Fang Zei

It's worth noting that when Tron Legacy was hitting theaters, Disney not only held off a blu-ray release of the original but also discontinued the existing dvd. They didn't want the kids today getting the wrong impression of what they were doing with the sequel. The lackluster success of Tron Legacy and the box office disaster of John Carter were pointed to as motivating factors in Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm.

Still no individual releases....

It was never mentioned in dialogue that Vader was a Sith.

My only point was that in order to make everything fresh and new again, they probably won't bring "the Sith" into the proceedings but focus on coming up with a compelling antagonist.

I just meant within the context of the movie itself, he wasn't.

TMBTM said:

Jonno said:

TMBTM said:

Beginning the ST with the Empire still controling the galaxy would be like killing Newt and Hicks in the opening scene of Alien 3, IMO.

As in, dramatically justified and probably resulting in a better film? Interesting point.

No, as in: making completely pointless half of the previous movie (I like Alien 3 for what it is, but I it was a mistake to begin the movie that way, IMO). That's why if it somehow "must be" an evil Empire controling the galaxy at the beginning of the ST (as someone proposed in the previous page of this thread)  I suggested it to be a kind of decadent New republic rather than the same old bad guys still in charge.

To say the truth, even if I liked some of the EU novels, having the Empire being the baddies (even just fighting against the New republic) would be just okay and not very interesting to me. The problem is that the bad guys being Sith Lords would be even more whatever (unless there is a very clever plot). That's why in another thread I suggested something completely different for the threat. What if the Force itself becomes "out of control"? What if, once the "balance" achieved (by the end of ROTJ), the Force is spreading across the galaxy and everyone with very few training can now have special powers? Should the New republic be pleased of this power now being offered to the people by "the Force" itself? Or should it be controled by the New Republic? Okay... that probably sounds "smart" on paper but would maybe become another political boredom if not handle well on screen. Harf, I don't know. Give me a new cool designed Sith after all, I guess!

They're most likely gonna try and recapture the feel of the original film. Darth Vader wasn't a "Sith Lord," he was just a cool bad guy in black armor. The Force has been the one unifying aspect of the saga, so it's sure to play some sort of role in Ep7. Involving the Sith would kinda ruin the ending of RotJ, with the master Emperor being killed and the apprentice Vader being saved. That hasn't stopped the post-Jedi EU from going absolutely Sith crazy, of course, but I don't see it as a requirement to make them the main villains of the ST.

Eh, I would actually kinda want this to be TPM actually, just without the suck.

DominicCobb said:

I think the sooner someone asks LFL about their position on the OUT at this time the better. No doubt they have a position, so it'd be great to know for sure what it is. And to make it clear there are still people out here that want to see these movies.

Indeed it's surprising we haven't heard anything yet. It's been the better part of a year since the Disney deal. Maybe the plans for the OOT haven't been finalized yet and they don't want to say anything until making the grand announcement.

How appropriate that the youtube commenter put DVD in all caps. Yes, it was released on dvd, which unfortunately allows for quite a range of quality (the GOUT, for example, was an IVTC'd laserdisc master). But we still don't have the original versions on blu-ray, do we?

Mike O, there's nothing to stop Disney and Fox from working out a deal right now. They need not wait until 2020. It's only the distribution rights, anyway. If Disney didn't mind seeing a small portion of those blu-ray sales going to Fox, they could release the damn thing right now. The only real problem is the distribution rights to the '77 film are apparently Fox's FOREVER. I guess maybe that's something dating back to 1977 that didn't change when they voluntarily handed the film back over to Lucas in the mid-90's.

Whether it's Yub Nub or Galactic Celebration, I think we're meant to believe the death of the Emperor = the death of the Empire.

Neverar, that's actually reminiscent of the original plan for the ST circa 1980. Wasn't Luke gonna defeat the emperor and vader in VI and then go off and find the actual real big baddie in VII or am I remembering wrong?

There were a bunch of endings: Artoo and Threepio being given to Captain Antilles, Padme's funeral, Vader and Palps on the SD bridge, Bail Organa bringing Leia to Alderaan and Obi-Wan bringing Luke to Tatooine.

If it's been eight years since your one viewing of the movie, I can see how it'd be hard to remember if Yoda's arrival on Dagobah was actually in the movie.

When the same guy directing is also financing the movie himself, what exactly was anyone supposed to do??? George had no "higher up" to answer to.

What's funny is that I can remember not knowing Yoda was even gonna be cgi in AotC until that first teaser-for-the-teaser (the "breathing" trailer) was released. Had they even mentioned it beforehand??

Of course, I should've realized that's what they were gonna do since one of the earliest rumblings circa 2000 was McCallum hyping how we were gonna see why they call Yoda "the master." I guess the image I'd gotten in my head just wasn't one of cgi.

Considering he did the sound effects for both of JJ's Star Trek movies, I can't see him not coming back for VII.

I hate the look of CPY as much as the next person, but that's how it looked in '99. I don't know what was keeping them from making a puppet that looked just like the one(s) in Empire and Jedi. Perhaps someone can fill me in on that.

Then we have cg Yoda....

On the one hand, it looks like the Empire/Jedi puppet, simply in cg form. Also, they added those rubbery bounces to his ears. The irony of it all! It's like the animators were paying more attention to the old puppet than the puppeteers were!

On the other hand, there's a big trade-off happening here. For all the animators' efforts to make Yoda more real, they only got farther and farther away from what made the Empire/Jedi Yoda "real." Freedom of movement and water in his eyes is not what made the old puppet real. It was that we were seeing something that was literally sharing the same stage, reflecting the same light as Mark Hamill, and that there was a real performance going on before our eyes.

Even Gollum can only have one of those two things said about him in the LOTR movies, which is still one more than can be said of cg Yoda.

The excuses were when Lucas was still in charge, and even back then I was convinced he'd get around to it eventually. Now that there's a larger corporate entity calling the shots, you can bet they'll get around to it sooner rather than later.

Yeah, it's more a matter of principle for me. I doubt I'd ever waste my time watching it either, but TPM's theatrical cut should be preserved if only because it was the second highest grossing film of the 1990's and the most anticipated film pretty much ever at the time. It's historically relevent. AotC is admittedly harder to make similar arguments for, but I'd still love to see the theatrical and Imax cuts of the movie preserved.

At this point, an OOT release isn't so much a matter of "if" but "when" and "how" and "what." How will they go about restoring it? Will they include the '97 version for completionism's sake? What about the prequels? Will they now be stuck in their revised form on blu-ray while the OOT remains available?? What about the "official" version of the OT? Will it be re-scanned or will the lowry master linger on even longer?

I'm betting we'll see completely new designs. There wasn't much (any?) overlap of vehicle designs between the OT and PT. Sure, they foreshadowed the OT vehicles in the designs of the PT, but we never blatantly saw an X-Wing or TIE fighter flying around. Even the big triangle-shaped attack ships that showed up in AotC weren't called "Star Destroyers" until RotS.

Within both trilogies, we see certain ships make recurring appearances. The N-1 fighters from TPM show up again in AotC. The LAAT gunships from AotC show up again in RotS. The Trade Federation cruisers show up in all three PT films. The OT is full of X-Wings, TIE fighters and Star Destroyers. We'll probably see designs in Ep7 that get used in the rest of the ST.

Funny, only after reading Jaitea's post did it occur to me how much the bridge of JJ's Enterprise resembles the bridge of a Mon Cal Star Cruiser.

Oh, and ditto on the whole "Star Destroyer" naming confusion thing. I never realized that until today, feel like a total idiot now.

So far we've got:

-Michael Kaplan as costume designer. He's not only worked with Abrams on Star Trek '09 and the sequel, he also did the costumes for Blade Runner!

-Chiang and McCaig coming back as concept designers.

-Williams doing the music, which should've always been a foregone conclusion.

We're still awaiting confirmation of who the production designer and the cinematographer will be.

No restoration project is that expensive. In the case of Star Wars, they certainly wouldn't need to worry about making their money back. Paramount spent more than a million dollars restoring the Godfather movies back in 2007.

I doubt George even cares about them being out there anymore. He even said at a convention a couple years ago that the original versions weren't being included in the blu-ray set because they were too expensive to restore .... or something.

Re: the whole 3D discussion,

I recall seeing a comparison between the 2D and 3D blu-rays of one of the Ice Age movies. Everything was in focus on the 3D version, while the 2D had depth of field.

This is a whole lot simpler when everything's being rendered in the computer to begin with. You simply do separate renders. But when we're talking about actual photography in the real world, it's a bit more complicated.

http://badassdigest.com/2013/08/02/new-star-wars-might-use-more-elegant-fx-for-a-more-civilized-age/

Several interesting tidbits:

The last paragraph pretty much confirms this will be shot exactly as the OT and TPM were, complete with actual film. Like I said in previous posts, I just hope Abrams can do with Lucas on Ep7 what he did with Spielberg on Super 8.

In the comments, someone mentions they were at some event with Phil Tippett and he mentioned he was working on some super secret project that in all likelihood is Ep7.

There's also a particularly interesting story someone heard from "a friend at lucasfilm" that kinda takes the idea of George having limitless control and flips it on its head. Worth reading.

What sucks about STID getting post-converted is that Abrams not only wanted to stick with film but also shoot some of the movie in IMAX. The studio let him do so, but they still mandated a post-conversion since they were spending so much on the movie and needed a guaranteed return on their investment. Because they were focusing their resources on the 3D, rendering the cgi in native stereo and so forth, they weren't able to render the IMAX shots at their full height. As a result, the handful of IMAX 15/70 2D prints have the IMAX shots matted down to 1.66:1, as opposed to the full 1.44 height of the frame. The Imax 15/70 3D prints of the movie apparently cropped the 1.66 image to fill up the entire screen for maximum immersion, losing information on all four sides of the o-neg.

Therein lies the propensity for tacking on the 3D. When so much of the movie is being done in the computer anyway, why not just convert the live-action stuff and be done with it? It's too bad there aren't more 15/70 theaters out there. I feel like that would've earned more respect for Abrams' intentions from the studio heads. But since his name isn't Christopher Nolan and the name of the franchise isn't Batman, I guess it was a no-brainer to make an extra four dollars per ticket from the thousands of 3D screens out there instead of settling for an extra five dollars a ticket from the only few hundred imax screens out there (which would then be an extra six dollars a ticket because it's imax 3D).