SilverWook

Shocking and sad news. Wasn't he going to be involved with the Top Gun sequel?

I don't know if it's an unpopular theory. I just can't recall any "official" sources saying it was done to explain away Hamill's surgery. I don't think Once Upon A Galaxy ever got into it. Maybe there's something in the newer making of ESB book about it?

It was an extra on "The War of The Stars". The actual episode is on the SNL season three DVD set, IIRC.

Carrie's one woman show "Wishful Drinking" is well worth checking out on DVD.

Where the heck did you get that 100 million 3D conversion cost from? I don't recall the exact figure, but it was nowhere near that much...

I don't trust slot loaders myself, I've seen CD's in car players get scuffed up too much.

It was a special achievement award...

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001964/awards

He was nominated for Legend in the best makeup category too. The line between makeup and SFX can be hazy sometimes.

It's real. Carrie wore an exaggerated version of the buns for her SNL appearance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQrL8_8ETfY

Russia is starting to scare me again in a 1980's cold war sort of way. Vlad is on the threshold of Bond supervillian status. Former KGB agents living in the UK do not just get randomly poisoned with rare radioactive elements.

How long before this Simpson's episode comes true?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC5KxexbDEM

So, voice acting and movie acting have nothing in common? Don't tell Orson Welles that! ;)

Any dissatisfaction with Hamill's performance can only be blamed on the director, whose job it is to elicit a good performance.

I'm surprised there isn't a "Kubrick is still alive" crowd.

After all, someone had to have scuttled that Eastman House screening of "The Shining" last October, with the legendary lost ending intact, and given their blessing to "Fear and Desire" getting a legit DVD/Blu Ray release this year. ;)

What's "right" changes every six months or so these days. (At this rate there will be a tiny BR player the size of thick DVD case before too long.) I still remember when Pioneer kept the same models in their product lines for 18 months or longer.

The refresh rate is only an issue if you like sports, play lots of videogames, or want all your movies with the "soap opera effect" turned on. (Most sets have it turned on out of the box.) Your eyeballs will tell you more than any spec sheet. Watching a scene from a movie you know like the back of your hand helps too.

Most properly mastered DVD's look good upscaled. Some older discs can look a bit ragged, especially if you sit close to the screen. It's also important a set have proper zoom modes for letterboxed material, especially if you still have a lot of old video formats lying around. My Panasonic players can zoom letterbox on the fly, not sure about the other brands.

Yeah, I remember the Marvel flashback issue.

Pity the only time we ever saw a Skyhopper in flight is in the Jedi SE. I think there was a level in one of the Rebel Assault games that let you pilot one.

A Skyhopper race in Episode One could have been more thrilling than doing Ben Hur with jumbo jet engines.

The Skyhopper race only existed in the radio drama though, didn't it?

I've been pretty happy with the two Panasonics I own. The upconversion is top notch, and startup/load times are tolerable. My LG BD/HD DVD combo, not so much, but it's a weird beast to begin with. I would have gotten rid of it, if not for the region hacks someone thoughtfully put out there. I had pretty rotten luck with LG electronics back when they were Goldstar in the 80's. Had I known about the name change sooner, I might not have bought one of their players.

I have read Toshiba's early BD models were made by someone else, as they were in a hurry to get in the market, and make people forget the whole HD DVD debacle. Don't know if that's still the case.

My first BD player was a Sony, aside from having a noisy fan, being almost as large as a Laserdisc player, and being really slow, it did have good upconversion.

Thankfully, the days of constant firmware updates seem to be behind us.

If you can get a 3D capable model at a good price, go for it even if you don't have a 3D set yet.

zombie84 said:

DominicCobb said:

Warbler said:

zombie84 said:. It strikes me as similar to the likely scenario of how the Beatles started playing on the Paul-is-Dead theory

I just did a quick internet search to find out what the Paul-is-Dead theory was.   I had never heard of it before.    So let me get this straight,  some people actually believe that Paul McCartney died in 1967 and a look-a-like has been posing as McCartney ever since?    So they believe that the guy performing at Olympics opening ceremony was not Paul McCartney, but a look-a-like?   My god, people are crazy. 

If I'm not mistaken, people don't really believe this anymore. I think it was just a side-effect of Beatlemania - some people looked for meaning in the songs, and a select few thought what they found meant that Paul was dead. I'm also pretty sure that it quickly became little more than a joke after the Beatles heard of it.

Yeah, this has faded away now, but even in the 1980s it was at least remembered seriously, even if not taken that way. In 1998, my grade 8 teacher gave us a Beatles lecture shortly before we moved on to high school. He did this with every graduating class, a bit of a tradition for him, which speaks to how much the Beatles impacted the baby boomers. And at the end of it, he would walk us through every single Paul-is-Dead easter egg that had been identified. I really doubt he believed any of it himself, but it made for an entertaining presentation, complete with "I buried Paul!" sound clips and such. I already knew about it all though. I was really into paranormal stuff and cryptozoology in the early 1990s--almost assuredly due to the X-Files being popular--and would read a lot of books relating to stuff like that at the local public library. A lot of them would go on about the Paul-is-Dead theory. So it was a pretty big part of baby boomer culture and Beatlemania history. I don't know who actually believed in it at any point, but I'm sure there were enough who at least for a time recognized it as a real possibility. With all the JFK murder theories, moon landing hoaxes, Area 51 and Rosewell, etc. circulating at the time, and with stuff like Watergate coming out and all these crazy stories about Vietnam (agent orange) and stuff like Manchurian Candidate, it wasn't so unbelieveable. Plus the Monkees were still around, so you could see how easy it was to get a Beatles substitute.

Even today there are still some people who believe Tupac is alive and there are many books proposing Kurt Cobain was murdered, just as people years ago refused to believe Elvis died, so this isn't so out of left field. I mean, a significant proportion of Americans even believe 9/11 was staged. Heck, Dave Mustain, of Megadeth, thinks Obama staged the Aurora DKR shootings to impose gun control. Dave Mustain! People will believe anything. My parents to this day still believe JFK was killed by the CIA, even though it's been shown multiple times how a single gunman inflicted the damage from that vantage point through re-creations (wasn't there a Myth Busters episode about this?). My university had an entire course about rational thinking, where the semester-long example was a total deconstruction of the JFK theory showing how implausible it really was when you consider how unlikely it was to go off without anyone blowing the whistle, aside from the physics simulations. Yet lots of Americans, and even many non-Americans, will hear nothing of it. Like I said, people will believe anything. The Paul-is-dead connections actually hold together better than most conspiracies!

I sat across from one of those "Tupac is alive" guys on a train once. Just mind boggling what people will believe in the cold light of reality. Dave Chappelle did a great skit on his show where Tupac's lyrics were a little too up to date.

Aren't there some people who think Jim Morrison faked his death?

I'm pretty sure Eddie Wilson faked his death, but have no real proof. ;)

zombie84 said:

This does make me remember the fantastic Hitler-in-Argentina scene from the Simpsons though.

"Eine minuten, eine minuten! Das phone ist das nuissance phone!"

The 70's comedy "Soap" did a similar gag involving a waiter in a South American cafe that looked a lot like Adolph, and had Dr. Strangelove's little problem with involuntary saluting. ;)

That theory is as old as Empire itself. Yet we see Luke in closeup before the Wampa attack.

Mark's female fans were still numerous enough during production of ESB, the publicity machine wanted to downplay the fact he was happily married, and hesitated even to announce the birth of his son!

doubleKO said:

His lack of on-screen roles after the OT was likely due to the car crash that busted up his pretty mug.

Which happened between Star Wars and Empire. Harrison Ford has a scar, and that hasn't hurt his career. Luke Skywalker casts a larger shadow than Han Solo in the minds of casting people perhaps?

Mark hasn't ever been not working steady if the IMDB is anything to go by.

Aside from his long career in voiceover work before and after the OT, Mark Hamill played Mozart in Amadeus on Broadway, and co-starred with Lee Marvin in "The Big Red One". 'nuff said!

It may have been someone forgot to flip a switch at the dubbing facility.

Not every studio used it as it did cause video problems for some people. Fox videos were the worst offenders in my experience.

Does this remind you guys of anything? ;)

http://youtu.be/bXFGxCjehIY

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/08/watch-formula-1-car-speeds-through-lincoln-tunnel/

No worries. :)

No one could have anticipated Paramount slapping new labels on old stock. (Or that LDDB seller needing their eyes checked.) It was a crapshoot whether the VHS was going to be the 20th anniversary version on the tape, and there were no obvious tracking issues. It could have even been Grease 2 on there. ;)

Factory sealed or not, this tape is over a decade old.

I've had a few "tapes from hell" where the Hi-Fi track drops out every few minutes.

Got the VHS today. Minty fresh, original version, and no tracking problems so far. Best of all, apparently no macrovision, so I don't have to pipe in another video signal to get the DVD recorder to play nice.

Unlike the other older video masters, the opening and closing credits are letterboxed.

DominicCobb said:

Oh, yeah. Forgot about the special edition. Well, that was a case of the studio asking for a shot inside the mothership. He regretted ever doing it. Though I wonder what his opinion of his later director's cut is now.  

Also, the title change for Raiders wasn't in the film itself.  

Until the Criterion Laserdisc came along in 1990, the SE was the only version you could see on home video.

It just keeps getting better!