danny_boy

TV's Frink said:

danny_boy said:

TV's Frink said:

danny_boy said:

theprequelsrule said:

danny_boy said:

What would I have done to Jedi?

 

Nothing.

 

It is fine as is.

Agreed. This thread is unworthy of OOT fans.

Indeed!

I find it hypocritical that fans here curse Lucas for changing the OT,yet have no problems with introducing hypothetical changes of their own!

Then I'm not sure you understand what hypocritical means.

Is there a single fan here that would deny everyone the original versions?  Even kenkraly understands that part of it.

Well as I already said-Lucas has only deprived fans of seeing the original versions in good quality(Blu ray/anamorphic standard def DVD)-as opposed to denying them the original versions in any quality-big difference.

Oh, ok.  Forum closed.  :-/

Even if the OT is eventually released on Blu ray-----this forum will still be around plugging for a release in  4K!

DuracellEnergizer said:

 

danny_boy said:

Picture quality/Sound quality is not the only pre-requisite for enjoying a movie.

No, but it helps ;-)

 

Whilst I would be inclined to agree with you on a superficial level-Sometimes I do wonder if optimum picture/sound quality really does help.

The contemporary home theater viewer is so engrossed in how the film "looks" that he/she loses sight of the actual substance of the movie(story/acting/pacing/music-ect).

And with films like Star Wars....the relatively low resolution of Laserdisc and VHS and even the 35mm theatrical prints of the time(which were little above the equivalent of 720P) obscured(or at least drew the viewer's attention away from) those matte lines and grainy 4th generation optical composites.

On edit:

On the subject of sound quality:

People still enjoyed Star Wars in 77',even though the vast majority of them experienced it in Mono!

TV's Frink said:

danny_boy said:

theprequelsrule said:

danny_boy said:

What would I have done to Jedi?

 

Nothing.

 

It is fine as is.

Agreed. This thread is unworthy of OOT fans.

Indeed!

I find it hypocritical that fans here curse Lucas for changing the OT,yet have no problems with introducing hypothetical changes of their own!

Then I'm not sure you understand what hypocritical means.

Is there a single fan here that would deny everyone the original versions?  Even kenkraly understands that part of it.

Well as I already said-Lucas has only deprived fans of seeing the original versions in good quality(Blu ray/anamorphic standard def DVD)-as opposed to denying them the original versions in any quality-big difference.

timdiggerm said:

danny_boy said:

theprequelsrule said:

danny_boy said:

What would I have done to Jedi?

 

Nothing.

 

It is fine as is.

Agreed. This thread is unworthy of OOT fans.

Indeed!

I find it hypocritical that fans here curse Lucas for changing the OT,yet have no problems with introducing hypothetical changes of their own!

A lot of people here aren't so much upset with the changes existing as they are with the changes being the only version available.

A lot of people here aren't so much upset with the changes existing as they are with the changes being the only version available in the highest quality available----as in Blu ray!

Because the original versions are available.

I actually watched my 1986 VHS copy of ROTJ a few weeks ago.

I enjoyed it more than watching my 2010 Return Of The King Blu Ray disc.

Picture quality/Sound quality is not the only pre-requisite for enjoying a movie.

theprequelsrule said:

danny_boy said:

What would I have done to Jedi?

 

Nothing.

 

It is fine as is.

Agreed. This thread is unworthy of OOT fans.

Indeed!

I find it hypocritical that fans here curse Lucas for changing the OT,yet have no problems with introducing hypothetical changes of their own!

What would I have done to Jedi?

Nothing.

It is fine as is.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1406163010025

Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere.

But if you have not seen it, it is quite entertaining.

http://www.dga.org/Events/2011/04-april-2011/George-Lucas-on-Star-Wars.aspx

Anchorhead said:

msycamore said:

Don't try to pretend it's something different than it is, it's a very well made fantasy film for kids, and when I say kids, I mean 7-18 year olds, (yes, a kid can be 18) don't be ashamed for liking a good film primarily directed towards kids. Just because it showed burned bodies in one scene doesn't directly make the film only made for mature audiences.

I don't pretend it's something it isn't.  No two ways about it, it's an outer space fantasy enjoyed by all ages.  My point was that Star Wars' darker moments had a feeling of heaviness, of actual danger.  Return's darker moments were either cleansed or played for laughs (or at least along with laughs). 

During Return, at no point what so ever did I get the feeling our heroes were even close to any sort of danger.  In Star Wars, Luke's family is murdered, Leia's family is murdered, Vader murders a guy while he's talking to him then throws his body on the ground, and Ben is killed (albeit willingly). There's a seriousness to Star Wars & Empire (to me, at least) that doesn't exist in Return.

Return is like a roller coaster at an amusement park.  When it goes through the dark tunnel, you know the monsters are fake, so you laugh while you're jumping out of your seat.  In Star Wars & Empire, when it goes through the dark tunnel, the monsters burn your family, kill your best friend, and cut your hand off.

 

I guess it really is about perception.

When I saw Star Wars back to back with Empire in 81' (aged 6) only Empire gave me that sense of palpable danger to any of  the the 3 main heroes.

In SW,even when Vader was blowing up all the other rebels in the trenches I never felt Luke himself was really in danger.

It did not matter because the whole thing looked f*****g awesome!

Even though I loved Jedi when it came out in 83', by the time it came out on V2000(my video system---even more rare than betamax!) in 86'  I was really disappointed in it.

The quality of the tape did not help.

The colours were  completly washed out so the whole film had a grey tinge to it.

That compounded by the seemingly less dynamic story made me wonder why I had liked the film so much just 3 years earlier.

It was not until a mate showed me a VHS tape of the special edition in 97'/98 that I rediscovered my liking for the film .

Canby slated it back in 83':

Published: May 25, 1983

'Return of the Jedi,'' written by Lawrence Kasdan and Mr. Lucas and directed by Richard Marquand, doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film, which opens today at Loews Astor Plaza and other theaters, is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot. All of the members of the old ''Star Wars'' gang are back doing what they've done before, but this time with a certain evident boredom.

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9c00e3d71e38f936a15756c0a965948260

S_Matt said:

danny_boy said:

As for Jedi:

We had the Rancour eating a gamorean guard,Jabba being strangled by Leia, Implied murder of Botham spies,Ewoks being killed(Ok not on any grand scale),the death of Yoda which is as touching as anything seen in any of the 3 films and the bad guy ultimately dying (both Vader and Palpatine).

So there is stuff there.

I do have to agree with Anchorhead that the films did kind of shift in tone and that kind of does hurt the continuity of something intended to be a single story split into different chapters.

 

It is a tough question to address.

I saw Jedi when it opened in may 83'.

I then went to watch all 3 films in one evening in August 83'.

That was here in cambridge, UK. I understand that US audiences had to wait until 1985 before they showed all 3 films together .

Again , in terms of personal cinematic experiences,nothing else comes close.

Even then at the age of 9 I could detect those shifts in tone.

But in my opinion those shifts complement each other adding enough diversity ,both aesthetically and tonally to keep you interested.

In my opinion,The Lord Of The Rings or The Matrix trilogies have no where near as much variety(I like those trilogies too BTW!)--probably because they were filmed at the same time.

Filming the SW films separately actually helped.

Mark Hamill's performances as Luke are quite distinct from film to film reflecting the predicament and evolution of the character.

Does Elijah Wood's Frodo or Keanu Reeve's Neo have the same variety in their respective character's arc?

In my opinion no,but that is my opinion!

p.s

I thought it was quite cool seeing Neo get blinded and Frodo being intoxicated by the ring's power.

But Luke's journey is more engrossing.

Anchorhead said:

doubleKO said:

I agreed with S_Matt about this, not from the point of view of what was or wasn't originally intended but whether it works for the climax of a fantasy story.

I think if the change had been handled differently it would have worked better (at least for me).  It's still deep enough in Empire and worked well enough.  By the time Return was released the series had lost a lot of its harshness. 

In Star Wars we had burned bodies, mass murder (Alderaan), torture, severed arms lying on the floor, untrustworthy hired pilot, etc. Those elements were either castrated or g-rated as the series progressed and I think that hurt the OT overall.  There was real danger in Star Wars.  The lack of of any real danger in Return made me want to walk out of the theater in 1983.

For me, the change didn't work.  For a most others, it worked well and still does.

 

I take your points.

Personal perception of the movies does depend on the chronological order that you experienced them in aswell as the age that you had at that point in time.

I do envy you for having been there at the beginning!

I did not see SW in 77' but I saw it back to back with ESB in 81'(aged 6).To this day ,the best cinematic experience ever(coupled with Superman 1and 2 back to back not long after).

SW blew my socks off and ESB made sure that they stayed blown off!!--LOL!

So personally for me SW and ESB are inextricably intertwined.

As for Jedi:

We had the Rancour eating a gamorean guard,Jabba being strangled by Leia, Implied murder of Botham spies,Ewoks being killed(Ok not on any grand scale),the death of Yoda which is as touching as anything seen in any of the 3 films and the bad guy ultimately dying (both Vader and Palpatine).

So there is stuff there.

Bingowings said:

I don't really get the obsession with a Wookiee army over a band of Ewoks.

The Ewoks could have worked fine if A) better quality costumes were made for the foreground characters (with heads that fitted and eyes that didn't look like glass beads) B) they were given more of a culture instead of being largely being the receiving end of jokes C) we saw evidence that they were already successfully taking on the Empire and this was being covered up (presumably to avoid getting a visit from Vader or some other similarly ruthless enforcer).

If we saw a village with totems made out of wrecked Imperial tech and Stormtrooper armour and maybe some half eaten stormies the cute little teddybears would suddenly look like the sort of creatures who could help the Rebels take on an entire legion of the Emperor's best.

While we are on the subject a legion is about 3-6 thousand troops (and that's on top of the troops that would be expected to be there guarding such an important base).

If Lucas can make us believe in a space battle with hundreds of different looking ships why does he find it so hard to make us believe in a ground battle with thousands of troops who all look exactly the same?

All you would need would be one amazing reveal sequence and then use the same troops in different areas of the forest (or inside the base itself) being picked off, over and over again.

Well the Ewoks were going to eat Luke,Han and Chewie alive!

The problem with huge battles on large scales is that you lose sight of the individuals.

This is a problem that effected  Return Of The King.

It got away with it because it looked cool especially in 2003. Seeing Return Of The King  now in 2011 it does not carry anywhere near the same power (for me personally--seeing it the other night I focused more on the individuals within the battle as opposed to being overwhelmed by the jaw dropping visuals----and because of this I found it severly lacking in punch.)

I obviously have to qualify this again by stating that it is solely in my opinion---but ROTJ(over 28 years) holds up better over time than ROTK has(in just 9 years)

In the final 3rd of ROTJ, the focus is explicitly on Han and co with the Ewoks providing the back drop.

Combined with the best crafted space battle (even to this day) and Luke's emotional confrontation with Vader + Palpatine----that is what made ROTJ work for the audiences back in 83.

SilverWook said:

IIRC, it wasn't until the Making of a Saga documentary that Lucas mentioned it was originally going to be Wookiees, which aired around 1985. I'm unsure if he ever mentioned it publicly prior to that.

There were over 70 little people playing Ewoks in the film. Finding an equal number of tall people to play Wookiees really should not have been as difficult. (Think basketball players!) And only the costumes that are going to be in closeups have to as detailed as Peter Mayhew's. Only a handful of Ewok masks even had any articulation.

As for creating the illusion of a large Wook army in 1983, there were ways to accomplish this with opticals, camera angles, and just clever editing. There weren't that many guys in rebel uniforms standing around at the end of Star Wars. And how many knights do you think you see charging at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? ;)

 

yeah mate,you make good points.

having said that,hypothetically,with that many wookies occupying the final 3rd of the film the aesthetic of the movie would have felt more in the line of Planet Of The Apes or even dare I say it---the Christmas Special!

Having Chewbacca by himself feeding off other different types of characters is fine.

But once you have more than 1 wookie or a bunch of wookies all growling and howling at each other(Think The Christmas special or ROTS) it just turns alters the tone of what Star wars is about(In my opinion).

Also we were already familiar with Wookies as an alien species by 83'.

A bunch of Ewoks was something different.

And sure,clever editing may have compensated for the lack of volume(of rebel soldiers),but that scene only lasted 3 minutes!

The wookies would have had to occupy far more screen time.

And in order to carry the dramatic weight of their impact you need more than just clever editing in order to supend the audience's disbelief.

@doubleKO

Oh I am pretty sure it could have been done.

But there would have been no sense of scale.

It would have just been 20 extras dressed up as wookies.(and in some ways ...it would have bore too much of a resemblance to Planet Of The Apes.

As an example, look at the making of Lord of the rings.

In the battle of the pelenor fields.

They filmed Viggo Mortensen(Aragorn) killing a bunch of extras of orcs(men in rubber suits) against a blue screen.

It looks lame.

But in the finished film with a CGI filled backdrop of 1000's of digital orcs it looks awesome!That is what gives this scene a sense of scale.

That technology was not there in 83'.

+ I don't recall any of us back in 83' clamouring for a Wookie finale.

That vibe to the best of my knowledge has only surfaced in the post CGI 90's/2000's were audiences/fans are so used to seeing digital armies on huge scales that they fantasize what Return Of The Jedi would have been like with a huge wookie army.

doubleKO said:

Wookies tearing peoples arms out of their sockets, some pacing changes, dealing with what you can from Bingowings' post about things that don't make sense - it might have been a worthier successor to Empire. I thought it was oh-so-clever of George when I was young. Wookie -> Ewo(o)k. "Instead of making them tall with long fur, I made them short with short fur". Genius :(

The technology was not there in 82' to create a wookie "army" .

At least not of any significant size(say compared to the digital armies as seen in Lord Of The Rings or the Phantom menace)

The costs of kitting up at least 20 extras with the same kind of costume that Mayhew wore would have been quite expensive(I assume).

I think it was more economical(both financially and in terms of time consumption) to create 30-40( I am guessing here--it may have been less) ewok costumes.

And from a story telling point of view, given the wookies superior physical strength as well as their technological prowess(established in the 1st 2 films); they would have been perceived by the audience as being too strong for the stormtroopers.

The Ewoks for all their faults, were the underdogs.

And people tend to forget that back in 83' the emotional impact for the audience (I should know--I was one of them)of seeing the storm troopers really getting their asses kicked(for the 1st time in 3 films) was exciting.

It was the same with Luke forcing Vader("Never!!") back in the saber duel.

For  2 films vader had beaten the shit out of both Ben and Luke.

To see him being subdued in the 3rd film was(at the time of it's release) was where the audience got to effectively  have emotional payback(John William's music accentuated this moment superbly).

That sensation cannot be replicated when viewing the film in 2011 for the 100th time!

(Unless you have never seen it before and you are seeing it for the 1st time)

Harmy said:

I can't see the pic for some reason but I assume it's the one on R2 and 3P0 in Tantive IV corridor, if that's the case, the same print was used for the NTSC version too but the NTSC version had heavier DVNR, which concealed it but when you look closely you can see where it was.

Ahhh

thanks for the info.I always presumed they were different prints.

I know this particular scratch is only on the print that was used for the 1995 faces UK widescreen VHS PAL  release.

It is not on the equivalent frame of the NTSC version.

Personally I don't see a problem with scratches,grain,gate hairs,colour mistimings  or film dirt.

They are part of the film and the theatrical experience.

In my opinion, if these anomalies were preserved on an eventual UOT blu ray release I would be quite happy.But that is my opinion!

@S_Matt

You are talking bollocks.

The mono mix is representative of how the film sounded in 1977(to a lot of people)

Not everyone in 77' had the means or good fortune to be located in a major city to be able to watch it in 70mm and  6 track  magnetic audio.

The vast majority would have experienced Star Wars during it's original theatrical run watching 4 generation degraded 35 mm release prints with the mono mix.

That's fair enough!

Personally I think Transformers 2 is poor.

But that is my opinion.

You have to tolerate people who do like it.

Just the way the world works i'm afraid.

@Harmy

It implies that there should be room for improvement.

But you might want to underline where in the general conscensus it says it "is a piece of a shit film".

I have to agree with Alex here.

Saying that the majority dislike or hate the phantom menace is either misguided misinformation or deliberate disinformation.

These are from Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes respectively:

The Phantom Menace has far more going for it in terms of heart, plot, and human interest than the likes of Armageddon and Godzilla. This is not a mindless blockbuster designed solely to make a killing at the box office. Lucas, already wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, is hopefully beyond that (not that he'll refuse the money...). What he has done with The Phantom Menace is to satisfy an artistic craving, and it shows in almost every frame. The director's vision and reverence for his own creation are the two key elements that differentiate this movie from 95% of the others with similar $100 million-plus budgets.
JAMES BERARDINELLI 1999

But mostly I was happy to drink in the sights on the screen, in the same spirit that I might enjoy "Metropolis," "Forbidden Planet," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Dark City" or "The Matrix." The difference is that Lucas' visuals are more fanciful and his film's energy level is more cheerful; he doesn't share the prevailing view that the future is a dark and lonely place.

What he does have, in abundance, is exhilaration. There is a sense of discovery in scene after scene of "The Phantom Menace," as he tries out new effects and ideas, and seamlessly integrates real characters and digital ones, real landscapes and imaginary places. We are standing at the threshold of a new age of epic cinema, I think, in which digital techniques mean that budgets will no longer limit the scope of scenes; filmmakers will be able to show us just about anything they can imagine.

BY ROGER EBERT / May 17, 1999


Just as "Star Wars" became one of the most widely imitated pop phenomena of its time, "The Phantom Menace" looks like a template for a new generation of computer-generated science fiction. And unlike "The Matrix," another film liable to spawn imitations, it is sweetly, unfashionably benign. Whether dreaming up blow-dryer-headed soldiers who move in lifelike formation or a planet made entirely of skyscrapers, Lucas still champions wondrous visions over bleak ones and sustains his love of escapist fun. There's no better tour guide for a trip back to the future.
May 19, 1999
By JANET MASLIN

Maybe the projectionist made up a story that was he was held at gunpoint!

He stole the print for himself===lol!

I do not watch the following for great picture quality or sound(although the dolby matrixed 4 track encoded VHS hi-fi stereo tracks when decoded through dolby pro-logic give modern 5.1 digital tracks a run for their money).

I just watch them to enjoy the most important thing above all others--the story.

1)

Star Wars:

Twentieth Century Fox 1982 VHS linear stereo video (rental library 1st home video release)

2)

Empire Strikes Back:

CBS/Fox 1984 VHS hi-fi stereo video(1st home video release)

3)

Return Of The Jedi:

CBS/Fox 1986 VHS hi-fi stereo video(1st home video release)

There is also something quite cool about watching  video tapes that are roughly  from the era that the films had their original theatrical runs.