Fang Zei

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).

It would actually make perfect sense for Disney to open Avengers 2 and Ep7 at opposite ends of May. Last year, the big memorial day movie was Men in Black III. It'd been three weeks since The Avengers opened and it was the movie to finally knock it from the #1 spot at the weekend box office.

If Disney opens Star Wars on memorial day weekend (as damn well they should) and assuming Avengers 2 is once again the #1 movie for the three weekends preceding, they could end up enjoying six or seven weeks as king of the box office.

Oh, and on the whole "how will it be shot" debate, I think it's quite likely Abrams will shoot this thing in 2D. All four of his other movies were shot on film, in cinemascope, just as the OT was. Perhaps the "on film" part might change (they could go with Arri Alexa 4:3 cameras), although I'd think JJ would prefer actual film if it's still available next year. Disney will in all likelihood convert it to 3D to squeeze an extra hundred million out of the box office.

I don't see Hollywood's obsession with 3D blowing over anytime soon. If the vast majority of the movie-going public don't know whether or not the movie they're seeing was shot in 3D, the studios are just gonna keep on exploiting that ignorance. Even I have to admit the conversion tech has come a long way. My pre-screening of Man of Steel ended up being the 3D version (projected in real-d) and I found everything quite natural-looking. The only real drawback was the darkening caused by the polarizing filters. Also, while I didn't go see the full movie this way, the converted opening scene of JJ's own Star Trek Into Darkness (shown in front of Imax 3D screenings of The Hobbit) looked pretty natural as well.

Also, it's important to note that while converted 2D footage will never be as convincing as the actual native material, more and more of these tentpole releases are having their cgi rendered in stereo. So, there's at least something "truly" 3D that people are getting out of these converted movies.

Not destroyed, not by a long shot. The original negative is conformed to the special edition edit and may no longer be viable as the basis for a restoration unless the pieces that got altered/replaced were in fact put into storage back in '96. Even if they were, I'm pretty sure the optical shots had completely faded beyond repair by the mid-90's because of the unstable film-stock used to composite them (they were thrown out and re-composited digitally), so they would need a second-generation source anyway.

For this and other reasons, it might make more sense to simply use an interpositive or the separation masters and use that as a starting point for an OOT restoration. Even then, it would still take a little thing called "time" and some "effort," both of which would require something called "money" to be spent. That's all George really meant.

Forgot about that also. Never did get around to picking up the blu-ray.

Anyway, I was convinced George was eventually gonna get around to restoring the OOT someday. Didn't he make some comment at Celebration Europe about how it was still "too expensive" to restore the original versions? That right there pretty much sealed it for me: it was about money. All the Disney deal did was make it that much more of a sure thing, and pretty much guarantee it would happen sooner.

Yeah, except ..... no, at least I hope not. God, would that be dumb. You're probably right, though. I just think it's dumb for them to have built up all that continuity, to say all the while that it's canon, and even needing George's approval to kill off one of the major characters, only to then go and say it never happenned.

How well do you think such a move would go over with the fans? It's been the official continuation of the story for all these years. Wouldn't it be kind of a slap in the face for them to say "it never happenned, deal with it?"

Oh, and I just checked Wookieepedia. The Falcon is still intact in the EU. You're probably thinking of the cover art for Jedi Search, which depicted the ship as having crash-landed on the surface of a planet.

I thought the story was all ready to go back in November. He's the director, not the writer. I know the screenplay itself is a different matter, and it does take time to iron it out, but they've had the better part of a year now to work on it. I'm scratching my head as to why he would still need more time.

I'm wondering if the Holiday Special even still exists in any form at Lucasfilm or Fox. Wasn't the copy that's now out there in the wild made straight from a tv station's master tape of it??

Oh, wait, I forgot they used some shots from the cartoon in one of the web docs for AotC, the one focusing on Boba Fett.

Hal 9000 said:

I don't expect the new films to make anything of the existing EU, but hopefully they steer clear of openly dismissing it entirely. If the films skip 40 years and don't require knowledge of what happened in between, these still might be fun as occasional podcast replacements.

That's exactly how I've been hoping Ep7 will be handled. It would be pretty stupid at this point for them to do anything but this, especially considering the cover art they chose for Crucible.

It's not like it would be all that complicated. They just need to follow a few simple rules, such as setting it 40 years since Endor, keeping certain characters dead and maybe avoiding going to certain planets so they don't have to even bring up the Yuuzhan Vong thing.

I won't spoil anything, but if you step back and look at who's still alive there are some intriguing possibilities for where they could take the new movie.

Besides, if they come up with an original script with original characters they won't need to worry about what EU stuff to reference and what not to.