^eeeeh, I dunno. I guess if they’d done it before his characterization went completely off the rails it could have been cool, but the original Emperor hologram has always been one of my absolute favorite parts of the saga. Continuity be damned, it’s so pleasingly spooky.
yeah the original emperor there was pretty cool
fandom’s vision is not lazy, it’s stuck in time, and that’s worse.
some truth to that
some went nuts because the prequels dared to show crowded cities
what? what? all this nonsense, cars, taxis, ships all over by the dozens? just a bunch of fake show off garbage!
but really, come on… the entire galaxy is supposed to be nothing be barren wastes just because that is all we ever got to see in 4-6???
I guess Times Square in NYC is fake? It’s just a bunch of phony, over-crowded, CGI show off nonsense???
Quicker to list the changes I don’t like. They’re all in ESB.
The dialogue change from “Bring my shuttle” to “Alert my start destroyer to prepare for my arrival, and have my smoking jacket and slippers ready. Oh, and put the kettle on for I should like a cup of hot chocolate, too.” And the butchering of the subsequent chase scene. All unecessary and I’d love to see them removed.
Other than that, I’m fine with everything.
ugh I hated that whole change, they cut the single most fiercely deliver line by Vader in the entire series! and totally cut up the pacing and music
i’d call that the single worst change
I don’t like Greedo shooting first or both shooting at the same time. Makes no sense! I mean Han is jsut supposed to sit there and let Greedo kill him? Greedo is supposed to miss from 2’ away?
I sort of miss the original x-wings in the Death Star battle.
The expolding DS didn’t really need the ring added.
I’m actually fine with Hayden ghost though.
Wasn’t crazy about the new Jabba palace song.
I don’t mind the somewhat busier Mos Eisley. It was always supposed to busy and bustling from day 1, Lucas just ran out of money. All the talk that Star Wars has to be half empty, nothing going on locations doesn’t really make any sense.
I’m fine with WOlfman gone from cantina.
The new windows and such for Cloud City are fine.
I don’t mind the Jabba seen in ANH, although it’s not really needed. Perhaps it does make ROTJ less suspenseful for first time viewers.
I love that they sort of brought back the close the blast doors stuff, but they still don’t have it like it originally was, which was best of all.
The new celebrations at the end of ROTJ are cool.
Bantha herds were a nice addition
etc.
Plenty of stuff was fine. But I do wish they had always given us the original cut as well. Sometimes you jsut want to get the full nostalgic pull of the original version. Sometimes you want to see the new stuff. Let us see it both ways whenver we chose.
None of them really. A couple of Death Star battle shots from Ep. IV but the quality of those shots were so inconsistent with the original footage that it was more annoying to watch than anything else. Also scenes in Ep. IV that SHOULD’VE been changed weren’t, e.g., Ties chasing Rebs in the trenches. One moment Ties but no Rebs, next moment Ties fire and Rebs just ahead explode to kingdom come. I also hate the remastered look of the SEs. They look nothing like the films from their runs during the late 70s - early 80s. The contrast levels are nice but overall it’s just so damn revisionist.
When R2D2 goes through the Jawa canyon it looks really dark in recent releases. In early home releases that looked almost like day time. I forget, when did the home releases change that? If it was with the SE, then the SE actually get that MUCH, MUCH more accurate. Back in the theatrical release, it did look really dark when he went through that canyon and did not look vritually like day time as it had on TV and so many home releases for years.
Perhaps they already fixed that before the SE though, maybe for some earlier THX release or something?
I really dislike the added Jabba scene in the SE, and not only for the obvious and poorly executed CGI either.
In my opinion Han would have managed to get off Tatooine WAY before Jabba even got the chance to catch up with him.
In fact, I don’t think Han would be careless enough to leave any trails to allow Jabba to discover where the Falcon was docked.
Han was better than that!Just another thing to mess up Han’s character, and is right up there with the ‘Greedo shoots’ scene for me!
Well, the problem is the scene was originally made back when the rest of Star Wars was originally made. You make it sound it’s something Lucas thought up years later. He just didn’t have time to add in an effect to replace the stand in actor back in the 70s so the scene got cut.
But going back further, when that scene was written and filmed, Vader and Anakin probably weren’t the same person at all. Trying to think like Lucas makes my head hurt.
I don’t know. I sort of feel like he already had a feeling they might be one and the same.
Alec Guiness said that he insisted Lucas fill him in on background details so he could act his character better and I think he said he was told secret stuff.
Now note the whole meeting between Luke and Obi-wan. When Obi says Darth Vader killed his father, that whole bit, look at how Alec Guiness acts that, his eyes go all shifty, he is clearly stretching the truth (at best). He didn’t deliver the line and act it out as if that was simple flat fact.
I liked “Close the blast doors,” but that wasn’t really an SE change. It was used on, I think the 70 mm and mono (or one or the other) original audio tracks, but it wasn’t used in a <span class=“Italics”>home</span> release until the SEs.
yeah that was awesome!
had been missing that ever since the original theatrical releases
that said, NONE of the home releases still show that scene the way it was originally shown, they all seem to cut some part of the original dialogue out and revoice other parts and alter the chase sequence in one way or another
Didn’t “Then I’ll see you in HELLL!!!” get changed to “Then I’ll see you in hell.” at some point? I think starting with or maybe some time later for home releases? Like the “hell” part seemed go from a scream to somewhat muted sounding?
I seem to vaguely recall there having been something a little different with the Wampa stuff between seeing 70mm ESB a day or two after opening day and then a 35mm showing a bit later on. I probably have old notes on some old computer somewhere back before all the various versions of everything and longer time made it all more muddled.
One other thing that makes it all the trickier, is I believe, at least for Star Wars (ANH) but perhaps for ESB as well, that the very initial batch of 70mm prints for the opening couple weeks at a few theaters had a slightly different edit than all the later 70mm prints they made and I don’t believe anyone has ever turned up a recording from the very initial cut 70mm SW shown at a very few theaters for a short time. I heard they made up a whole new batch of 70mm a few weeks in as they were getting the 35mm ready. (FWIW, many of the claims for the missed toss and extended scene where the door took longer to prop up seem to be from people who saw SW within the first week at a few specific locations only.)
(on another side note, has there ever been any home release of Star Wars (ANH) that has the original “close the blast doors, close the blast doors, open the blast doors, open the blast doors” scene in it? For a while that was all but erased and then it did get added in SE but not in the form it was originally although a bit closer in certain ways.)
I think that whole Red Letter Media nonsense about TPM is what really got it going. Before then you could go to SW forums and reasonably talk about TPM or the prequels, after… forget it. And all you see is people parroting RLM review quips and quotes, or if you say you like a prequel, they respond by saying, nope, you are wrong and then give a link to one of the RLM videos. (But those RLM videos, I mean there is plenty of stuff objectively incorrect in them, a bit ironic since he is laughing at what a stupid fool Lucas is. Although some of the farther post TPM RLM videos, I almost feel like maybe he is actually not even being so serious about anything he says but just mocking the RLM review lovers.)
(and yes, sure some hated TPM (and even many who loved it did still complain about some of the baby dialogue and scuh given to Gungan officials and he did get a bit more commercial in a few things, I wasn’t so crazy about some of that stuff myself, but in the end, the baby dialogue stuff is jsut a few minutes out of more than 120) and even AOTC and even even ROTS before any of that, but the numbers just seemed to explode after that video, again SW message boards went from somewhat reasonable to almsot total hate fests, couldn’t dare mention anything other than 4-6 after that video)
A lot of the stuff people bash about the prequels for being dumb, actually has decent reasoning behind it. Even the way Anakin and Padme were awkward in AOTC make sense, I mean he wasn’t some swashbuckling Han or worldly Lando, he was a monk! isolated at an early age and she became a leader at like 14 and then was off to the Senate. So hardly surprising they talk to each other in less smooth ways than Han or Lando. Also some of the wya they acted and talked was also modeled off very early US cinema romance. DOn’t forget the characters were in another galaxy, in anotehr time, not today.
“Once those are done, I will move onto AOTC, once I have the HDDs to store the scan on. It will be later this year, couldn’t put a timeframe on it at the moment.”
What is happening to the print reels once scanned later this year?
ah dang, I forgot, I got rid of my 35mm reel (the final one with the different marriage scene) for AOTC when I heard the blu-ray was coming out. arrrrr
now that was silly
I did keep Reel 6 from ROTS (a super quick peek at it again just now makes it appear to be in ultra good condition, basically fresh new with reel intro and countdown markers and taping), so it seems that is actually the only full reel I have (along with a few trailers (including AOTC from which pics above sourced), including a 1977 SW that has far less red shift than most, if still shifted).
Well, the AOTC Blu-ray colors are all fucked up and there’s a ton of DNR and other processing done to it. That’s why 95% of all fan edits and other fan projects for AOTC are done using the high-bitrate HDTV caps, which have the right color and, even after some processing to reduce compression artifacts, more detail than the Blu-ray.
I’d be more surprised if your scans resembled the Blu-ray at all.
interesting and kind of ridiculous as no way HDTV should be able to beat blu
so does the HDTV stuff look like my scans in terms of color and luminance curve?
Yep, absolutely.
It’s funny, being a member of this forum so long I kind of take it for granted that people are aware of how God awful the BD of AOTC is and how much better the HDTV broadcast was. Schorman made excellent preservations of all the pre-BD HDTV broadcasts for the first 6 films, and he’s coming out with updated versions of these releases very soon. I’d urge you to check out his work.
The BD of TPM is similarly God awful (DNR’d to hell and iffy colors), but the HDTV for TPM isn’t as clearly superior since it’s plagued by pretty rough sharpening/edge enhancement from a subpar 35mm scan and different color issues than the BD. Also burned-in generic-looking subtitles instead of the theatrical subtitles the AOTC HDTV had.
Thankfully, other than some a couple very minor alterations, ROTS’s Blu-Ray is pretty excellent, with accurate colors and no DNR, so unless you really want to restore the pre-BD Wookiee hut rooftops on Kashyyyk, the HDTV of that one is kind of redundant.
now that I think about it I have vague memories, I think, of thinking things looking sort of washed out when blu-rays came out for AOTC and parts of TPM (and rather smooth for TPM), compared to what I had recalled at the theaters. I know there is one scene in TPM with Amidala in Palp’s office, which had storng contrast and cool colors in some release and then looked very muted in other releases. Can’t recall at this point which releases I was referring to. Maybe theatrical vs. all home or maybe it was even say 35mm theatrical vs all others or digital theatrical vs all others.
It’s pretty bizarre how often studios muddle home releases. I mean, what, they sent some poor versions to theaters that needed to be fixed up later? That makes no sense. So if the ultimate theatrical presentation doesn’t need lots of DNR and so on, why on Earth do home releases suddenly ‘need’ DNR, new colors and other crap?
Ironically, I sometimes find bargain basement titles, so long as not too, too low ont he pecking order, end up with the best home releases, just big enough to get top quality scans, but not big enough titles that the studios bother spending money ‘fixing’ them and paying for photoshop monkeys to fiddle with things.
when the supposed Disney Insider supposedly working on a new 4k Star Wars UHD said that they were redoing some CGI to 4k for AOTC/ROTS but that the 2k shooting meant the live action could not be made to look any better than on the current blu… that would seem to be false, even just from my scans I can see that all of AOTC could have been done better on the blu even with CGI as is
Well, the AOTC Blu-ray colors are all fucked up and there’s a ton of DNR and other processing done to it. That’s why 95% of all fan edits and other fan projects for AOTC are done using the high-bitrate HDTV caps, which have the right color and, even after some processing to reduce compression artifacts, more detail than the Blu-ray.
I’d be more surprised if your scans resembled the Blu-ray at all.
interesting and kind of ridiculous as no way HDTV should be able to beat blu
so does the HDTV stuff look like my scans in terms of color and luminance curve?
the more I compare to my scans the more I can see they did various bits of DNR and digital noise smoothing and even hidden sharpening and so on with the filtering hitting areas of low contrast more
cool project
I saw this in 35mm as well as on two different digital projectors back in '99, including what might have been the first commercial digital projection of any film in the world.
Contrary to all the net rage, theaters were packed and people generally seemed pretty happy and were NOT all laughing, raging, etc. decent bit of clapping at the end at many showings.
And for AOTC, people were racing out of the earlier showings, smiling, giving thumbs up to people still on line, saying it was awesome, audiences erupted into cheers at the end. Again, contrary to all the hate you hear coming form the net crowd.
Probably still high from the movie they just saw. After a few days of reflection (and repeat viewings) the cracks start to appear, not long after, they’re ripping the film’s a new a-hole (deservedly so).
nah, more just like the sort of sneering hipster crowd took over forums and spread hate and then it became cool to hate everything
crowds were still boisterous and cheering weeks into the release
hate for ATOC didn’t happen big time for some years and all the net rage
when they came out ROTS got uber love, AOTC tons, TPM pretty decent love (but many did have quibbles with some of the baby talk given to some characters and some of the fart joke stuff and jar-jar reaction was mixed, some loved, some hated, some middle of the road; and there was the odd hater you’d meet in real life, especially among the age who had high school in the mid to late 90s and were all into being grungy/gangster rap bad ass posing and wanted Matrix, older and younger seemed to have less of the ones who hated it at the start)
after the internet distortion raging forum stuff happened now people say AOTC was always the least liked and TPM was far more liked (not remotely true) and that even ROTS was never all that well liked (note remotely true)
I have some bits of 35mm from The Little Mermaid with film code dated 1990. So maybe a trailer (or also bits of actual release as well?) from the UK? Anyway, it should be before the scanned and loaded it into computers to fix up for the 1997 re-release (unless they really used almost decade old film stock, which seems not too likely, unless they did that for trailers at times).
The colors seem pretty intense! The print also gets pretty dark for dark regions.
I have no xenon bulb now so all I could do was try to view with a daylight incandescent bulb (maybe around 6000k?) on a slide sorter tray, not sure that gives a perfect impression, but whatever for now, based on that:
colors don’t match anything on:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/0eb1209t913t4mx/The_Little_Mermaid.htm/file
or
http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/walt-disney-characters/forum/post/228686/title/walt-disney-comparisons-little-mermaid-walt-disney-classics-vhs-vs-laserdisc-vs-limited-issue-dvd-vs-platinum-edition-dvd-vs-diamond-edition-blu-ray-vs-signature-collection-blu-ray
however, they actually seem closer overall to the last three (2006 DVD, 2013 blu, 2019 blu) on the fanpop site above than to the first three (VHS, 1990 laser, 1999 limited DVD)
they like sort of like a mix of various bits of 2006 DVD, 2013 blu, 2019 blu and stuff simply not seen on anything on the sites above
Granted, it’s hard to yet really compare, since it’s hard to stare at calibrated HDTV and lit film at the same time (and it may not really have been lit quit the right way either), but for what I could do with that for now, my feeling is that:
NONE of the home versions look accurate to the 1989/1990 look (or to what I hope truly is the 1989/1990 look) theatrical release!
Granted, I don’t know how those VHS and laserdisc frames were captured, the capture process itself could potentially distort things itself, but as shown there, neither than VHS NOR Laserdisc look to have particularly accurate look compared to the actual film itself. And there is perhaps a reason NTSC was called Never The Same Color Twice (then again, I think that said those were from a Danish release, which probably means PAL, but whatever the colors still seem nothing like the film at all).
It’s also tricky since the colors do change from scene to scene as they lit it differently and I don’t necessarily have the scenes to match the ones on the websites above, but I do have a couple that are the same and a few close.
Anyway, the bottom frames, the newest blu-ray 2019, actually do seem in some ways actually maybe heading towards the most accurate overall, but not entirely. Sort of like some mix of the bottom three frames (2006 Platinum DVD, 2013 Diamond blu-ray , 2019 Signature blu-ray) plus that stuff that simply looks like none of them would be most accurate.
That 2013 release actually seems to more often get her sea shells closer to the correct color I think, the 2019 often makes them a bit too dark and a bit too saturated, although in a few scenes, the 2019 is more accurate. Sometimes the 2019 maybe makes her skin a touch too saturated and a trace heading towards a wrong shade. OTOH, the 2019 generally seems to make her tail more vibrant and rich than most of the other versions, which is more accurate, if sometimes STILL not intense and vibrant enough (these 35mm bits REALLY pop with the color saturation)! The 2013 sometimes makes her tail not vibrant enough or certain greenish elements a trace too blue perhaps. The 2006 makes her tail vibrant too fairly often, but sometimes, maybe fairly often, gets maybe a bit too greenish.
None of them seem to get Flounder as deeply saturated as he seems to be in the film at times and many skew too pure yellowish (too much towards a lighter, bluer yellow).
In some scenes, Sebastian’s red is absolutely glowing in the film, none of the home release clips shown on that website come close to matching the brilliance and saturation of his red in some of the scenes as seen on film.
It may well be that some of the colors in this film are also simply beyond not just NTSC/PAL colors but beyond sRGB/REC709 color gamut. I’ll have to compare to the wide gamut UHD and see if that brings some of them to the film’s intensity.
In the jellyfish scene shown on the website (http://images6.fanpop.com/image/forum/228000/228686_1567725027549_full.png), none of them make that scene look correct.
The 2013 blu-ray has the background above her head too blue-skewed and her tail is not nearly vibrant enough and a touch too blue-skewed. Only the 2019 blu even begins to get her tail vibrant enough, but still falls short of the film. None of them come even wildly close to how popping beyond popping intense red Sebastian is in the film there. On the film the jellyfish looks vaguely like the top half of the 1999 DVD combined with the bottom half of the it on the 2019 blu, sort of.
Regarding where she pops up to meet the Albatross and is with Flounder, I don’t quite have it to where he holds the fork/dinglehopper [EDIT: do have that but not compared yet], but near that it seems like (assuming the rendering of the way they colored the scene didn’t change more than I think between the part I have and what is shown on the website):
VHS and Laserdisc have very poor colors compared to the real film all around.
Only the 2006 DVD and 2019 blu make her tail remotely intense enough, but I think the 2006 DVD probably make her tail likely a bit too green-skewed.
None make flounder quite the right shade, none saturated enough.
None quite seem to have the shade or saturation of her shells quite a match.
None seem to quite have the color of the sky right, maybe the bottom two are getting closer although only the 2006 has some of the extra subtle alternate shades apparent in the film, not that it gets the blue part right.
The VHS, Laserdisc, 1999 DVD all seem to get the sky rather wrong.
But take this with a grain of salt (other than for sure the colors can be really intensely saturated! I think some of those saying the digital home media releases hyped up the colors and the film was much duller are totally wrong). It also seems very likely the 2019 does make her shells often too saturated and dark.
The 2006 likely often goes too green to some degree or another and the 2013 likely a bit too blue, although this stuff is a little more dicey without a proper xenon projection.
On a side note, the original 35mm theatrical presentation may not have accurately matched the original cells. Film does do certain odd things color-wise at times. So as to what version is closest to the original cells, who knows (but it could hardly be the VHS or Laserdisc). Then again, who ever saw the movie as the original cells? So not sure that should really be the goal.
more from the blu-ray screencaps site that are similar to my frames for you to comapre with (more and more it looks like either these caps were taken from a computer that either didn’t do max decoding or had jpgs too compressed or that Lucasfilm actually did some filtering and various jiggering around with the image):
https://i1.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-352.jpg
https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-592.jpg
i guess my scans just have tons more contrast and a different luminance curve
now I’d need to go see what the 35mm frames look like, did my scanning do it properly or get the wrong curve
it will be interesting to see what this project turns out like, hopefully they have a scanner and everything with perfect calibration to the film type, interesting to see how it turns out if so and what it looks more like, the blu or my scans here
oh wow, sorry to here what happened to him
not so much toxic print chemicals then, but wow, yikes
i had a run in with that stuff in an HVAC at an apartment, not good stuff at all
well the blu-ray caps do look like my blu-ray
i guess my scans just have tons more contrast and a different luminance curve
now I’d need to go see what the 35mm frames look like, did my scanning do it properly or get the wrong curve
more from the blu-ray screencaps site that are similar to my frames for you to comapre with (more and more it looks like either these caps were taken from a computer that either didn’t do max decoding or had jpgs too compressed or that Lucasfilm actually did some filtering and various jiggering around with the image):
https://i1.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-352.jpg
https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-592.jpg
something about these screencaps feels odd, like dingy, let me look at my bluray before I post more comparisons to caps from that website
well these two are pretty close:
first cap from blu-ray from the site in the other:
https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-306.jpg
then my scan:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767259407_eec471a1c2_o.jpg
actually they look quite different and compared to those screencaps, at least, mine actually does sorta show some hints of more detail (surprising since direct digital out should retain more detail for sure), certainly more microcontrast, if maybe at times a hint less detail in other cases and you can clearly see the grain in mine now, download both and then flip back and forth in a pic viewer and the grain and other differences are quite noticeable
color and luminance ramping are different too, now that maybe could be they didn’t time the trailers as carefully? maybe I didn’t have a LUT for the scanner to exactly match the film stock? the blu-ray was colored differently? just natural alteration of printing to film unless you perfectly pre-adjust it and the 35mm release was always different (and less accurate to original intent)?
found four more, forget whether any of these came from flat or scope or a mix, I think scope, not sure anymore, vaguely seem to recall stretching some things out, think they were scanned at something like maybe 4k-5k or something and then downscaled to 1920x across
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767259407_eec471a1c2_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48766723163_d1966dc35f_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767059411_69da6cfe8d_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767059581_de00b56c05_o.jpg
well these two are pretty close:
first cap from blu-ray from the site above:
https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/200/2-starwars2/full/starwars2-movie-screencaps.com-306.jpg
then my scan:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767259407_eec471a1c2_o.jpg
actually they look quite different and compared to those screencaps, at least, mine actually does sorta show some hints of more detail (surprising since direct digital out should retain more detail for sure), certainly more microcontrast, if maybe at times a hint less detail in other cases and you can clearly see the grain in mine now, download both and then flip back and forth in a pic viewer and the grain and other differences are quite noticeable
color and luminance ramping are different too, now that maybe could be they didn’t time the trailers as carefully? maybe I didn’t have a LUT for the scanner to exactly match the film stock? the blu-ray was colored differently?
found four more, forget whether any of these came from flat or scope or a mix, I think scope, not sure anymore, vaguely seem to recall stretching some things out, think they were scanned at something like maybe 4k-5k or something and then downscaled to 1920x across
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767259407_eec471a1c2_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48766723163_d1966dc35f_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767059411_69da6cfe8d_o.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48767059581_de00b56c05_o.jpg
