the PT the GOUT. I'm not saying those same things never could've happened had Star Wars been another Hollywood-owned franchise, but c'mon, they most likely wouldn't have. How many times had I thought "man, if this massive franchise wasn't owned by its creator, we'd have a restored OOT by now."
Sure, it was sad to see George "sell out" to Hollywood, but in many ways he'd sold out long ago. Besides, someone here had an Orson Welles quote in their sig that summed it up pretty well: "The absence of limitations is the enemy of art." It's that tug of war between the studio and the filmmakers that produces something neither would've gotten on their own. That's Star Wars, that's Empire Strikes Back and, hopefully, that'll be Episode VII.
My own explanation for why Lucas changed it is that Shaw as Anakin's ghost was supposed to be representative of "the good man" Luke's father was before becoming Darth Vader.
hairy_hen said:
The disappointed annoyance I feel whenever I watch any movie with an opening logo that obviously did not exist at the time the movie was actually made can scarcely be quantified.
It's one thing when it's a clean replacement/addition to what was already there. For example, the 2008 Paramount logo on the Godfather blu-ray doesn't bother me in the slightest since the movie doesn't really "begin" until you hear Nino Rota's score and see the opening credits.
But in the example of Toy Story you're hearing the music from the get-go, not to mention seeing a version of the logo unique to that film (at least it was at the time). I can't fathom why someone would decide to completely delete all of that.
Tyrphanax said:
This looks incredible. I'm reminded of the Trilogy arcade cabinet so much, but this is just like that only modern. Very excited! It's nice to see the arcade isn't quite dead yet.
My thoughts exactly.
I wonder how that screen works. Is it rear projection or something?
I guess it's a moot point with AotC since even with its 100% original color timing it still doesn't look like Ep1 and 4-6, but I still would've preferred it be out there on blu-ray with its theatrical color just as RotS is.
As an aside, I never did get around to seeing AotC projected digitally* but I did see it several times in 35mm (more times than I'd like to admit, believe me) and I'm assuming those colors more or less matched the digital version. If that's true, then I'm wondering why RotS looks exactly as it should while AotC looks vastly different, especially considering they claimed to have gone back to "the digital source" to make fresh hd transfers for the blu-ray.
*I saw it on opening day downtown in DC on film. As fate would have it, the only theater in the entire commonwealth of Virginia showing it digitally was only a few stone throws from my house. But by the time I wanted to see it again (a month later), they'd already switched it out for the digital version of Scooby-Doo.
The opening of the original Toy Story was totally ruined for the blu-ray release, imo. Pixar's version of the castle with Randy Newman's fanfare has been completely removed. I don't know how the second movie originally opened, but the new logos don't appear to have affected it as adversely. I wonder if there've been similar alterations to the openings of other pre-2006 Disney/Pixar movies like Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Incredibles, etc.
Ratatouille, which is from 2007, uses a similar opening to Toy Story with the Pixar-lookin' castle. I guess that one made it to blu-ray unscathed because it was a new release and not catalogue.
Oh, and I love the irony of the touchstone logo on Nightmare Before Christmas being replaced by the Disney logo. At least they redid the opening credits to keep the score intact.
ETA: sorry if this post seemed kinda random. It was looking up the changes made to Lion King that got me thinking of Disney's own revisionism.
Even superimposed onto an iphone screen in a youtube video, that teal push they gave AotC for the blu-ray is obvious as ever.
That painting matches Badass Digest's description of the ice planet looking like the other side of The Wall in Game of Thrones.
Back around 2009 when they decided to jump ahead a hundred years in the continuity for the Legacy comics, I figured part of why they were doing it was to provide a huge empty space should a sequel trilogy happen someday. Meanwhile, they continued to write the ongoing adventures of Han, Luke and Leia in the novels.
They could've set Episode VII within the existing continuity if they'd wanted to. They didn't need to address much of what'd happened in the intervening 40 years, just that Chewie had died at some point, Luke was a widower with a son, Han and Leia had a daughter and granddaughter, etc.
I honestly believe they could've gotten away with picking up Episode VII at wherever the books were up to and still told a fresh, engaging and original story that would please the movie-only fans.
The simple answer to all of this is that Lucas never should've adopted the stance of "there is no Episode VII" because c'mon, how they hell else was this franchise ever gonna continue in any meaningful way? Yeah, there was the live-action tv series they dragged their feet on, but they were never gonna settle just for that.
What George could've (and probably should've) done is take a more supervisory role in the post-RotJ EU, saying "Maybe I'll make Episode VII someday, but in the meantime here's the history of what happened to our heroes after Endor."
Hell, I always assumed that keeping Han, Luke and Leia alive in the books was the contingency plan should Lucasfilm suddenly decide to make Episode VII.
Like I said in another thread:
If the leaked plot rumors are true, then I'm glad they're justifying the jettisoning of the EU by going in a totally different direction. Since it's been 30 years, I can kinda see why they got rid of everything. I mean, it actually would've been harder to justify titling your movie "Episode VII" when you've got 40 years worth of epic shit that's happened in the interim.
Yeah, it's awkward that they kept that continuity going for 20 years only to throw it out now, but part of this is due to Lucas' fickle nature. As of October 29, 2012, Episode VII was still "never gonna happen," so it didn't matter to Lucas what they continued to do in the EU. RotJ was "The End" so far as he was concerned. The Thrawn Trilogy onward was "the rest of the story" to satisfy the fans. Now Lucas has changed his mind.
I think it can't be coincidence that just a couple months ago this mention of 4k Star Wars goes up on RMW's website and now we're hearing this talk of a 4k blu-ray format by the end of next year. I think everyone in the industry is realizing "4k" is fast becoming the new buzz word. Regardless of when exactly this RMW job was commissioned, whether it was before or after the Disney deal, it must've been motivated by the realization of 1080p no longer being good enough for the foreseeable future.
The biggest question is whether it's the OOT, the SE or both that got the 4k treatment.
Wazzles said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a 4K scan wasn't going to be used for a 4K release, instead being released in 1080p, wouldn't it not really matter what resolution the CGI is in? Wouldn't it look fine when scaled back down to 1080p?
Not only that, but pretty much all movies finished as a 4k DI only have their digital vfx rendered at 2k. That's why movies with a lot of vfx shots are only finished at 2k.
Digital effects shots are only rendered at higher resolutions for when they actually stand to gain from it. The literal handful of hollywood movies shot partially in native Imax had the effects for those scenes rendered at 5.7k or higher. I know that some of ILM's beauty shots of Pandora in Avatar were rendered at 3k (odd res, I know) so that they would really shine in the 70mm Imax blow-up.