Fang Zei

Indeed it could just be a blanket statement, and if that's the case it doesn't really change anything. All they'd really be saying is that, going forward, everything will be on the same level as everything else. The "legends" thing might simply be a two-level distinction (G-Canon vs non-G-canon) for the layman that doesn't get into the more elaborate multi-tiered heirarchy of canon.

I'm hoping it doesn't mean a nullification of the EU, because as others have said, they'd be overwriting a whole lot of great stories in addition to the less well-recieved stuff.

I must echo what Hal and Tobar and Mr. Cobb have said. We need to wait and see how this all shakes out. For the moment, I'm still taking this news merely as confirmation that the new trilogy won't be an adaptation of any existing EU story. I'm sure I'll be proved wrong, but there ya go.

Tyrphanax said:

There was never any part of me that thought they would just take the existing EU books, comics, and games and just make a movie out of them, or even try to fit the story into the existing EU continuity. 

 I wasn't expecting the former, but I was expecting the latter.

I dunno, I think they should at least try to fit Episode 7 in the "old" continuity. I don't see any scenario as "too constraining" for the filmmakers. If anything, having parameters in which to work might actually breed creativity more than a blank slate would.

One big thing I'm curious about is whether Abrams and Mindel will be shooting some scenes in IMAX like on the last Star Trek movie. Brad Bird and Claudio Miranda are shooting some of Tomorrowland (also from Disney) in the format, just as Bird did with Robert Elswit on Ghost Protocol. I wanna say there was a story about JJ "wanting to," but no confirmation.

A Star Wars movie with scenes in native 15/70 is pretty much the only thing that would get me to see it anywhere other than the Uptown.

Anchorhead said:

I've taken a glance around the nerdosphere since the news release and there are plenty of fans who are put out or upset that the stories they love aren't official anymore. 

Which, as I said in the "EU like" thread, we don't even know LFL is technically saying. All they've said is that VII-IX won't tell the same story as the EU. They might simply be clarifying that this won't be an adaptation of an existing storyline, which we already knew prior to this news.

Then again, the part about "in order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers" certainly seems to imply they don't want continuity to bog them down.

imperialscum said:

As for EU sources that used big-time characters in order to try to increase their popularity they will pay the price now.

Here's the thing, though: they've had 20+ years to kill off Han, Luke and Leia in the EU and they haven't. Also, didn't Chewie's death need to be OK'd by GL himself? That, to me, makes it semi-official.

I just re-read the article yet again. All they technically said was "VII-IX won't tell the same story as the EU" (italics mine). For all we know, they're simply clarifying that this won't be an adaptation of any existing storyline, which is fine by me because I was never expecting a sequel trilogy to do that anyway.

It would make sense for Bane to make the cut, as I'm pretty sure he's an idea of GL's that made its way into the TPM novelization but not the movie itself.

What would be the reasoning for him never existing? Palpatine mentions that story to Anakin in RotS. Granted, he does call it "a Sith legend," meaning even if he'd heard it secondhand (and not just completely made it up himself) it still might not be true.

But are people saying now that because the Darth Plagueis novel is non-canon Palpatine might've completely made him up?

The policy I was kinda hoping LFL would take is to just "ignore" whatever's happened since RotJ. That is, don't bring it up, but don't directly contradict it either.*

I haven't closely followed the EU, but the mere fact that Han, Luke and Leia are still alive after 40 years seemed reason enough to keep Episode VII within the existing continuity. I guess the problem would be forcing Abrams and Kasdan to suddenly step into the EU "as is," whereas I'm sure they had their own idea for Episode VII independant of where the EU has taken things.

*Which, for all we know, could still be what they're doing. Chee and Hidalgo might've had a meeting with the new people, sat them down and said "this is where things currently sit, Chewie's dead, Ackbar, Mon Mothma and Crix Madine are dead, two of the three Solo children are dead and the surviving one has a husband and kid, Luke's son is now in his late teens but the wife Luke had him by is now dead, etc, etc." A meeting like this could have happened for all we know, and for all we know the new people found all of this interesting, a cool place to jump off from .... or they said "screw it, we're starting over from scratch."

DuracellEnergizer said:

I loathe the whole notion of "official" canon, so consider me one of those people who aren't pleased with the idea of making the films and the NuEU 110% compatible with one another. Continuity should be an option, not a prerequisite.

 And what a weird way to go about it, right?

"Hey, Everyone. Remember 20 years ago when we said this was the official continuation of the story? Well, we're making a new movie now, so any and all of that stuff may or may not be official anymore, sorry. But we're gonna be writing more stuff and starting right this moment it's officially official. We promise."

After re-reading the story on the official site, they are still being unclear (for obvious reasons) as to whether or not Episode VII will actively overwrite the existing EU. They probably just want to get this announcement out of the way now, before they head into main unit photography in a few weeks and story details inevitably leak out.

Like I said, this isn't without precedent. The Clone Wars movie/show is barely compatible with the older clone wars (lowercased) stuff. Maybe instead of making promises they know they can't keep, they're simply saying up front "there is no direct connection between the new material and the old. If old stuff gets contradicted, the new stuff trumps it every time, no retcons."

Another thing I was gonna say is that this isn't entirely without precedent. I remember feeling a bit annoyed when the 2008 clone wars was set only a couple months after AotC, creating a continuity mess. Chee and Hidalgo said they'd eventually make a revised clone wars timeline, but then five seasons of the show happened and it became its own thing.

Even back in '05, at the end of the grand clone wars multimedia project, there was a kerfuffle over Labyrinth of Evil and part 2 of Genndy's cartoon not quite matching up like the official site said they would. It was either Chee or Hidalgo (can't remember now) who bent over backwards to make it all work.

What about the handful of old books and comics that brought up stuff George would later do his own way in the PT (Boba Fett's backstory, young Kenobi, etc)? Did that stuff get retconned or was it rendered non-canon? The Bounty Hunter game and the Open Seasons comic reference Jaster Mereel and Concord Dawn, so some of it was clearly repurposed even if it wasn't retconned.

One of the dark horse clone wars comics (from '02-'05) even used the chemical spill on Honoghr mentioned in the Zahn books as a jumping-off point.

Oh, and someone was wondering about the character from the Marvel comics that eventually made their way to higher levels of canon? That would be Lumiya, who was brought back for the Legacy of the Force novels.

Honestly, what's happening now is doing the same thing regarding post-RotJ continuity as The Clone Wars was to the existing '02-'05 stuff: they're doing their own thing, but also feeling free to incorporate EU elements as they like.

Obviously we won't really know where the chips have fallen until the movie is finished and released. Obviously the official policy is now "No previous material is canon except the movies and TCW," but that doesn't mean some of the existing EU can't still count (until something comes along to contradict it, that is). Even if a story is rendered non-canon, it doesn't suddenly cease to exist.

Besides, as someone in the comments section at badass digest put it, personal canon is the only one that should ultimately matter.

If you liked a story more than the official one that contradicts it, so what?

Octorox said:

and all Star Wars content (books, films, games etc.) moving forward will be canon and overseen by Lucasfilm's story department.

Ummmmm, fool me once?

Seriously though, I wasn't planning on spending hard-earned cash on anything moving forward except a ticket to see Episode VII (although a restored OOT and OPT might change that).

I've barely read any of the EU set post-RotJ, mainly kept up with the gist of it via wookieepedia, so this doesn't exactly come as heart-breaking news or anything. It's what we all saw coming, anyway. At the same time though, I can't blame the continuity-obsessed fans for feeling a bit betrayed. While Lucasfilm did eventually say "not all canon is equal" several years ago, they were still calling it "canon." Rather than having a tiered system of dividing lines, it would seem they've settled on just one: there's the stuff George was involved with and then there's everything else.

The reality is that George let the EU get away from him because he never planned on doing Ep7. RotJ was THE END, all caps, and what happened afterward was hearsay, written by other people playing in his sandbox. Abrams may be directing, but it's still with George's involvement, unlike all those countless books.

Mike O said:

danny_boy said:

Fang Zei said:

But for a scope movie like Star Wars, it really should be the full 2048 that's being used. 2K for scope is 2048:853, 2K for 1.85:1 is 1998:1080 and for 16:9 it's, of course, 1920:1080. 

Yes---although commercial 2K  cinema projectors can scale/stretch  up the image in the vertical direction(thereby utilizing the full 1080 x 2048 panel)

And with the help of an anamorphic lens---optically expand the image horizontally.

For those who own projectors which have this same scalability function---It can also be done at home (but consumer anamorphic lens cost somewhere in the region of $5000-$10000).

P.S

I have a Sony 4K 1000es projector and have watched Eps IV,V and VI at a resolution of 1706 X 4096.

The below screenshot is from projectorreviews.com:

They scale up perfectly and look nothing short of amazing.

Same applies to the prequels with Revenge Of Sith being the standout.

This screenshot below is from an AVS forum member :

 How the hell does everyone know all of this home theater and technical information except for me?! God, I'm behind on everything. My life is a mess. Anyway, that last photo is frigging creepy. Is there a point to 4K unless you have a super-badass projector? I can't even tune my cheapo HDTV right. I fail at life.

Oh, I gave up on trying to calibrate a long time ago. It's impossible to do it "by eye," so I usually just pick whatever preset I like the most and stick with it. The tv manufacturers have gotten smarter about this, I've noticed. The 32" 720p lg lcd my mom got in 2012 with her credit card points actually looks pretty darn good on its out-of-the-box settings (blasphemy, I know). The only thing I did was change the aspect ratio from the default 16:9 (which overscans the image slightly) to "just scan," which matches the pixel ratio 1:1.

Compare that to the 40" 1080p sony lcd my dad got in 2008. For starters, its factory picture setting was "vivid," which always looks terrible. Motion-smoothing was also on by default, on a 60Hz tv no less (not a good combination). I remember hooking up the dvd player and gleefully switching the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 after nine long years, throwing on RotS as demo material. It was straight-up unwatchable on those settings! I chose a different picture preset and then went into the tv's various menus to turn off motion-smoothing and various other things. Went through this all over again once we got a blu-ray player. I swear the tv companies throw in all these bells and whistles just to justify the high price point, which is probably why most people don't change a thing once they get their shiny new tv. I mean, they paid all this money for it, so clearly that's how everything's supposed to look, right? ;)

So yeah, watching blu-rays on a 720p tv's default settings, my brain tells me everything looks wrong but my eyes like what they see. In fact, the "cinema" picture presets on both tv's look all wrong to me, even though I know that's probably closer to a calibrated setting. Perhaps "closer" is the crucial word here, as a calibration would strike the perfect balance.

The sony now sits in the basement awaiting a proper viewing space. Once I have that, and a little extra income, I might possibly become interested in getting it isf-calibrated (the painful irony is that the smaller, 720p lg is much more suited for it as lg is one of the companies that makes their tv's isf-ready). But it's honestly not as big a deal to me now as it once was.

It makes me nostalgic for that day, more than 13 years ago, when I hooked up the year-and-a-half old dvd player to a brand new 27" panasonic tube over s-video and everything looked and sounded perfect. Ignorance really is bliss.

m_s0 said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

I won't be convinced until the OOT gets a proper rerelease and the EU abandons the use of PT-styled Sith.

Agreed about the OOT, but I couldn't care less about the EU. Unless you consider this new trilogy part of EU, I suppose.

Like I've said in a couple other threads, we still don't really know what they're gonna do in regards to continuity. They're either going to "ignore" (i.e. just not bring up certain things because it won't have anything to do with this movie's story), which I think would be the best solution, or they're gonna press the reset button and "pretend it never happened" (i.e. come up with their own backstory of whatever's happened since Endor), which would be stupid IMO considering the EU has been doing exactly that for the last 20 or so years.

This rumor about Mayhew coming back would seem to indicate the latter, but all we really have is rumors at this point.

Anyway, it's cool they're writing that book. It'll probably introduce a whole new generation to McQuarrie's OT artwork. I kinda love the connotation in that woman's voice when she says "they've grown up on the prequels," like she really wants to say it but knows she shouldn't.

It only makes the OUT seem that much more conspicuously absent, indeed. You'd certainly hope this is a sign they'll be bringing it back sooner rather than later.

But for a scope movie like Star Wars, it really should be the full 2048 that's being used. 2K for scope is 2048:853, 2K for 1.85:1 is 1998:1080 and for 16:9 it's, of course, 1920:1080. 

Also, I find it interesting that the article is apparently (without an exact translation) saying that it's Disney, not Fox, that's doing this release. That either means Disney and Fox actually worked out a deal over the last 18 months, or that there's nothing legally stopping Lucasfilm/Disney from doing this in Australia and Germany but they wouldn't be able to do so in the U.S.

It may simply be that I'm overthinking this and that Fox is still technically distributing but that it was Disney's idea to do the release. Fox wouldn't be able to do such a release without Lucasfilm's blessing anyway, so this would make sense.

Most movies finished as a DI are only done so at 2K anyway. The theater gets it as a 2K file on a hard drive and the 4K projector upscales it. 

I was unaware that the C4 saga screening was done using a commercial cinema projector. IV-VI were only cleaned up at 1920:1080 HD resolution (although the source scan was 1828:1556 which is considered a 2K harvest of the "squeezed" anamorphic image on the negative of true cinemascope movies like the OT and TPM). The Lowry guys were very specific about that at the press conference in 2004 (with Hamill, Kershner, Jim Ward et al) when someone asked if it was 2K. They also specified full RGB resolution, which makes sense since they were doing this on 600 networked powermacs. I can only assume they meant 1920:817 for the actual 2.35:1 image itself. Either way, 1920 is still slightly below the 2048 of true 2K.

This info about the C4 screening, coupled with the fact that GL did go ahead and make additional changes to the Lowry master for the blu-ray, makes me wonder if he really did intend it as the basis for any and all future releases of the movies. Now that it's Disney's property, I would assume they'd want it transfered in a quality greater than just hdtv/blu-ray.

Y'know, now that I think about it, these are probably just the 35mm German prints from 1997.

SilverWook said:

If this 4K thing catches on, the Blu Ray masters aren't going to cut the mustard. They'd have to to go back to a film master, and that leaves the '97 versions and the OOT.

I doubt the Mouse nor Fox are going to let the 40th anniversary in 2017 go unexploited.

The Lowry master doesn't even cut the mustard right now in terms of a theatrical re-release. All of the digital projectors installed in theaters right now are at least full 2K res (2048 by 1080). Lowry only did the 2004 job with hdtv in mind. The projectors in theaters at the time were 1280 by 1024, I believe, with an anamorphic lens to unsqueeze the image to its full ratio (someone please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not so sure about that).

So, whether 4K tv catches on or not, the current digital master shouldn't be used with anything but a blu-ray reissue in mind.

Has the OT ever been exhibited theatrically as a dcp???? The Lowry master, aside from being used for its initial purpose in the 2004 dvd release, has only ever been used for hd broadcasts and the blu-rays. They've never used it to make a dcp for theatrical exhibition, not to my knowledge anyway.

Mike O,

Regarding FotR, you're probably right. The problem with that new transfer isn't so much the coloration as the lack of contrast in the image. A big piece of evidence is the dissolve to white when Arwen saves Frodo: on all other transfers it's bright white whereas it's just a pale shade of green on the extended blu-ray. It's the same problem with any other scenes that should exhibit "peak white," such as the letters in the title shot and end credits. When you consider that a recall would've involved exchanging not just one, but two whole discs, you can see why everyone involved would've agreed to just keep saying "it looks exactly as we intended." Pretty frustrating when - aside from that one significant problem that affects the entire transfer - it's actually a pretty big step up from the theatrical blu-ray in terms of detail. All previous transfers of FotR were telecines of filmouts. The extended blu-ray was the first time they made a transfer directly from the DI files.

The new transfer of Raiders is really more of a head-scratcher than a frustration. When you consider that they'd already done newer transfers of the three movies in 2008 (it's those transfers that were used for the Temple and Crusade blu-rays, in fact) and even struck new 35mm prints from them, you wonder what decisions led to them giving Raiders a radically different color-timing in 2012 from how they made it look in 2008.

generalfrevious said:

Mike O said:

Fang Zei said:

Yeah, I hate that directors can't leave well enough alone and have to digitally erase stuff from their older films. It becomes frustrating when a movie like Evil Dead gets a beautiful restoration for its blu-ray debut but is then altered from its original version because the director wanted to "fix" things.

By the way, did Cameron actually make alterations to T1? I remember reading about one or two shots that people had spotted, but I never saw screenshot comparisons. It's probably a given that he's made "fixes" to True Lies and The Abyss, which are hitting blu-ray later this year. I should probably brace myself for when the eventual remaster of T2 suffers a similar fate.

 What alterations were made The Evil Dead Blu-Ray? I know it didn't include the mono. The Terminator didn't include the original mono track, and much like he did with Aliens, Cameron has changed the color timing completely to that teal and orange that he wants it to swim in. I think the sadder part is that not only will T2, The Abyss, and True Lies almost certainly suffer the same fate (I still hate myself for supporting Wal-Mart and buying the HDX True Lies from Vudu, but it was the only place to get it.), and no one will give a damn. No one cares about the kind of revisionism practiced by Lucas, there certainly isn't anyone who gives a fuck about the recoloring on those films :(. The dark side of digital, change is easier than ever, and why? Because they can. And after Cameron spoke out against what Lucas did, too. FML.

 Those were minor technical points, aren't they? Cameron really hasn't done what Lucas has (right?), changing whole scenes around where another character shoots first, people screaming nooooo when they didn't in an earlier version, editing out original actors and replacing them with actors who weren't alive when  the original film was out, and shoehorning CGI from the late 90s into a film from the 70s. Then deride the real films as rough drafts and letting them disintegrate and be lost forever. This is a whole new level than just color correcting.

Raimi had some of the glaring bloopers - bloopers that kinda give the movie part of its charm - digitally erased. It's even more frustrating because they made brand new masters of both the 1.37:1 and 1.85:1 versions to include on the blu-ray (just as the old dvd had both framings), and they both have the same digital revisions in them.

Cameron didn't quite do the same thing as Lucas with his newer transfers of Aliens and Titanic, no, but then again I think Cameron puts more emphasis on the original version's edit being what makes it the "original version" than any digital revisions that may be found within otherwise identical edits, and he "fixed" a whole bunch of things in Titanic for its most recent release. Funny enough, the theatrical cut of Aliens on the blu-ray can't technically be called that from an editing standpoint either: Cameron corrected the order of four shots where Ripley picks up a flamethrower, puts down a machine gun, picks up a machine gun, puts down a flamethrower. Although I guess I should simply be thankful that the only thing he erased in Aliens (AFAIK) is Lance Henricksen's torso sticking out of the ground in a shot during the final action scene. It's almost like the snake pit reflection to Aliens' RotLA.

Similarly, Cameron seems to have left T1 alone for the most part, although I don't see why it was so much troubke to include the mono track. He's given it that new color timing, yeah, but those kind of things don't tend to bother me as much. I'll admit the most recent transfer of Raiders didn't look right to my eyes when the screenshots popped up online, but then again there seems to be disagreement as to just how the movie looked in '81. The new transfers of Fellowship of the Ring and AotC (Hey, back on topic!) also look weird to me, and I suspect it has something to do with digging up movies that were some of the earliest DI's after almost a decade.

SilverWook said:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-chief-reveals-star-wars-693950

Filming has already begun, according to this. Of course, that could simply mean crews out on location shooting background plates or something, not the actual start of principal photography.

 Anyone else notice the figure given by Alan Horn?

35 years, not the 30 given by Bob Iger.

Like I said, 30 years is the minimum, not the maximum.

There was a story recently (also by THR, I believe) that "sources" are claiming Mayhew will return as Chewbacca. Honestly, I don't know what to believe until a script leaks, and even then ....