Lord Starfish

I think it was around 2000, I saw part of The Phantom Menace on TV because they were doing a marathon of all the movies released up to that point. But since it was late at night and I was eight years old at the time, I didn’t get to see the whole film. In the months that followed I would catch bits and pieces of the various movies during reruns, but I don’t think I actually got to see any of them in full until a few years later.

Revenge of the Sith had a kickass opening.
While they lacked any sort of tension, the battles were fun to watch.
While they looked utterly fake, some of the worlds were cool.
“You want to go home and rethink your life.”
Ewan McGregor made for a perfectly believable younger Obi-Wan, even if the script gave him far too little to do.
The music.

Sounds interesting. I checked out some other fan edits but all the continuity errors induced from their editing just bothered me too much. (Such as several dwarves not coming along to the mountain for NO REASON AT ALL, the Kili subplot having been completely cut.) I’m curious though, do you have any plans for the part where Smaug breaks through the mountain wall? I saw one edit that recolored him from gold to red in order to make the scene a tad less jarring, but he was still clearly covered in SOMETHING, so I can’t say I was too happy with that… So are you doing anything clever with that part or is it just getting cut entirely? (I feel this would be a bad idea though, as cutting from him going “Then you can watch them suffer!” to him already in the air outside… I can’t imagine that NOT being jarring.)

Density said:
Maybe it’s just nostalgia talking, but something about the melody of “Yub Nub” triggers a warm happy response in me that seems totally fitting for the end of the series while the other one just leaves me totally cold.

I could say the same thing in reverse, with Victory Celebration being a lovely tune that fits the end of the series perfectly and Yub Nub doing absolutely nothing for me… so yeah, nostalgia could very well be a factor here, for both of us.
I mean, I’m pretty sure the first version of Jedi I saw was the SE, and for the longest time that was all I knew. So even though I KNOW Yub Nub was the original track, it just doesn’t feel right to me.

I will agree that the transition to the credits is awkward in the SE though. They really should have rerecorded the credits music too, and not just awkwardly cut back to the original recording once the credits started.

Sounds cool. But will they get a do-over once v3.0 for all three movies are out?

That said, I’m interested in getting a copy as well.

SkyderHouseMafia said:
*A locked down closing shot (Tradition broken by 7. 8 and 9 better have rotating closing shots too otherwise I’ll be pretty cut)

No, actually this “tradition” was broken almost immediately, with Empire closing on the camera pulling back from the Rebel fleet. And while we’re at it, that movie is also the only one to have any significant dialogue in its final scene (Phantom Menace had the Gungan king shout “Peace!” but that’s it). So really, TFA’s ending is still a lot more “standard Star Wars” than Empire’s ending was.

A few days before The Force Awakens premiered, I was listening to the Star Wars theme and said to my sister “Hey, what if The Force Awakens DOESN’T start off with this music and the traditional text crawl? …Okay that is never ever going to happen. Heads would roll if that happened.” Or something like that. So from where I’m standing, yes, all Star Wars episodes need to start off with the traditional crawl and music. It’s just too ingrained into the series at this point. Though I guess that suggestion earlier that they could mix it up so that the starry background isn’t actually a starry background could be a neat way to change it up without incurring too much Fanboy Rage.

I generally go with “A New Hope” or “Episode IV”, simply to make it avsolutely clear which one I’m talking about. To me just saying “Star Wars” makes things a bit confusing, what with that also being the name of the franchise and all.

Incidentally, from what I understand, in Norway the movie is still officially known as “Star Wars: Stjernekrigen”. The translated subtitle of “Et Nytt Håp” was only ever included on the 2004 DVD.

Jedi Rocks. Much as there are other changes in the movies that annoy me like crazy, nothing else comes close to being as embarrassingly out of place as that music number. So if I could only remove one single SE change, that would be it.

Anchorhead said:
No doubt it’s baffling when seen 38 years later, but at the time it wasn’t. Star Wars wasn’t the grand visually Rhyming entity created by the genius Ring master Lucas * genuflect *. It was just a single story in a single film. There was no Original Vision™, so this was the third story written to expand the Star Wars universe. I’ll research, but Star Wars may have still been playing in the theaters at the time. It was that big of a deal.

Okay sorry, let me rephrase; The fact that there is a Star Wars Christmas special isn’t surprising… but literally every single creative choice in it is so logic-defyingly awful that I can’t imagine how anyone could have read that script and said “Okay, I have no problem with the idea of having my name associated with this product”. Or that anyone could have written that script in the first place…

LuckyGungan2001 said:

Worst Star Wars thing? Um…I’d say The Holiday Special, but even that benefits from the original actors returning, and watching it feels like an accomplishment, a testimony to being a Star Wars fan.

Probably The Clone Wars movie.

I dunno, I saw the Clone Wars movie not too long ago, and while it was hardly impressive on any level, I didn’t find it THAT bad.
The Holiday Special though… I think Chris Stuckmann summed it up quite nicely; “People… MADE this. How. Does that. Happen?!”
There might be plenty of bad Star Wars stuff, but that special is the only one where its very existence baffles me.

Possessed said:

I still thought the BD sound was better than what I heard in theaters. The theater sound didn’t have enough bass, punch, or impact. The star wars theme in the opening crawl didn’t have near the impact I remember it having when I saw ROTS in the same theater. Although it is possible the speakers haven’t been maintained well.

Well, I for one thought the theme sounded kinda weak both in the theater, on the soundtrack CD and on the BD. I think it’s just a matter of the performance itself lacking intensity.
Though I agree with your point about dialogue volume. I tend to find in live action movies (animated films rarely have this issue) that I have to put the subtitles for the hard of hearing on, simply because the dialogue is often drowned out by the sound-effects. And for what it’s worth, I did not have this problem in TFA.

imperialscum said:
Now I remembered we already had exactly same debate year or so back and I got the very same suggestions. I would say PT has better CGI than all of those. Of course at this point it will be just my opinion against yours.

Having recently rewatched both The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars prequels, both on BD… The Lord of the Rings has held up considerably better. Heck, The Lord of the Rings actually had overall more convincing CGI and effects than The Hobbit, which other than the Smaug scenes never really impressed all that much.

Anyway, topic… By far the main thing that sticks out to me is Starkiller Base. I could accept all the other callbacks, references and homages to the original trilogy… but having the climax being a battle against a planet-destroying super-weapon for the third time… Yeah no. Thankfully we at least had a pretty decent lightsaber fight (that actually felt like a fight) going on at the same time. There’s also Rey being a little bit too awesome, though at least that didn’t make me immediately shake my head the second it came up the first time I saw the movie.

“What. Why? No seriously, why is this a thing?!”
I’m paraphrasing of course, but I do remember my initial reaction being just… baffled at the fact that they would even do this.

Well, I could just say “recomposited bluescreen shots” but I feel like that’s too easy. So if I had to stick to significant changes that actually change the movie and not just taking what was already there and making it look a bit cleaner…

I would say the 97 version of Jedi’s ending. Maybe it’s just because I grew up on the special editions, but I just think Victory Celebration is a much better piece of music to end it on. (Also if I were told to make one NEW change for whatever reason… I would re-redo the Anakin ghost to actually look like the Anakin we saw under the helmet. Like, seriously, why did the original have hair? Kid-me couldn’t even tell who it was supposed to be.)
Then if you wanted me to keep one per movie… for Empire I’d keep Ian McDiarmid. Sure, you could complain that the original Emperor in that scene looked more intimidating, or that 2005-Emperor still doesn’t look like 1983-Emperor, but I think I’d still like to keep the same actor who plays him in every other movie. Though I would very much like for the “Offspring of Anakin Skywalker”-line to be removed.
For ANH… Does the title “Episode IV: A New Hope” count? …Probably not. Well then the CGI spaceship shots then. I have no issue with those.