Fang Zei

That's the other big issue.

Even though I'm hopelessly optimistic based on their releasing of a laserdisc master on dvd seven long years ago, I have to remind myself that it's the SE that was released on blu-ray and it's the SE that plays on spike.

Contrast that against E.T., which for several years now has only been played on tv in its original form. Spielberg regretted doing the SE so much, he didn't bother to include it in the blu-ray release last year. While the original cut was included in the first dvd release way back in '02, I remember a single-disc reissue that was the SE-only.

That's actually kinda similar to the situation with Star Wars on video in the late 90's / early 00's. Sure, we didn't have two-pack vhs sets with both versions (impractical), but both versions were out there in equal quality. Also, as far as most of us were concerned (aside from stuff like the ANH crawl and the audio mixes), there were only two versions of the movies: the original and the '97.

Then there was that 2000 vhs reissue with the roman numerals. Uh-oh, what does this portend? Then just a few years later, not only are we denied the original version, we're given yet another revision of the movie!

So, yeah, pretty good comparison considering which formats were dominant when each movie's "special edition" hit home video. It's quite amusing how these two colleagues have totally different views on what they themselves consider their masterworks. Spielberg is embarrased by his Special Edition while Lucas is embarrased by his original version.

Of course, it's a slightly different story with Star Wars' SE, which was a "test-run" for the prequels Lucas realized the original versions would never be compatible with. Of course, he could've chosen to make a more restrained, less effects-intensive PT to better fit with the OT, but that's all in the past.

There's no petition I'm aware of to get the SE of E.T. released on blu-ray. Meanwhile, there's quite a vocal group who want the OOT on blu-ray. Even if Lucas hadn't pulled that GOUT stunt and properly remastered the films, we'd all still be sitting here now in 2013 waiting for it to hit blu-ray. Disney must know this. They can't be that clueless.

It's not like similar things haven't happened. When WB put out Superman Returns, the HD disc formats had just debuted and a marketing opportunity presented itself. When the movie hit video later that year, they not only put it out on all three formats, but did the same for the Donner cuts of I&II. They did not put out III, IV or the theatrical cuts of the first two, although there was an all-out, all movies and versions collection released on standard dvd. Several years later, they finally upgraded this collection to blu-ray.

Blu-ray is still in the early years of its lifespan. Most of the big titles have been released, but there are still plenty that haven't. Just today I was reminded that The Right Stuff still hasn't hit blu-ray. Two of James Cameron's movies aren't hitting the format until next year (The Abyss and True Lies, both of which, it's worth noting, are currently stuck at NON-ANAMORPHIC dvd quality on home video (yeah)). Me, I'm naively hoping Paramount will someday do proper remasters of the Star Trek films, some of my favorites (at least Wrath of Khan got the proper treatment, but that's not enough).

We keep pointing to some quote someone said and then throwing up our arms and screaming "we're doomed." Guys, the situation isn't nearly as hopeless as we're making it out to be.

Lets face it: each film deserves its own special edition with film-specific extras. I'm hoping Disney sees the potential there.

 

Been thinking the exact same thing for a while now.

Even before the Disney deal happened, I was thinking this would be a great way for LFL to ease their worries of "we'll never make enough profit off a proper release of the OOT to justify the amount we'd need to spend on restoring it."

msycamore said:

Baronlando said:

More 35mm film from the archives getting scanned and sold that isn't the actual movie. They're just screwing with me at this point.

 They have been screwing with us for a very long time....

digitalfreaknyc said:

 

Mielr said:

Just more bonus stuff to eventually get released on the OOT Blu-Rays. ;-)

Imagine if they released 1 every 2 years to coincide with the new films? Damn.

 

Lucasfilm publically stated seven years ago that they don't have any future plans to restore these films.

Lucas himself have stated that they are dead to him and that he wish they disappear, when being confronted with this question he always give weak excuses not to do it.

Rick Mccallum said in an interview a few months ago that "officially it will never happen."

About four years until we will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the death of the Original Trilogy.

This is the first I've heard of McCallum saying that. Was it before or after October 30th of last year?

Also, yeah, LFL officially said that to all of us almost seven years ago (how could we possibly forget?), but didn't Lucas himself say just a couple years ago at some convention that it was a matter of the OOT being too expensive (as of that date) to restore?

Let's be honest. If George had wanted the OOT to (eventually) die with the tapes and laserdiscs, he never would've put it out on dvd. It renders his quote I read in someone's sig kinda meaningless. The GOUT may have been garbage quality by 2006 standards, but it was still technically speaking the highest quality official transfer of the original versions ever (essentially the '93 lasers viewed directly from their digital source). More importantly, it was now on a completely digital format that could be preserved bit for bit exactly as it was, ad infinitum. If it'd been about anything but money, Lucas wouldn't have put it out at all.

It's entirely possible Lucas stipulated the OOT remain buried when he sold Star Wars to Disney. You would think $4 Billion would've earned them his permission, and I would certainly hope it was enough money to make him no longer care.

Hello and welcome, cdbarnes!

Your post sent me on a trip down memory lane, back to the 56K dial-up days seeing those first photos from the set of Episode I on the official website (a full-sized AAT sitting around what must've been the backlot at Leavesden, Jake Lloyd as Anakin at the dinner table in the slave quarters, Ewan McGregor as a buzz-cut Obi-Wan, etc). Oh, and there was that Doug Chiang sketch of the Naboo N-1 if I remember correctly....

Then there was that first teaser trailer in November of '98, wow. It'd been almost two years since the SE's were in theaters, and I think somewhere in the back of my head I saw the dewbacks and rontos, the updated lucasfilm logo and thought "yup, the SE's are gonna be considered the official versions now, to match up with all the cgi of this new prequel trilogy."

I still never, ever in a million years would've expected something as lame as the GOUT from a company like Lucasfilm. That was what finally made me wish the SE's had never happened and that we'd gotten a less effects-intensive trilogy of prequels (made in as close a way as possible to the OOT, which we'd now just be calling the OT) from three new directors, with Lucas simply writing the story as he did on Empire.

But, that ship has sailed.

There are things about the SE's and the prequels that I like, and zombie's "Secret History of Star Wars" finally allowed me to take a step back and see these movies for what they are.

I'd actually love it if Lucasfilm released the theatrical cuts of all six movies. I think Revenge of the Sith is the only one to make it to blu-ray in its original form (even the dvd had that wipe switched with a cut). TPM was substantially altered from the dvd onward, as was AOTC.

Something I've been vocal about on this site is the small alterations that slip under the radar when a movie gets "restored." The Wizard of Oz's most recent restoration is not a true one. Wires were digitally erased in at least one shot, with the justification that "audiences in 1939 would've never seen the wires since they weren't looking at a direct scan of the negative like we are today."

The thing is, I still hate that justification. Just because audiences didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. There was a restoration/remastering done only four years earlier for a special dvd edition which left the wires in. That one was finished at 1080p, so hopefully there's an hd broadcast of it floating around the internet somewhere.

All of this is to say, alterations are a slippery slope IMO. James Cameron went crazy "correcting" Titanic for its most recent release, erasing things that would've been clearly visible to audiences in '97/'98, and that's an erasure of film history. But the prevailing attitude these days is that the director, if given the power, gets to make that call.

The work done by Charlie de Lauzirika and Warner Bros for Blade Runner's 25th anniversary remains the standard by which all archival releases should be judged. I've long said of a hypothetical ultimate release of the Star Wars films that, at the very least, all theatrically-released versions should be included. This would mean the original, the '97 and the inevitable 3D I'm sure they'll force us to buy in order to get the original and the '97 ;)

For the prequels, this would obviously mean the theatrical cut of TPM and either of the theatrical cuts of AotC (neither of which are the version on the dvd, which extended the scene where Anakin confesses to Padme about the Tusken slaughter). Also, give us the Imax cut of AotC!

So, yeah, this post got away from me.

I'll just wrap up by saying that I've yet to see The Phantom Edit, even after hearing about it for all these years.

I'll have to rectify that sometime soon.

Well, that's finally a piece of news on some main member of the crew aside from who's writing/producing/directing.

It's worth noting that Nilo Rodis did the costumes for RotJ several years before doing the costumes for Star Trek 5. I remember seeing those movies when I was growing up and noticing how similar Luke and Kirk's shirts looked in those movies and thinking it was just coincidence or "my imagination."

The biggest question to me remains who will shoot it and how it will be shot.

Abrams has used Dan Mindel on three of his four movies. I'm guessing he would've used him on Super 8 if Dan hadn't been busy shooting John Carter. That one was shot by Zack Snyder's longtime DP Larry Fong (who, it's worth noting, did not shoot Man of Steel).

Abrams has shot all four of his movies - at least primarily - in true cinemascope, just as the OT and TPM were shot. Into Darkness was partially shot in IMAX (the 3D is a post-conversion job, although the cg effects were rendered natively in stereo). I'm sure Abrams will at the very least push for the movie to be shot in true cinemascope. This is of course assuming film stock will still be available to use by the time this starts rolling next year. Not that shooting in digital would be a problem. Certain shots in STID were captured with Red Epic and Arri Alexa cameras. Digital movie camera sensors are finally getting to the point of being able to mimic how 4-perf vertical pulldown 35mm behaves. For example, Arri finally made an Alexa with a full-height sensor for shooting with anamorphic lenses.

The start date for principal photography has been one of my big questions. If they want to go back to the old way of doing things, they won't even start shooting until next year. Most movies, whether big or small, don't tend to start shooting much more than a year in advance. Star Trek Into Darkness started shooting way back in February of last year, for what it's worth. That's still less lead time than the prequels.

SilverWook said:

Why 45 years though? It's only been thirty since ROTJ came out. Let's not make our heroes older than they are already! ;)

45 years since the original 1977 film, which is where the books are up to now. Sorry, should've specified. It will have been 38 years since principal photography on Star Wars when Episode VII starts shooting next year. They'd only be bumping things up a few more years.

Also, keep in mind that while there are three years between A New Hope and Empire, Jedi only takes place another year later. They didn't spend three years flying around the galaxy like Mort/Lando said they should in the Family Guy parody of Empire.

Anyway, I don't see Lucasfilm rebooting the post-Jedi EU. It would be much cleaner and more natural to just set the original story of Episode VII whenever they're at now in the books.

If not fake, definite proof that Lucas & Co. were planning on Episode VII before the Disney buy and that they won't just be not-using the existing EU for the ST, but will be downright contradicting/overwriting it.

Which has been my concern all along. I have zero problem with them basically "ignoring" the EU and just picking up 45 years or so after the original. Downright rebooting it would be a weird move though, even considering all the continuity shenanigans Lucasfilm pulled with TCW.

Jaitea said:

I'm prepared to break tradition, hopefully the new movie will exceed our expectations.

The established Fox Fanfare & Star Wars crawl didn't stop the Prequels from being a complete waste of time and money

J

I guess there's just a part of me that feels like you need that fanfare to be the very first thing you hear in a Star Wars movie with "Episode" and a roman numeral in the title.

Reading that story only served to once again remind me how weird the fox fanfare's absence will feel.

double post

SilverWook said:

IIRC, Ridley Scott used the same trick to make the landing leg of the Nostromo in Alien look even bigger.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about that!

As for photographic miniatures, well, it seems like that's going away. Star Trek didn't use them at all in the traditional sense. The ships were completely digital as far as I know. It shows how far we've come just over the last ten years when we go from actual big-atures on LOTR to digital big-atures on The Hobbit.

They built a model silo for a forced perspective shot in a scene of kid Kirk and his brother which was cut from the finished film. Also, the shot of Kirk running into the cave on the snow planet was a small child running through a small (and therefore less expensive) set. In the finished sequence, our eyes see it as an adult running through a full-sized set. As much as Abrams loves his "how did they do that?" vfx shots, he also loves using simple tricks the audience doesn't even know are tricks.

Hey, it's me. said:

The lived in look back. Especially Coruscant. The Empire being defeated has created a power vacuum (as with all dictatorships) different splinter cells all vying for power. Start VII with a street battle on Coruscant, big and epic, between two of the fractions. Who's fighting? Why are they fighting?! This is exciting!! Not everyone's still sitting around with their feet up after Endor reminiscing about the battle.

This is probably the first good reason for going back to Coruscant that I've read so far. It would certainly recall the Taungs and the Battalions of Zhell fighting for control of the planet "a thousand generations" ago.

Personally, I want the sequel trilogy to just stay away from Coruscant completely ala the OOT. The prequels spent way too much time there, especially the latter two. There's an entire galaxy to explore. I'd want each of the three sequels to take an Empire Strikes Back approach and show us worlds we've never seen before.

So anyway, yeah, J.J. Abrams is directing this thing, you guys!!!

1. Hamill looks like Christopher Lambert in that poster.

2. Technically it should say Gordon-Levitt.

3. I would pay good money to see a Star Wars flick with Milla Jovovich in that getup.

Until I'm actually watching the first teaser trailer, I'm taking every rumor I read/hear as just that: a rumor. I won't even bother taking it seriously unless aintitcool, chud and badassdigest are all reporting it, not a smalltime operation like cosmicbooknews who offer nothing aside from "we've got good reason to believe our source because he was right about other stuff." Even when there is a widely reported rumor, I won't read it if it's prefaced by "spoiler, spoiler, spoiler."

I'm gonna be highly suspicious of any rumors regarding ep7 from here on out. I would think GL, Iger and now especially Abrams want the script under lock and key. Either someone at Disney and/or Lucasfilm is intentionally leaking false info to throw everyone off or someone out there in internet land is simply making stuff up.

Also, I'm not gonna lie. Part of me just really doesn't want to believe rumors like this are true. At the very least, I would want them to set this 40 years after RotJ and have it be about a completely new group of characters, with old Luke in the Ben Kenobi role. In other words, it should be in the spirit of the original 1977 film. Also, this is a perfect way for them to avoid the problems of reconciling ep7 with the post-RotJ EU. Instead of "pretending it never happened" they would simply be "ignoring it."

When this thing starts shooting next year, it will have been 38 years since the original film was shot. Having it take place 45 years later doesn't seem so complicated to me.

Well, it is being directed by a guy who's made two Star Trek movies.

They're setting our expectations pretty damn high by hiring an oscar-winning writer.

I'm with Darth Ender on this: I hope the new movies do their own thing. To me that means setting this 40-45 years after RotJ (which is roughly where they're up to now in the books) and going in a completely new direction from there. I kinda hope the EU stuff that's happened in that time doesn't even get referenced. Just because they'd be "ignoring" it doesn't mean they'd be "pretending it never happened."

So, in reply to the OP, assuming LFL isn't rebooting the post-Jedi EU I have no lingering questions.

The actors never stepped outside a soundstage for ROTS, so far as I know. Even if they did shoot outside, it was still probably on a backlot.

McCallum bragged about how they went to more separate locations around the world for RotS than on any previous Star Wars movie, but these were entirely for purposes of getting live-action effects plates. For example, a crew was sent to Sicily when word got out that Mt. Etna was erupting. They got some footage (from a distance, of course) and used it to help create Mustafar. Some shots from Switzerland were used to realize Alderaan while remote locales in China and Thailand formed the basis for Kashyyyk. The Tunisia plates for the Lars Homestead were filmed while they were there for AotC. I'm not sure if they went back to Italy and/or Spain for that short scene on Naboo.

The locations crews for the various shoots are all listed in the end credits of RotS.

I hope Fox distributes 7, 8 and 9 theatrically so we can hear that fanfare at the beginning of every Star Wars movie with "Episode" in the title.

Don't say it'll never happen!

Disney's not gonna want to wait forever (literally) to get full rights to Episode 4, are they?????

Speaking of people I'm betting would love to be in Ep7.....

skyjedi, is that an actual verified quote from Pegg in your sig? I only just noticed it, so I apologize if you've had it for a while. I'm guessing it's from a year and a half ago, when the blu-rays hit? I would think Pegg would love to be in Ep7, especially now that his friend JJ is directing. Granted, it might be a little jarring having an actor from ST cross over so blatantly into SW.

Well, it's not unlike what happened with Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan didn't know Batman all that well, but it didn't matter since he had David Goyer helping him come up with the story and write the screenplay.

The Goyer to Abrams' Nolan on Star Trek (and the sequel) is Roberto Orci.

All Hollywood ultimately cares about is that the director is competant and can handle a big-budget movie, especially when we're talking $150 million or more. Occasionally, the director also happens to be a huge fan of the property in question. Zack Snyder made Warner Brothers a lot of money with 300 and used it as his chance to finally get their long-in-development-hell Watchmen movie greenlit. Even then, Warner chose to co-finance the movie with Paramount, knowing it would be twice the budget of 300 and once again R-rated.

Scott Pilgrim is a good example of a low-budget adaptation with a geeky director that Hollywood was willing to make since it wasn't a huge financial risk. Compare that to something like Land of the Lost, from the previous summer (and also from Universal), also with a geeky director but with a bigger budget because of the box office potential Will Ferrell's name carries.

This is why I think Joss Whedon never would've gotten the job for Avengers if it'd been a Hollywood studio calling the shots and not Marvel. Handing a $220 million summer tentpole to a guy whose only movie cost nowhere near as much and couldn't even make that back at the box office??? Well, I think the studios will be a little more willing to take a chance like that after seeing how it worked out for Disney.

The road towards my becoming a purist probably started the night of ROTS' midnight release. I'd heard there were laserdisc-to-dvd preservations fans had made, but during that long wait in the theater for the clock to strike 12 I noticed someone in the rows ahead watching the original version of empire on their laptop. I knew it was the original when it wiped to that shot of cloud city and a cloud car flew past the camera with no cgi gas refinery to be seen. It'd been so long since I'd seen the original version of the trilogy that I'd completely forgotten how that shot originally looked!

That Fall I got a nice fast computer. I guess it was just pure curiosity that eventually led me to seek out these "fan preservations" of the OOT. I must've looked it up on google or something. It led me to these forums, which I must've already heard about anyway by that point. I contacted Rikter Blacksvn, did some research, and got the cowclops v2 transfers off of myspleen. I specifically chose that transfer because it was anamorphic. Even though it made no difference since it was a letterbox 4:3 source, I still wanted the disc itself like that just to "future proof" it.

It was really cool to finally watch the original versions in their OAR, and in higher resolution than vhs. The closest I'd ever come to that was back in the early-to-mid 90's when I think I caught some of Empire letterboxed on scifi channel.

Also, the pcm soundtrack was nice!

As timing would have it, this was circa March of '06. It probably took a couple weeks for me to torrent all three movies over my school's network. Then one night in early May I visited thedigitalbits.com and saw that, completely out of the blue, Lucasfilm had set the OOT for dvd release in September. Yeah, did a double-take arright. The announcement noted dolby 2.0 audio and Jim Ward's statement said "this will be state of the art, 1993." Ah, whatever that meant, surely they were doing an anamorphic transfer from an IP or something, right?

Right??!?

Then a week later we all found out they meant 1993 in just about every sense of the word, short of the physical media being a dvd. What a letdown.

Couldn't believe how many people on the tfn forums jumped to defend Lucasfilm's actions. "They give you what you wanted and this is how you respond? You people will never be happy, etc." To think, just days earlier I'd been telling everyone on those forums that surely we were getting a new dvd transfer from the IP, the same IP used for the '93 laserdisc transfers. So, when LFL elaborated and I saw the total lack of outrage among fans, I jumped ship from tfn after four years.

Only the most succesful movie in history could get away with a new dvd release of a laserdisc transfer in an age of hddvd and blu-ray.

I finally registered here in October of '06 after lurking for several months. I noticed that a couple familiar names from the tfn boards, CO and zombie, were posting here too. What some saw as a community of "haters" I actually found to be a place where the actual history of the Star Wars films, their making and even their storytelling influences were respected. Above all, it was a place where they were looked at as films, not simply as Star Wars films.

This is probably when I became a purist. Watching those original effects shots from the death star attack in the '77 film, it became clear to me that the movies should've remained unchanged. 1997 was an opportunity for people to view a piece of film history as it was meant to be seen. Instead, it became an excuse for the addition of cgi. In time, my opinion extended to the prequels as well. It would have been better for the original '77 film to remain the last movie ever officially directed by George Lucas. Power corrupts, and absolute power, well, you know the rest. How often are a trilogy of big-budget films written, directed and executive produced all by one man????

The OOT really is culturally important and should absolutely be preserved, but I wish every movie's original version was available to legally purchase and publicly view. At least the SE is blatantly a different version that all but the most ignorant know is a revision. Meanwhile, other movies are getting wires and reflections erased and getting passed off as the original version.