Since we’re only just now hearing about this with very little notice, I’m not getting my hopes up that it’s anything more than maybe a remastered blu-ray from the newer 4k transfer. The GOUT was also a September release and we knew about it four whole months ahead of time, so I think we would’ve heard something long ago if this was anything significant.
Will this be the first time I-VI have been reissued since the steelbooks in 2015?
If this really is just regular 1080p blu-ray again and there’s no day-and-date UHD planned, I suppose it’s possible they might at the very least finally retire the 2004 master and use the newer 4k master for this release.
I suppose it’s also possible they could include the original versions for that price point, but that could simply be the addition of a digital copy this time around or some fancy packaging (or both).
I think it was cropped bc they figured the TBS version would be fine and they didnt double check.
Exactly.
Turner (TNT, TBS, TCM et al) currently has the tv broadcast rights to I-VI. If Disney had wanted to, they could have provided tcm with a better master, at the very least one that was 2.35:1 throughout the movie, but they didn’t bother.
Maybe Disney wants Turner to be stuck with an inferior copy of the movie (a cropped-to-1.78:1 transfer of the 2011 master) so they can show off their own new 4k master on Disney+.
… on a side note, right after Star Wars they showed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The print they used seemed to be unique to TCM. It wasn’t blue like the original blu-ray. And it wasn’t bland/dark like the later Director’s Cut blu-ray. It was quite nicely color balanced (leaning more to a warm earthy amber color) … they must’ve had that archived from way back somewhere. But at least CNN used some original Star Wars clips for their broadcast, which was super cool.
I was also noticing this as I watched the first few minutes the other night. I happened to find a screenshot comparison and there was in fact another hdtv broadcast that predates the 2009 blu-ray, with a red push and warm earthy colors, so that must’ve been what they were showing.
Worth repeating here I suppose
https://twitter.com/ctabesh/status/1156747612935954438
It’s also worth re-emphasizing that TCM was using the exact same tv broadcast master as their sibling networks TNT and TBS (they altered it further for their own purposes with commercial breaks and whatnot, but otherwise it’s the 2011 master cropped to 16:9 except for the opening and closing shots/credits, just like they show it).
Let’s be honest, though. They were never going to debut a restoration of the unaltered ‘77 Star Wars in the form of a tv broadcast anyone could just dvr.
Apparently they’ve promised 4k HDR content “where applicable.”
I wonder if this will be the long-awaited debut of the OT’s 4k master we’ve been hearing about for five years now.
My only question is whether or not the unaltered cuts will surface. Anything else is neither here nor there for me.
The “4-discs per film for the UHD, 3-discs for the blu-ray” rumor is the only shred of hope regarding an official unaltered remaster, which doesn’t even guarantee that the unaltered version would be an actual UHD disc in the UHD edition. It might turn out that the 4-disc UHD is simply the same regular blu-rays from the 3-disc edition plus the most recent version on UHD as the 4th disc.
It would only make sense for TFA and RO to hit UHD this year, not only so that fans who’ve upgraded their hardware can at least marathon the first two installments of the ST in the highest quality possible ahead of IX’s theatrical release, but also because Disney’s had all the time in the world to do HDR passes and get them ready for UHD without the legal barriers that kept them from releasing I-VI on physical media until just this year.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Lucasfilm hasn’t been working on I-VI on their own, regardless of who the distributor was. In fact, we know they have been. It’s the whole reason this thread was started in the first place.
Yeah, although I did appreciate the TCM host mentioning in her intro how Universal, United Artists and Disney all passed on the script and that “their lack of faith was disturbing.”
It’s basically the exact same broadcast master TNT/TBS has been using (the 2011 version with everything after the opening shot cropped to 16:9).
Has that actually been done before???
I don’t know if an outlet as big-name as CNN has ever used unaltered footage before, Harmy or otherwise.
The Story of Film: An Odyssey used unaltered footage, which would’ve been GOUT-sourced since it was finished in 2011.
The timing of this is rather interesting, coming so soon after the Academy 70mm screening and, as mentioned above, with ANH airing on TCM tonight. It’s worth noting that CNN and TCM are, if I’m not mistaken, both part of the Turner media empire that currently has the broadcast rights to all the Star Wars movies.
I’m not exactly expecting TCM to just throw on the Harmy version, nor am I getting my hopes up that this will be some surprise debut of an officially restored ‘77 Star Wars (but wouldn’t that be nice). TCM does like to show movies uncut and in their original ratio, though. So it will probably be the blu-ray master “as is” without any edits or commercial breaks.
I couldn’t help but notice that the framing of the CNN and Despecialized shots don’t perfectly match. Assuming they are in fact from the same source, I guess CNN simply pushed in on the framing a little bit?
I saw it last night and posted about it in the 4k thread Haarspalter linked to, and I actually edited my post to add some additional info just now before I noticed you started a thread about it.
Btw, why can we only see the date but not the time that the first post of a thread went up?
CNN is airing a 6-part docuseries called The Movies. They’re going in a weird order, starting in the 80’s and taking us up to today before jumping back to the 70’s (the one that aired earlier tonight) and then covering the 60’s and “the golden age” for the final two.
When they showed the very last shots up to and including the Death Star blowing up, it was blatantly the original version.
I know every time something like this happens we dismiss it and say “it doesn’t mean anything,” but at a glance the footage at least looked like full hd quality to my eyes and not like an upscale of the GOUT.
The irony is that the very last shot of the episode on The 80’s was the DS2 blowing up and it was blatantly from the SE.
Edited to add:
Someone posted about this on another forum I frequent, and they pointed out that the Han/Greedo “Yes, I bet you have” clip was also the unaltered version.
I suppose it’s possible cnn simply used the Harmy version, but like I said, it didn’t look like upscaled GOUT footage to me.
If anyone wants to look it up for themselves on their computer or cable box, it should be right after the very last commercial break towards the end.
Works for me, it’ll probably lead right up to the release of TROS.
If they put up the first two or three episodes all at once, like The Handmaid’s Tale has been doing each season, they would probably get through the whole season in time for TRoS’ release in theaters if the streaming service launched at the very beginning of November.
Hey, if they’re only charging six bucks a month then we can’t reasonably expect the money-making behemoth known as Disney to just put the whole first season up all at once. Didn’t I read somewhere that they budgeted the first season at a hundred million?
I hope the story doesn’t involve time travel, but that the Whills factor into it in some way, even if it’s just at the very end with Artoo giving them the “journal” of everything that happened throughout the saga.
Didn’t Mark Hamill say in an interview back in the early 80’s that George had told him the ending of IX (or at least IX as it existed in George’s head at the time before he basically folded everything into RotJ) and that Mark thought it was “really weird?”
Whether that was the Whills, or the ending I’ve heard BSG ripped off (finding Earth “a long time ago”), or this microbiotic world George mentioned last year, who knows?
At the very least, Filoni introduced Novikov self-consistency principle-style time travel. Basically, it is time travel, but they can’t really alter the past. What happened, happened. The Prisoner of Azkaban is a really good example of this.
A part of me likes to think Filoni introduced time travel this way to Star Wars so “what happened, happened” are the canon rules and no future writers can write canon stories that change the past! Pretty clever I think.
Has the nu-Canon said anything about Anakin’s birth, etc?
Going by the “what happened, happened” rules of time travel, The saga’s grand finale could, if it wanted to, turn the whole I-IX story into a causality loop, hence the title The Rise of Skywalker.
I mean, there’s also the matter of George saying rather definitively, circa RotS’ release, that I-VI is all there is, only to completely walk that back when he realized doing a sequel trilogy was the best way to keep the franchise going after the live action tv series never got off the ground.
So I don’t really know who’s to blame.
I think they literally mean in-camera. Favreau said there’s a video wall that extends the background of the set by displaying it in parallax. So as the camera moves around the set the game engine perfectly changes perspective to complete the illusion.
It’s basically like that scene in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, just with camera-tracking instead of eye-tracking.
The bigger discussion that kinda does warrant its own thread is just how much control George does or doesn’t have over this sort of thing now. Isn’t it a little suspicious that for all those years when he still owned LFL he never allowed screenings of the OOT and now that he doesn’t anymore he “granted his permission?”
Like I said in the other thread, it was probably just a formality by the Academy considering their long history with George going all the way back to Graffiti. Notice how Disney hasn’t been mentioned at all in regards to this news?
All of this assumes, btw, that John Dykstra wasn’t just joking when he said they had to get George’s permission. I wonder if anyone managed to capture video/audio of him saying that.
Really it just makes an official restoration from Disney all the more conspicuous in its absence.
Lucasfilm has access to even better materials closer in the photochemical chain to the camera negative than the Academy’s 70mm blow-up, although the fact it’s in such good condition means it should probably be preserved if only because it could be the best remaining record of all the picture and sound differences in that version of the movie for all we know. That is of course unless this print is different still from the ‘77 blow-ups and conforms closer to the 35mm prints in terms of content.
Another IB Tech print perhaps?
So when I first heard about this showing at the Academy, I scoffed and said there was no way they were getting the original, because no one ever got the original. At the time I didn’t know about the 70mm factor. I watched the live stream video of the panel and enjoyed it. But then…then I heard that the print shown not only WAS the original edition, but it was also in 70mm! And I completely missed out on the opportunity.
Some day, universe. Some day.
–SKot
This reminds me all too much of that time I noticed a new thread on these very forums with a title having something to do with a screening in Baltimore … and didn’t even bother clicking on it since I didn’t want to get my hopes up and have them dashed for the umpteenth time.
Naturally, that was the now infamous IB Tech screening at the Senator Theater on its last day under those owners. I couldn’t believe I’d inadvertently passed up such an occasion. Baltimore was barely an hour away from me, and I totally would’ve made the trip had I known in advance.