SilverWook

And what is the source of this Raiders "transcript"? The article doesn't say...

I'm going to have to dust off my copy of Once Upon a Galaxy and see if there are any mentions of this.  (I do recall a passage mentioning Lucas was reviewing the dailies sent to him on videotape.) Although there is a gap over a certain period of time between the last days of shooting at Elstree and the final interviews conducted in California during post production.

CO said:

I can't believe any of these moron SW fans who dress up can't answer why Luke and Leia kiss, yet they are siblings.  Is every SW fanboy naive to the reality that Lucas was making this up as he was going along? 

Let's hope he was, or if this was planned, that would be creepy as hell!

I hope you're not implying they are morons simply because they wear costumes at cons.

A old newspaper article I wish I'd saved mentioned fans yelling out "incest!" at one of the Trilogy screenings held for charity. ;)

If you've seen the "Star Wars to Jedi" documentary, Lucas fesses up that they had no real motivation for Luke to go all Dark Side on Vader as they began to shoot the final confrontation. The implication is the whole sister thing was pulled out of his asteroid field at the last minute.

I'd certainly be interested in knowing what was shot first, the throne room fight, or Luke and Leia on the Ewok Village set. All the Endor exteriors in Northern California were shot last, according to the documentary.

The animation in the Nightline segment is creepy too!

This was happening in the last six months leading up to the movie, so that's probably all there is. It's fun to speculate what other characters could have done messages though...

"Hi! This is Wedge Antilles, doomed to live forever in Luke Skywalker's shadow. What's my secret to surviving battles with the Empire, when all my fellow pilots seem to end up frozen chunks of meat orbiting Yavin? Find out when the Empire Strikes Back!"

"This is Boba Fett. I was the only good thing in the Holiday Special. Han Solo won't escape me, nor the wrath of Jabba the Hutt, when the Empire Strikes Back! And then I'll collect the bounty on Kenner for ruining my action figure. Enjoy my silky voice while you can, because someday, I'll be dubbed over by some guy from New Zealand."

Oh boy, I called that number every month back then! And more than once, so it's a good thing it was a toll free number. Imagine having to explain those charges on the phone bill to your parents!

Nice to see they haven't been lost to time. And they sound a heck of lot better than I remember!

A proper preservation must include setting these up on answering machine and changing the message once a month. ;)

Jaiman Tuckuh said:

Was it on laserdisc? (Currently, I only have an non-decent LD player).

eBay only shows VHS, at the moment.

 

The LDDB lists both films as being released on LD. Bon Voyage was only released in Japan, so there would be subtitles unless it has a bilingual track.

One seller on LDDB has a copy of Bon Voyage for sale at the moment.

http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/27419/LV8850/Peanuts:-Race-for-Your-Life-Charlie-Brown-%281977%29

http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/46692/SF078-1220/Bon-voyage-Charlie-Brown

Race For Your Life has an interesting footnote in home video history.

http://www.cedmagic.com/mem/milestones/mem262.html

Has anyone contacted "TheThirdgather's" on Youtube to see if they would accept help in getting the entire dubbed version?

From what they wrote on their channel, they are having problems getting the whole movie. It's apparently a crazy bootleg DVD with ten movies crammed on  it...

Saw this over at Trekmovie.com and wanted to share here…

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2010/06/star-wars-poster-artist-looks-.html

working archived link - http://web.archive.org/web/20141231090340/http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/star-wars-poster-artist-looks/

The AFI screened all three movies to coincide with the award they gave George in 2005, and they were all the '97 versions.

The recent Empire 30th screenings have been reportedly been all digital.

The guy who puts on revival screenings in my area has expressed frustration at not being able to get any Star Wars prints at all. I presume this includes the prequels...

Ironically, I was at a bargain theater to see Revenge of the Sith when I noticed Raiders was on the marquee five years ago. I've also had the pleasure of seeing TOD again in the same venue since then. Both screenings had several fully costumed Indys in attendance too. :)

http://americanclassicimages.com/Default.aspx?tabid=36

I found this site a while back, searching for images of a movie theater I had a lot of good memories of. Sadly, it has been partially demolished after sitting empty and dark the past several years. But I found a photo of it in all it's summer 1984 glory, and for all I know I could have been inside the day it was taken!

What I didn't realize until now was, you can also search by movie title, and there are a lot of pics of old movie theaters showing the OT. Perhaps you might find the places you first saw them there. :)

I enjoyed his work on the Marvel comic as well.

This sounds professionally done! Some of the voices are so spot on, I had to listen to it twice to realize it wasn't the original actors.

The $64,000 question is, who did this and why? It's like this came from a bizarro universe or something. ;)

In any case, this must be preserved for all time!

I've also been wondering if there are Chinese boots of the other films with badly translated subtitles...

I guess that explains the Death Star model wedged under the Daily Show desk. ;)

A lot of what we remember is also dependent on the acoustics of the theater we saw it in, and what the gear was set at too. Not every theater cranked it up to eleven like they do these days. But, this was also the era of Sensurround, which was legendary for causing plaster to fall from the cieling!

I saw Logan's Run in 1976 at a theatre that was probably converted into a twinplex. It was nearly drowned out by Midway's Sensurround soundtrack playing next door. Also the last time I ever got into a theater while the previous showing was just ending. Something Star Wars put an end to, as theaters didn't want people sitting in there watching the movie five times and only paying once!

My main memory of seeing Empire in 70mm was being amazed that noises on Dagobah were coming from behind me! But I recall feeling things like the first snowspeeder flyover as much as hearing them.

Front row in the balcony seemed to be the sweet spot too. Something I remembered three years later when seeing Jedi in a honest to goodness movie palace. The Speeder Bike scene was an IMAX like experience in that place. I've never been able to find out if that was 70mm though. I regret selling all my local newspaper SW clippings to a collector in the 90's now, as it would probably settle it.

We really need someone like Roger Ebert though. He once called Disney out on their practice of cropping Snow White and other pre-widescreen classics to fit modern theater screens, and they listened. Subsequent reissues were pillarboxed.

Has he ever weighed in on the special editions? I can't recall if he ever reviewed them...

It's scary to think this ad probably cost more to make than the movie did!

There was also a special screening of Jedi in Hollywood(?) around the same period. It was a demo for THX, and members of the original SW fan club got invites in the mail.

Alas, I had no easy way to get to L.A. back then!

I stand corrected!

Fang Zei said:

Actually, that American Dad episode pre-dates the GOUT debacle. Spooky, but true.

Are you sure? I could have sworn AD premiered in 2005, and the GOUT hit DVD in 2004...

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/07/what-is-darth-vaders-diagnosis/?hpt=C2

Funny thing is the Ewoks cartoon got a second season and Droids didn't. Any Ewok loathing back then never approached the levels of what happened with Mr. Binks.

There is a fan film called The Invisible Enemy that portrays Ewoks as the vicious little furry bastards they could have been. ;)

Boba played a big part in the recent Clone Wars season finale, so he and Anakin may cross paths again.

msycamore said:

The funny thing is that Dolby Stereo was designed to be Mono-compatible. So in a way it was unnecessary if you doesn't care about the actual audio content.

There was enough concern about that issue that Ben Burtt and company thought the dedicated mono mix was a good idea at the time.

We're probably lucky Fox didn't push for the use of Sound 360, (used on Damnation Alley the same year) as that system didn't catch on.

There's a nice article about the sound mixes here.

http://www.fromscripttodvd.com/star_wars_a_day_long_remembered.htm

The $64,000 question is what mix did the Academy hear when they awarded SW an Oscar for best sound? Not to mention Ben Burtt's special award...