Z6PO

New movies comes out traditionally on a Wednesday in France. I think it's the simple reason why TFA is out two days earlier here. 

This old ad (1995) just appeared on the official Star Wars tumblr :

http://starwars.tumblr.com/post/126703535163/promotional-poster-for-the-1995-edition-vhs

(I don't know what to think of it, at least they're acknowledging the original)

In 1977, George Lucas was only 33, and had made just 2 movies before (the first one, already a sci-fi movie, in 1971)

ray_afraid said:

NeverarGreat said:

I think that it was a rather missed opportunity for HISHE. They could have ended it a lot sooner.

"There goes another one."

"Fire."

Ha! I like it.

"Did you hear that ? They've shutdown the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure !"

KABOOM

The end. 

Harmy said:

I just wish I could find the Falcon in the DS hanger matte.

You can find it in "The Art of Star Wars" book, page 82. But it's a very small picture, you may not be able to use it. Besides I can understand why it's rarely seen: it's a pretty boring matte ! The Millennium Falcon has only its edges painted (they must have composited the falcon model for the final image)

On his blog, J.W. Rinzler acknowledges Special Edition screen grabs in the Making of ESB book :

P.S. Errata

Unfortunately, The Making of ESB went out with a few mistakes. We hope to fix all of these by the fourth printing. The biggest one-and if it's any consolation to fans, the one that has kept me up at night-is that a double-page matte-painting spread of the Falcon in the book is actually from Return of the Jedi, not Empire; and not painted by McQuarrie but by Michael Pangrazio. A host of strange circumstances went into that error, but I take the blame. Another series of small errors occurred when the publisher replaced my screen grabs from the original ESB version on DVD with screen grabs from the Special Edition DVD; Del Rey regrets the error, too. 

 

We try and minimize all errors by having expert readers go through each of our nonfiction and fiction books, but mistakes happen. It's some sort of cosmic law against perfection.

savmagoett said:

So they say "Long-range views of Luke Skywalker ascending a cable beneath an AT-AT indicate a height of 22.6m", which is not what I calculated, hummm.

 

It is Luke Skywalker ascending the cable, but is it Mark Hammil ?  It seems to me that it may be a puppet... So, are we sure the puppet is correctly scaled ?!!

Absolutely incredible post ! Great analysis pictures. How did you draw the vehicles outlines ?

The Tech. Coms. on that gushers site has somewhat similar estimates on the AT-AT dimensions.

As always, the databank on the official site is completely off, and wookieepedia cites two contradicting sources (it's so obvious that the AT-AT length cannot be smaller than its height that they don't see it ?!)

EyeShotFirst said:

Sluggo said:

Maybe if one reads TF.n.  And I don't always trust them over there.  I think we have enough fans who can think for themselves here to come up with a good analysis or two.

Hear Hear!!!!!

The Star Wars fans here are the only ones I like. Too many GL worshipers and PT lovers elsewhere.

Even though Star Wars Technical Commentaries are hosted on TF.n, they are not part of the GL worshipping occurring on the main TF.n site. *sigh*

Oh, by the way, these technical commentaries are written by Dr Curtis Saxton, PhD who contributed to some of the best Star Wars reference books, in the Incredible Cross Sections and Inside the Worlds of series.

Dude !

Wasn't the whole scale issue of all the different starships already beaten to death ?

See the Star Wars Technical Commentaries site, here and here.

It's easy with Safari !  Use the Activity window, Luke.

SilverWook said:

Or that the medal ceremony looks like something else from WWII!

It is said to come from a nazi propaganda movie: Triumph of the Will

For Star Wars Origins, see this site.

HotRod said:

Gene Roddenberry......60's dude

 

JJ Abrams......00's dude

 

The spirit of Trek is not about the dudes. *sigh*

Gene Roddenberry put a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise, that was a bold statement, back in the sixties.

The 00'dude boldly go nowhere, has nothing to say, it's just the same old clichés of your average summer movie...

I saw J.J. Abrams Star Trek yesterday.

I don't know if Abrams is destroying Star Trek. But he's destroying Gene Roddenberry's vision for sure.

Octorox said:

I have a theory that the reason for the extreme coloring on the 04 DVDs may have been to make the films look truer to Ralph McQuarrie's original art. Take a look at some McQuarrie art, all which has the blue cast which can be seen prominently on the 04 dvds. I'm not defending the coloring, just pointing out a probable cause.

 

 

McQuarrie beautiful paintings are only blue on the internets !  Open a good book, such as The Art Of Star Wars (page 87) and you'll see that this particular painting should be grey.

Ripplin said about the SE Wampa:

I don't like it mostly because it really, really looks like a guy in a suit.

A guy in a suit that don't know how to act.

Don't ask for something from the Laserdiscs, or you will get it in Laserdisc quality...

Also to come is The Making of The Empire Strikes Back, to be released in 2010 in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of that film

This is very good news indeed !  But it will be a long wait...

It seems to be the same collection that we have in France for about a year now. Pretty good miniatures, about 9 cm long. I did get the Falcon, the X-Wing and the TIE fighter. I wish I could afford more, but at 15 euros each, I find them to be too expensive.

To see the whole collection so far, in France, follow this link.

SKot said:

Just out of curiosity: did you happen to catch "Au temps de la guerre des etoiles" when it aired 2-3 years later?

(for those wondering, it's the French Star Wars Holiday Special!)

--SKot

 

Yeah, at least part of it, on a (very) small black & white TV set !  And it was completly by chance if I remember well. I had no idea that such a thing had been made.

Dare I say that I enjoyed it ?!  It was bad but at least it was some Star Wars ! Those were the time, before the internet, there was no way to have your daily dose of Star Wars...

1977 (I was 11) at the biggest movie theater of Reims, France. It was dubbed in french (a pretty good and memorable dub), and I'm afraid in mono (just a guess, I have no memory of that !).

At that time everything was translated in french, the movie was called La guerre des étoiles, and the logo in the movie was in french as was the text crawl. The names of the characters, of the places, even the starships were translated !

Shadowheart said:

deliberately kept 3PO out of the loop

3PO is always out of the loop !  :lol:

(remember, in episode IV, he doesn't know the princess when R2 plays the hologram message, but earlier in the movie he says "there will be no escape for the princess"... I wonder if he may have some memory malfunction...)

You can see some pages of the book on the official site: http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/bts/article/f20070220/index.html?page=1

And there's a preview on the publisher site: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345494764&ref=news&name=starwars0507

Don't hesitate to buy it blindly !  It's the best book ever published on Star Wars.  (and get the hardcover version, if you like storyboards, there's a lot of them in the extra pages)

You can restrict a Google search by adding site:www.starwars.com to the search field.

HTH