joefavs

With all this talk of actual theaters I don't know if "six people watching a 42" plasma in a basement" constitutes a watch party, but I recently learned that neither my friend's girlfriend nor his roommate have ever seen any Star Wars movie, and since we agree this cannot stand, I'm planning on hosting a few folks for a Harmy marathon in the near future. I'm sure I'll also have people over when your Star Wars is available, maybe do it as a double feature with the Grindhouse ESB.

As far as legitimate theaters go, I'm probably going to bite the SE bullet and go to the AMC marathon unless any of the indie theaters around here end up hosting their own events. Luckily, there's enough underground stuff in Boston that that isn't a completely crazy thing to hope for.

I've got to say, I was kind of worried until I saw the higher quality clip of the Jawas nabbing R2 in the canyon. A lot of the grain in the preview ends up just looking like noise, but I'm guessing that won't be the case with a BD25-sized final product.

I really don't care to ferret through the past however many pages to see if this has been covered yet because it's late and I've had a few, so feel free to ignore this question if it pisses you off, but I've been wondering for a few days now: is this the sort of thing where you've learned enough doing the first film that you'll be able to bang out Empire and Jedi in much shorter order than Star Wars, or is this going to take as long to get through the rest of the trilogy?

Yes the SE was a mixed bag, and yes TPM was lame, and yes the romance subplot of AOTC was cringeworthy, but the actual shark-jumping moment for me was the one-two punch towards the end of that movie of C-3PO getting his head switched with a battle droid and spouting schticky one-liners for the rest of the movie, followed by that God awful Yoda fight. That was when I resigned myself to the idea that Star Wars was stupid now and would be as long as George had the keys.

Granted, I was a child/teenager when all of this was actually coming out, so I hadn't really thought it all through to the extent I have by now and my changing feelings were more gradual than it might sound like here, but looking back that was definitely the tipping point, even if I was only equipped to identify it as such years later.

I dusted off an old tube TV I found in the basement the other day and now I'm kind of clamoring for an old school experience. Are there any pan & scan preservations of the entire trilogy out there? All I see on myspleen is the '82 Video Rental Library ANH vhs. If someone's done the Faces tapes, that would really make my day.

As far as i'm concerned, there just isn't enough out yet to make any kind of judgement, good or bad. I'm not a long-time comic reader, but as far as TV goes, some of the best shows of all time have taken two or three seasons to find their footing. None of these have been going for more than six issues. It's completely reasonable that they aren't great. the fact that none of them are Kevin J. Anderson bad at this point is enough to keep me on board to see what happens.

Assuming there weren't any of these hypothetical legal failsafes against a release of the unaltered trilogy embedded in the Disney deal, wouldn't it behoove Fox to put something out sooner rather than later? It's not like Disney's never going to release another box set, SE or otherwise, and since Fox owns ANH until the end of time, Disney is going to have to make some kind of deal with them to do it. Shouldn't Fox want to get the ball rolling on that while they still have the distribution rights to the other two films (which I believe move to Disney in 2020)? I'm legitimately asking, I don't even really know if this is how distribution rights work, but it does seem to me like it would be better for Fox if this release came while they control all three films rather than one.

I read somewhere that the whole game is set in the Anoat sector, with Bespin, Hoth, and a third planet I don't recall (definitely one that wasn't in the films, possibly Anoat itself)

^oh, I thought we were talking about whether the Star Wars: Uprising game that was just announced makes sense with the timeline of the SE, since some of it takes place on a still-Imperial Bespin immediately after the battle of Endor.

Edit: oh wait, you are talking about that. I'm sorry, I'm on a phone and paying attention to five different things right now.

Couldn't you read the ROTJ celebration footage as flash forwards? I find it hard to believe that news could travel fast enough for the Bespin/Coruscant/Naboo/Tatooine stuff to be literally be happening concurrently with the festivities on Endor, so what's to say that those scenes don't happen weeks or months later (as opposed to the handful of days most people seem to assume)? If we're flashing forward either way there's no reason a short increment of time should be more valid than a longer one. And Bespin is the only planet shown that has anything to do with this Uprising game. I think that as long as there isn't a definite timestamp on that shot, fitting the new game into the timeline isnt a huge stretch.

Yub Nub is anticlimactic. If Jedi weren't a definite end point I don't think it would be a problem, but to have the whole thing go out on that goofy note doesn't sit well with me. Granted, I don't love Victory Celebration either (that electric bass is a bummer), but it's a step up. I honestly think this one more than the others boils down to which version you saw as a kid, though. I almost always go for the unaltered cut anyway because I'd rather tolerate Yub Nub and avoid Jedi Rocks rather than the other way around, but I really wish Lucas/Marquand/Williams had come up with something better the first time around.

Just checking. Color me satisfied.

^I'm curious, is there anything you do like?

I think my feelings about the Sarlacc and especially the victory celebration can be chalked up to the fact that I'd never seen ROTJ before going to the theater in 97, and my parents weren't big enough Star Wars fans to own it on video before I got the SE VHS box set that year for my birthday. That was the version I wore out in my childhood, so Victory Celebration IS the proper music with all the trappings of nostalgia for me. As for the Sarlacc, it looks pretty bad, but the fact that it's just been stuck in to existing shots without adding any running time and messing with the pacing make it less of an issue for me than, say, the rontos in Mos Eisley.

I'm someone who grew up on the 1997 cuts, so while I prefer the OOT on the whole, there are a handful of things from the SE that I'd include if I were making a master cut for myself.

What I like from the SEs:

-The inclusion of the 1981 "A New Hope" crawl

-Fixing Vader's lightsaber after the duel with Obi-Wan

-Replaced shots of the Sandcrawler and Ben's hut

-Cleaned-up landspeeder effects

-Biggs before the Battle of Yavin

-Victory Celebration at the end of Jedi (I know I'm being a bad purist, but I've always hated Yub Nub. And I mean the 1997 version, without Naboo or Hayden)

Things I'm not crazy about but that don't ruin it for me:

-CGI in the Battle of Yavin

-the extended Wampa sequence

-Extended Cloud City approach

-Oolah in the Rancor pit

-Sarlacc beak

Things that aren't the absolute worst, but that I'd leave out without thinking twice if I were making the decisions:

-CGI dewbacks

-Mos Eisley approach

-Windows on Cloud City

-"Alert my Star Destroyer to prepare for my arrival"/other useless dialogue changes

-Anakin's eyebrows

Things that 200% need to go:

-Greedo shooting

-Jabba in ANH

-Ian McDiarmid in ESB

-Temeura Morrison's voice

-Jabba's ridiculous big door

-The dug in Jabba's palace

-"Jedi Rocks"

-Vader's big "NOOO" in ROTJ

-Gungans in the ROTJ celebration

-Ghost Hayden

As far as fixing compositing problems and bad mattes and the like, I actually prefer the cleaner "fixed" presentation. If the impossible dream of the OOT/SE branched version ever comes to fruition, I'd keep the stuff in my first section and then go OOT otherwise.

fishmanlee said:

Ronster said:

I would also vouch for a Alex Ross movie poster for episode 7... Yes Please!!!

 Isn't that pretty much just one of the old comics covers redrawn?

 Yeah, it was a variant cover for the rebooted Star Wars #1 in January.

^ the Iron Sky sequel? I haven't seen it (I'm not even sure it's out yet), but I do know that it features dinosaurs and Nazis (and Sarah Palin, but I don't see her on that poster).

^meh, I just like going to the comic shop every other Wednesday. It's an enjoyable little ritual.

Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight was one of the first bits of EU I was exposed to and thus a huge influence on my ideas about Star Wars as a whole, especially given the fact that I played it within a year or two of seeing the movies for the first time. The atmosphere and tone in that game is still closer for me to what Star Wars is supposed to feel like than almost anything else that's come out since. The lack of characters and locations from the movies made the galaxy seem much more open, and I think the way that dark Force users were handled here is a big part of why I'm so inclined to groan when I see every single bad guy with a lightsaber referred to as a "Sith" these days. I also think Yun's yellow lightsaber is why non-movie colors don't really bother me (the Darksaber from TCW is still the dumbest thing I've ever seen, though).

EDIT: What an historically significant post number.

DrDre said:

Thanks for the compliments! Glad you liked it. :-)

At this point I'm planning to use the NTSC versions for all three films, but if ROTJ really looks better with SR, I'll reconsider. 

I'm planning to make it bluray compatible, and if there's a demand for it, I will also create a DVD-9. 

The rendering takes a little longer, but all good things come to those who wait... :-P

 allow me to officially voice my interest in a DVD-9 release.

Ah all right, that's exactly what I figured it was.

Spectacular, a surround mix is all that's missing. If/when you do eventually decide to revisit the picture after this iteration, there is one cut in A New Hope that I find sort of jarring that you may want to reevaluate. In the Mos Eisley approach, the portion of the shot with the Ronto rearing up that you've kept is so short that it almost plays like a mistake. I assumed its presence had to do with the timing on the soundtrack, but since you're editing a new mix anyway, I'd consider removing it entirely if I were you.

The forcefield thing that our heroes get stuck in on General Grievous's ship at the beginning of RotS has got to be the laziest, lamest effect I've ever seen.

EDIT: Y'know, this thing:

^On the whole I think it's fine. Nothing spectacular or important, but there's a lot of fun character stuff from the big three. This whole initial wave feels like it exists mostly just to pass the time until Shattered Empire drops in September.

Not sure if I'm on board with how over-the-top brutal they've made Boba Fett in Star Wars #5. I'd hoped they'd go more low-key with the character. More Drive, less Sin City if that makes any sense.