zombie84

Just leave it as a change. They're all changes, when you get down to it, and that's the whole point.

I'm sure the films will likely have some tweaks, I just don't think there is any way in hell there would be a "Special Edition done right." I mean, what are they going to do, start over from scratch? Fox spent $20 million yet we got the 1997 SE, Lucas is a billionaire and these films are the main thing he has done in twenty years yet we got not only the 2004 SE but the 2011 SE which they boast having worked on for seven years. It's not going to suddenly become watchable.

It's not the quality of work, it's the quality of ideas. You have Jar Jar being farted on in TPM and its rendered in state-of-the-art theatrical quality CG, but it's still Jar Jar being farted on. Budget was never an issue when it came to the Special Editions, and it never will be.

It could be if you hate 3D, hate the prequels, and maybe even if you resent the fact that people have to watch the SE.

Even when he is making bad films and stealing classic ones, he's actually still doing some cool stuff. He's invested a lot of money into the technology sector with all of his obsessions for gizmos and computers. We would be years behind in most respects--the industry infrastructure, the talent pool, cameras, CG, software and hardware, etc.--were it not for the fact that he invested in these things before most people did.

That's actually what Lucas said he wanted to be remembered for more than anything else. I remember reading an interview with him--it might have been Time--around when Episode II came out and he hoped that a hundred years in the future he would be remembered as a guy who helped move the state of the art forward when digital technology was first emerging.

You're kidding yourself bub.

How would the 3D release get us a proper SE to enjoy? All we would be seeing is a 3D version of the Blu-rays, possibly with even more idiotic changes.

They might have just got rid of some of the grain, or maybe they just went back to the negatives. The film isn't very old and had CG in it, don't forget, it shouldn't really look dated.

But yeah, I agree with your point: films are what they are. A film from 1977 should look like it was from 1977. Now, this doesn't mean that it should be super grainy and all contrasty, when you go back to the negatives they are surprisingly crisp compared to how we expect them to be.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

People who say to do zero tweaks, just slap the original to digital, are discounting that the process of transfering film to digital simply does NOT result in a viewing experience that is the same as seeing the original film projection. A really proper "restoration" to digital also requires a certain amount of additional work to make the playback of the digital look as close to competitive as possible with how good the original projection looked. There are always some tweaks.

Of course, the SEs go WAY beyond teaks.  But the types of tweaks described in the first post are pretty common and as far as I'm concerned would be totally acceptable in terms of making a digital version of the original trilogy that is faithful to the original viewing experience... if they included faithful reproductions of the original sound mixes that aren't over-compressed.

Right, but this isn't the same as re-compositing things. When the transferred 1982 Blade Runner they no doubt had to futz around with the colour controls so the contrast and colours look right, but every film goes through this. I don't think anyone is saying just let the telecine run unsupervised, but don't deliberately alter anything or "fix" anything, just make sure it looks as the same as the print you transferred it from.

@ R2-D2: It's a deliberately new colour timing, and reflects a number of things. Some of it is faithful to how the films originally looked. Some of it may even be faithful to how Lucas wishes they did. And a lot of it is how Lucas thinks the films should look today (eg., not exactly the same as before).

The 1997 Special Edition was actually pretty faithful to the original versions in terms of colour, with few exceptions, and was matched by YCM Labs to a 1977 Technicolor print of Star Wars (not sure about the other films). This was on the IP duplicate prints, unfortunately, so when they went back to the original camera negative for the 2004 release none of this was carried over. That's probably one reason why George decided "fuck it, we'll just give the films a whole new kind of look." They better match the cleaner, high-contrast, more colourful look of the prequels, so I am guessing that was one motivation for Lucas to screw around with the colours. He guided the colour correction himself, after all.

That would be a nice Special Edition, but its not the OOT. I'd buy it, because it's very close, but I'd still be on Lucas' ass for the original, and I'd still be running savestarwars.com. Those matte lines and "defects" are important, thats the film. For me, the matte lines are as important as the rest of the effect--actually, the matte lines were the effect, the effect is the composite not the model on a blue screen; as soon as you take that away you have destroyed all historical integrity that special effect had. Same with wires, if you want to appreciate the film in its context and with its history, well they did things with wires and sometimes the wires showed a bit and they couldn't paint them out because they didn't have computers. Same with crew reflections, or a bad dub. Same with anything. Star Wars should just be Star Wars, a film that opened in May 1977, if you aren't seeing that, you aren't seeing Star Wars, you're seeing something else.

So yeah--Tasteful Special Edition. Cool! But it's not the film we are looking for.

I'm not quite sure what Danny_boy is saying, but it is quite absurd to say that the 1982 VHS is a faithful guage of the quality of seeing the film in theatre, in terms of resolution.

Film and video really have no fixed "resolution" in the sense of how much detail you see. What you really want to be measuring is resolving power. I can transfer a hi-8 home movie upscaled to Blu Ray and it will be 1920x1080, but that measurement doesn't tell me anything about how much detail I can see. In general, a good theatrical print in decent condition should yield the same amount of detail as a middle-of-the-road Blu-ray. The 1982 Star Wars VHS is a horrible guage of seeing a print, it's soft and mushy, there's no fine detail, the colour is washed out, there's tape noise and tape hiss, and the colour space is very narrow.

Also, the 1982 telecine probably just came from a regular print, possibly a low-con one made for video but at that point in time it wasn't unusual to just get a regular print and make a telecine, because VHS back then was so soft you didn't really need to. It may have even been from a 16mm print, as television movies were commonly printed on 16mm back then.

Finally, I'm not sure why you would assume no one would want to see the camera negative, as this is what most restorations are made from, including the 2004/11 version of Star Wars; unless you meant an un-colour-corrected version, as the camera negative is not meant to be seen "raw". But then no print is ever seen raw, IPs and positive release prints are always colour timed when they get transferred.

It's impossible to say, I think. They may have scanned all three IPs early in the process, not knowing exactly how the final product would turn out, but then decided just to cut in the missing parts by branching. Or they may have decided on a branched version using the 2006 DC and just scanned those sections. Either way doesn't matter, the final result is identical so it doesn't matter how much "extra" (and ultimately unnecessary) work they did behind the scenes.

dark_jedi said:

zombie84 said:

dark_jedi said:

zombie84 said:

There was an animated Red Nails movie a few years back, I think. I never saw it. I did see the Conan: The Adventurer cartoon series every morning when I was a kid. :p

Was this show any good, I see it at walmart all the time and my Little Boy seems interested, is it worth a buy?

I doubt I could answer that, my memories are pretty vague, it was mildly enjoyable but sort of forgettable. It wasn't anything like the comics or stories or the movies though, closer to He-Man maybe. Who knows though, kids like unexpected things.

Thanks, he does like the old He-Man cartoon and Thundercats, and he is very interested in watching Thundarr The Barbarian LOL, so maybe I will just pick it up.

If he likes Thundercats and He-Man he will likely enjoy the show then.

dark_jedi said:

zombie84 said:

There was an animated Red Nails movie a few years back, I think. I never saw it. I did see the Conan: The Adventurer cartoon series every morning when I was a kid. :p

Was this show any good, I see it at walmart all the time and my Little Boy seems interested, is it worth a buy?

I doubt I could answer that, my memories are pretty vague, it was mildly enjoyable but sort of forgettable. It wasn't anything like the comics or stories or the movies though, closer to He-Man maybe. Who knows though, kids like unexpected things.

theprequelsrule said:

skyjedi2005 said:

They could have done King Conan with Milius but the studio would not back it.

And honestly with Arnold's age, they would have to have played that up in the movie or recast, or do what they have done reboot.

I would like a version faithful to REH manuscripts, not the butchered edited version by L. Sprague de Camp.

I think John Carter should be animated.

 

I would have liked to see an older Schwarzenegger portraying an older Conan. I think that would have been interesting.

An animated Conan would be the way to go (think Ninja Scroll). Forget a movie though, I want adaptions faithful to the actual stories.

There was an animated Red Nails movie a few years back, I think. I never saw it. I did see the Conan: The Adventurer cartoon series every morning when I was a kid. :p

American Hominid said:

Something that I believe is driving many changes is the evolution of the prequel storyline. 

It vaguely focused on Ben's story when the the OT was made, but as the PT was developed, Anakin became more and more the main character til eventually the six-film saga became "The Tragedy of Darth Vader."  The addition of Hayden and the "NOOO"s to Jedi are, I think, efforts to emphasize Anakin's place as the (now) main character.  A more fatherly Anakin ghost makes sense for Luke's journey, but now it's all about Anakin.  Adding a line that reminds us of ROTS obviously makes us conflate ROTS Anakin with ROTJ Vader. 

There are remnants of the original thoughts in the films.  "When I left you, I was but a learner," Ben calling Vader "Darth," Vader not being a real viewpoint character in ANH... etc.

This is a good thing to keep in mind.

It's why we have stuff like Hayden ghost, Ian McDiarmid emperor, NOOooo, and even things like Naboo in ROTJ, Temura Morrison as Fett, and a lot of the expanded vistas/CG in the films are done in order to tie them to the PT better. A lot of the new shots were even done for the sole purpose of training for the PT. So, had there been no PT, the Special Editions would be comparably tamer and probably decently tasteful--although you'd probably still have Greedo shooting first.

SilverWook said:

I have serious misgivings about a celebrity "gossip" site being the only source for that story about Lucas.

Seriously, nobody else who was there tweeted or wrote about this in the past year?

Why not, this kind of thing happens all the time. I remember a tweet from the editor of Creative Screenwriting when Lucas was at a DGA party and someone asked him and he said something like "The original doesn't exist." You'd think people at a DGA party would remark on this if they overheard it. But its a busy party and probably only two or three people even heard it in the first place, and if they ever told anyone they probably just mentioned it to their friends. Probably the don't even care. For Lucas to say what it's reported he said is completely believeable because he has said it to reporters many times in the past. Maybe the harshness of this particular time is overstated, or maybe Lucas was just harsher than normal because it wasn't an official statement and just off-the-record conversation at a party, or maybe he was just having a bad day and didn't want to be there. He is notoriously uncomfortable at public events and fan interaction specifically. I mean, he clearly doesn't respect his fans all equally anyway.

Anyway, if someone made a facebook post about how they heard Lucas tell some geeks a party "Too bad", you'd never be able to find it anyway.

The teal shift is probably not from aging. It's just a trend. They probably wanted to do a quick colour-pass to make it look "nicer" for Blu Ray, maybe pop the colours, get rid of any pink shift, etc. So in these cases it's usually up to the discretion of the colourist, and colourist sort of automatically go for the teal-and-orange look nowadays because the older pink-and-blue look is dated. If you saw the film on its own you'd probably hardly be aware it had been changed, other than something was different, it's the side-by-side where things seem more noticeable. TPM seems to have had a colour-pass too, but the colourist kept things more neutral--actually, he seems to have preferred a more "golden" cast overall. ROTS looks about the same to me, but maybe because it was the most recent.

I like that they added voiceover of Shmi to Anakin's dream in AOTC so that it now finally sounds like a nightmare instead of a...well, you know.

Wasn't there screenings in 2007? Or does this happen every year?

Lucasfilm will officially tell you that SW screenings are on hold. There are exceptional circumstances in which they will provide a print like DGA screenings (where the 1997 SE was last screened i think), but these are exceptional. I don't think its about money. That's quite absurd, if it was about money then we'd have had the OOT all along, douple dipped every year. This is about pride and ideology. I guess Lucas figures if his colleagues have one or two special events in which they need a print, then the 1997 SE best represents the version of the films he wishes people to see. He can't show the 2011 version because it still can't officially be shown and he doesn't show the 2004 version because there are no actual prints that exist, only DVDs and HD masters for cable television. I think the only time the 2004 HD version was screened was at Celebration once, when it first came out. Maybe television companies have exclusive rights to it now, or maybe the screenings since have not been digital projection equipped or have a 35mm-only policy (a lot of repertoir/specialty theatres have such a policy). So it's a small compromise for exceptional circumstances.

none said:

Right now all the news links points to the top of the page, so people have to scroll to get to the earlier dates.  You can have the links point to certain spots in that page.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp

(they use but I think this is being phased out of HTML5, so the below should work)

You set the spots by setting up a 'span' with an 'id' name.  I've used the date and a key word, so you can remember what it was.

June 5, 2011: Steven Spielberg Vows Never to Digitally Alter Old Films, Says Lucas Can't "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie"

or

June 5, 2011: Steven Spielberg Vows Never to Digitally Alter Old Films, Says Lucas Can't "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie"

then your link from the main page would look like this:

Try one, if it works great, otherwise i'll figure out what's missing.

Hmm, I've been trying this out tonight, but it doesn't seem to be working? Any thoughts?

For those keeping up, there is a few updates with the Phil Tippett interview, miscellaneous media links, the facebook boycott page, and Lucas telling fans to piss off about the original versions.

None--that McCallum quote about Lucas tinkering till he dies is a good one. I'll make a mental note of it for inclusion in future articles or any previous ones I want to update. I guess my "Can't Get the SE Right" article will be in need of updating some time soon, maybe I can sneak it in there.

The animation is decent, but why does Yoda look so angry at the end?

Anyway the lighting and rendering looked very fake, but I thought Yoda at the funeral was pretty damn impressive, looked pretty real. Too bad it looks like typical video game integration in most shots, although it is also kind of rewarding to get facial animation which is half decent. The original version was awful too, so I'm not sure if anyone should be complaining or not. I guess we should be complaining that Yoda hasn't looked right since 1983 no matter the film.

Lestrade said:

This whole mess feels insane. I've gone through so many stages of Star Wars grief, I don't know what to do anymore! Stage one: encouraged optimism. Stage two: blissfully ignorant excitement. Stage three: sudden shock and horror. Stage four: prickly malaise.

My wife just sent me this link. The bad-Lucas-press wagon hasn't stopped rolling yet. I don't have anything against the guy, I just feel a confounded confusion about the man. If true, though, then this seems to prove what a lof of other folks here have been saying for years:

Link to original article

The geeks eventually got their face time with Lucas and I want to stress how respectful these guys were, and that they paid a lot of money for face time with Lucas. This was not a surprise interaction; Lucas came to this event knowing he’d be expected to mingle with the peons. I don’t advocate bugging celebrities in their daily lives, but this was a professional event designed to encourage these interactions. The guys were not out of bounds. They started by telling Lucas that they loved him/the movies/grew up watching them. Then they very politely asked why he wouldn’t make the original versions of the movies available on DVD/Blu-Ray. They stressed that they don’t mind the retroactive edits (doubtful, but they were being nice), they just wanted good digital copies of the original cuts, too. Lucas’s response? An eyeroll and a huffy, “Grow up. These are my movies, not yours.”

The douchebaggery continues.