zombie84

"PG" doesn't mean the same thing as it does now; PG movies weren't necessarily for kids, they just didn't have explicit sex, violence and profanity, the same as PG-13 movies today. You could show breasts (Airplane, right in a close up too) and have some pretty grusome violence (Jaws), with healthy mounts of mild profanity (most movies before the 80s...American Graffiti). In fact, some movies rated G back then had nudity (Andromeda Strain) and were intended mainly for adults (2001, Star Trek The Motion Picture).

That's why Star Wars, with its moderate cartoon violence and brief realistic violence, was rated G at first. A brief glimpse of a severed arm, some roasted corpses, exploding pilots and mildly unrealistic gunplay were things that it wasn't unusual to have in a G rated film. All a G rating was was that it just meant that if you brought kids it wouldn't be terribly objectionable. A PG film didn't mean it was for kids, it just meant it wasn't The Exorcist or Taxi Driver. Anyway, with all that Star Wars got a G rating, but in one of--or possible the--only exceptions to the ratings appeal process, Lucasfilm argued for a HIGHER rating. Their reason?

Star Wars wasn't supposed to be a kids film and they felt that by having it G rated it would be seen as juvenile by association. They wanted it to appeal to older people, so they asked the rating be raised to PG, the same rating shared by recent hit films like Jaws, Rocky and Logans Run (which had frontal nudity I think).

That's why it always seems weird the whole "Star Wars is for kids" thing. They changed the rating so it would be seen as for adults too. Parental Guidance meant the film wasn't going to be The Exorcist but as a parent you had to consider if you wanted your kids exposed to it. Heck, even after they introduced the PG-13 and parents felt like they were suddenly absolved from responsibility because they drew an arbitrary age line now, you still had PG movies like Beetlejuice where its really morbid stuff and sexual innuendo and the character yells the word FUCK. I'm sure there's another example of fuck being in a PG movie after 1984, but it just goes to show you that before the more modern era from the 90s onward, PG was seen as something that was for adults but that it could also be appropriate for some (older, usually) children to see.

Good idea, I have been meaning to do that lately actually, I've just been lazy. :p

New update with BD reaction/media links, plus a personal editorial on the subject.

They lost money and didn't want to do it again. I think also LFL felt that the integrity of their product (e.g. the movie) was harmed by so much ridiculous levels of marketing exposure.

Yeah, in some ways Lucas was taking a legit risk by putting all the money up front. Also, they started preproduction in 1995, at the time the Star Wars profit machine was just starting to get up to gear, so Lucas wasn't worth as much as he was by the time the film came out. And that was before the SE too--no one knew how huge the rennaissance would get. But at that time, Lucas was wanting to make the first film for $70 million. By the time they got to filming in 1997, they realized they were making a $115 million movie, but they let that happen because they saw that there was so much demand that it would recoup the cost easily regardless of the quality of the product, so they no longer had to worry too much about the budget as long as it didn't turn into ESB again, because then Lucas might not have actually had the money to pay for it (e.g., ESB went from something like $20 million to $32 million, sort of equivalent to if TPM started filming on a $115 million budget but came in at $200). 

Once the dust settled from Episode I they were perfectly fine, they could have financed two films at once after that because they had all the tie-in deals and their share of the gross was ridiculous (I think Fox only got something like 20%? Maybe less?). It was pretty clear from 1997 onward that Lucasfilm wasn't going to have any financial problem for the rest of at least George Lucas' life, but I think those first few years must have looked a bit daunting. It's sort of like what happened with ESB, after it came out they were fine, but until that happened they had basically allocated every last penny to making it all work because he was building Skywalker Ranch at the same time.

He's not being accurate about Pepsi. In 1998, Lucasfilm secured a very lucrative deal with Trimark (?), the parent company that owns Pepsi, Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. But that happens with every blockbuster. Like any tie-in related to the prequels in the late 1990s--Fox, Kenner, etc.--the company that got the job paid a handsome fee, thinking the films would be huge hits. Lucasfilm made a killing but the Pepsi parent company didn't make much, Kenner lost money, and I dunno about Fox, I think they were the only ones who benefited, but not that much.

Anyway, Lucas didn't make the films for Pepsi, but Pepsi sure did pay him a lot of money once he did.

Trust me, that interview will be an entire news update once I give the BD stuff some breathing room.

Those movies had problems because of the script, not direction. I thought WOTW was directed great. But personally I thought the best films he ever made have been in the last ten years. Catch Me If You Can, Munich, The Terminal and the like are way better than soppy stuff like E.T. and The Colour Purple.

The fatal flaw of the prequels is that Lucas directed and wrote them.

That's all it comes down to, really.

Here's a good thought experiment. Take all the plots to the three prequel films and keep them, keep all the sequences and major scenes, keep the exact same characters, played by the exact same actors, with the same crew, same DP, same designers, heck even the same major designs. Then, have the script written by Lawrence Kasdan and the film directed by Steven Spielberg.

That's it: that one change. Different director and writer.

That, my friends, is the prequels going from mediocre blockbusters to minor classics. The scenes have drama and purpose, the dialogue is interesting, characters become complex and likeable, and the acting becomes realistic, with real emotion behind the film, powerful emotion. You laugh, you cry, you hold your breath. All from subbing in two human beings behind the scenes.

George Lucas should have thought up all the major elements of the films and been involved in the story and the production, but he should have let people who could write write the films and people who could direct direct the films. He knows he's a bad writer and bad director; he admits it openly. The problem is that Lucas is a narcissistic control-freak, and that major character flaw was so strong that he decided it was better to make three bad films himself than share three good ones with other artists.

Phil Tippet on the Special Editions: "They're shit."

Brilliant.

There's an update on the BDs now. I used None's link too.

Could someone be so kind as read over my update on this and see if I have made any mistakes?

http://www.savestarwars.com/news.html

I'm glad someone reposted that page, it's one of the better discoveries made (although None was actually the one who dug that up).

Lucas would release the OUT if enough people demanded it. He swore no one would ever see it again, but then thanks to all the bootlegs and this very website and its close-to-100,000 petition, he did put them on DVD. Regardless of the quality, that was a total dismantling about his "don't exist to me" stuff. And just this year he even said that maybe years down the road they would be restored, maybe. Which is a total 180 from 1997 when he said no one will ever remember the originals existed in 100 years. So it's possible, and it's happening. In that sense, the people that buy this thing in spite of not even caring that much for the SE are indeed part of the problem. But that's unfair, because there are ten million other people who like the SE, don't care or don't really even know how extensively the films are changed. In that sense, it's pretty much a moot point to try to guilt-trip someone for trying to make the most of a bad situation. What we really have to be doing is simply the same thing we have always done, which is to keep complaining and letting them know that we want the originals too, that there is also a significant number of fans that are disenfranchised. Because even in 2006 I would say that there was no fewer people who liked the SE, Lucas didn't have to acknowledge the OOT at all, but he did.

As to these changes, personally I have a hard time believing some of them could be real, just like in 2004, because I give Lucas too much credit. And just like 2004, my respect for him will die a little when the horrible truth is confirmed. Darth Vader ruining the climax of ROTJ with "Noooo!"? How is that really improbable. This is coming from the same man who not only thought that adding a creepy Hayden in the crescendo of the saga was a good idea but whom also already put that same "Nooooo" in one of the emotional climaxes of the prequels. I guess now the deal is sealed, I will never watch the SE of ROTJ ever again, unless I want a laugh.

Some of the changes I'm okay with. The Ewok eyes I would say are an improvement, if inconsistent. The Jabba door is a cool looking shot, although like any redone shot in the films it doesn't look like it belongs. The R2-in-the-rocks is dumb and inexplicable, and lazily done since the rocks disappear shots later, although the effect is at least convincing looking. And of course stuff like the fixed saber shots are a welcome change. This is much like in 2004, where they had a few additions that ruined the films but also a couple ones that were tasteful to one degree or another. Not one of them are necessary, but the damage is minimal in a lot of them.

But its completely bewildering, as was mentioned. Why on earth would you add a reflection on a window to the ESB matte painting--a trivial, invisible fix that no one would notice and no one complained about--but not fix the problems the 2004 version introduced in the first place?? They spend all this time adding small, useless things while ignoring the biggest, most glaring problems. Why fix one lightsaber shot when the shot that preceeds and follows it is also messed up? It just boggles my mind. It also boggles my mind how a professional sound designer could mix and add the effects that are in this. Obi Wan's howl was a joke when it came in the Sounds of Star Wars book but now we can't say it's a mistake or a test version. That's a final product. As bewildering as it is that Lucas could say, "yup, sounds good, much better than the old one"--it boggles my mind that a sound designer could create and present that in the first place. What the heck is going on at Lucasfilm these days?

Anyway, in a way I'm glad these Blu Rays are the most embarrassing version of the films yet. Maybe now people will actually start missing the original versions of the films. Its pretty hard to top the 2004 version, but lo and behold they seem to have done it. It's actually a bit sad that I am missing the 2004 version with its less intrusive changes. I would like to enjoy the films in high definition and I was actually starting to get a bit hopeful about this release. I am glad though that the films have become so butchered because I feel like Lucas may have finally crossed a line and pissed off the moderates. The extremists who buy anything will defend anything Lucas throws in there, no matter how bad, all those douchbags on bluray.com and TFN who have no life at all, but its the middle of the road people who can be honest and a bit critical, not really minding the SE but still having certain standards--that's where I think most fans of the series stand. They like the films, so of course they like the idea of a more high-tech version of them, and can forgive two or three bad changes. But seeing the reaction, it seems like even those guys are starting to facepalm themselves over the leaked changes. Maybe the tide will finally turn.

Also--Fox spent $20 million restoring and updating the films from 1993-1997. The films were very meticulously restored, by hand and also digitally. The only bit to do would be to wash the negative again (it's been handled since then) and do a 4K scan, and then retrieve the missing pieces from storage (or other print sources if they are damaged), clean them and splice them in. This accounts for, what, maybe eight minutes of material for ANH and five minutes for each of the following two films. How long do you think that would take? Just over a week maybe, plus all the release/home video prepwork. Cost maybe, I dunno, 300 grand or so per film?

Can't be that much more, the scanners are in-house at ILM and so is everything else, since 110/120 minutes of each film is already restored your main cost is the labour of the people actually putting those bits together. You'd have to pay a film librarian a day's wage to identify and retrieve the missing pieces (day 1), pay a supervisor to approve or select another source (day two), find and approve any alternate sources (day three), pay a lab technician to clean, scan, digitize and back up the negs and new pieces (day four), pay an editor and assistant editor to log it all and then edit together a new D.I. (day five), pay a colour correctionist to grade the D.I. under the supervisors approval along with select areas of digital repair while a sound mixer scans and masters the soundtracks (day six, seven, eight and nine maybe?) and bam, done. You overlap the film work so that you are constantly moving the work forward (i.e while ANH pieces are being scanned the film librarians are searching for ESB, so they can be scanned while ANH is in the D.I.) and within two weeks, you have a 4K restoration of the entire trilogy, probably not costing more than a few hundred thousand dollars. They could add a $2 tax to the tickets for the next Celebration and the fans themselves would have footed the bill.

I could never understand the workflow they did. 1) Scan, 2) Colour Correct, 3) integrate new FX, 3) Dirt cleanup.  It's pretty much the opposite of how normally things are done as far as I understand it. First you scan. Then you clean it. Then you colour it. Then you integrate the new footage and match it to what you have.

If I was Lucas, knowing I would return to the films, I would have also saved each stage. Have a pure raw scan, just in case you need to start over; you can always re-comp the new additions back in. Have a backup of the new scan with colour correction, just in case you want to do a new cleaning pass from scratch. Why wasn't this done? HDD space is so cheap and Lucasfilm is worth so many hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, okay, you would have to spend money on having Lowry clean it again, but with all the finicking with the baked-in scan, the difference can't be that huge, you would save time by simply returning to the source.

Unfortunately it probably comes down to the fact that Lucas himself supervised the 2004 scan (sad isn't it?), and he can't be bothered to do this for every scene of every film all over again and would rather just have them bring up the brightness levels if it looks sort-of right, at least to a not-very-discerning level. I mean, he thought the 2004 version was great after all, I gather that it is his cronies that are attempting to respond to criticisms. I read some response a few pages back by one of his employees that attempted to lay the cause on the way HD video responds to film; it was so ludicrous it made me laugh sadly and shake my head, fully out loud. Are they fucking kidding me? But probably most people reading that statement don't know any better, and buy it. But the moron saying that knows full well that he's lying to everyone's face and hoping that his audience is too stupid to realise they are being had. That's the sad reality of Lucasfilm these days.

I have to say, I like the 2004 gamma levels better a lot of the time. In half the shots, you don't get any more real detail but more importantly the blacks just look milky and you have this thin haze on a lot of stuff. As was said, even the black bars are greyer. This isn't the solution--you aren't doing a new D.I. and timing it brighter, you are just turning up the brightness on the TV basically.

The sad truth is that this is the best they can do if they don't want to do a new scan. Unfortunately, since they are starting with an already-colour-corrected source, the detail is "baked in," and so are the shadows. It's not the same as working with the negative and re-timing it to have brighter levels. Instead they just did the same thing as turning up the brightness on the TV, but it doesn't always look good, in fact in some cases it looks worse.

Not to toot my own horn, but would it be worthwhile to involve savestarwars.com in this? I mean, this is sort of the exact thing the page was designed for, as a sort of "wait, what's this about?" advocacy page (well, among other things). I don't know if bringing any heat on it would be bad or not; I'd hate to see it shut down.

Pagz said:

That clip was official, posted on the StarWars youtube channel.

 

I wonder what's going to happen to the 3D conversions what with the 3D fad already on its way out. They won't even have episode II done before it's a thing of the past... again.

Yikes then. I was hoping maybe they fixed more than I had anticipated but I guess not. That scene is one of the most important ones in the film and it is completely visually neutered. It would be great for viewers if this is another one of those "not final version" official peeks, although I doubt it since the scene would have to be re-transfered from scratch in the easiest scenario. Otherwise you have to uncrush the blacks, amp up the gamma, re-do the starfields, re-roto the lasers and engines individually, somehow fix that blue engine haze (no idea how) and then properly colour time it all. Yeah, not likely to happen. Maybe we'll get one of the above.

Also, is the sound mix new or is it just me? It sounds like the music is even lower in the mix, but to be fair I haven't heard the 2004 mix in a long time.

If that clip is real, all of the de-saturation, oversaturation, black level crushing and mis-tinting of 2004 is totally unchanged. It looks to me like it doesn't even have the gamma boost, so I'm suspecting this is fake.

In fact, I am beginning to suspect that anything posted by anyone outside of official promotions is unreliable. Even the official stuff is only sort-of reliable, it seems.

Pagz: In late 2003, Lucasfilm did an HD telecine of the films, which they colour-corrected, added new effects to and had cleaned by Lowry. The 2004 DVD set was a standard-def downconversion of that. The HD version was always intended to eventually become the highest-quality master (i.e. for blu ray), but it seems they did attempt to fix a couple issues people complained about by taking that master and tweaking it ever so slightly.

Someone mentioned before--these are the masters being used for the 3D conversion. I wonder therefore if the extra brightness boost is not actually an attempt to fix anything but merely compensating for the dulling quality of the polarized 3D glasses. Michael Bay did this already with TF3--he boosted the brightness of the master so that when audiences saw it in 3D it would have the same luminance as a regular 2D print. I mean, even TPM is way brighter, slightly unnaturally so in some shots, and it never had any of the dullness and black crushing issues of the OT.

Those pages are all accessible from the main page, except the Gout one which isn't quite ready for prime time. Some of those might be duplicate files or errors, there's a lot of junk there and also some things that I've uploaded for my own use.

Behold, I live. And so does the site.

Thanks for the concern though, good to know people will notice if I drop off the face of the earth for two weeks. :p

You're not in the middle if you are buying it no matter what. You said it yourself, you will buy it on release day and see. Others will see before they buy it. That's a big difference, and it says a lot about how you are approaching the matter. If you don't really care about the 2004 issues that much and just want to watch SW on blu-ray, then fine, say so, but don't hide behind a rhetoric that is ultimately the exact same approach as the "AK" crowd.

And yes, there is evidence out there OTHER than having the discs in your hands. I don't know why this is hard to understand. From what people involved in the set and at Lucasfilm have said, to officially-released screenshots and videos, to the history and context of the 2004 master, to the marketing approach of Lucasfilm, it's pretty clear that the 2004 master--regardless of how it is tweaked--is being used for the release. You don't have to fly off the handle with your rants like you always do. I feel like you have temper issues or something, it's just discussion of a Star Wars blu ray, just relax.

Also, thanks Bingo for pointing out the -1 thread. I hadn't known about that, and also hadn't noticed I have a few PMs from him.

dark_jedi said:

none said:

^ There's some updated posts.  answer is publicity@lucasfilm.com.

dark_jedi wrote: Why would he? the way he gets treated here it does not surprise me at all.

Look at the stuff you get in your threads, I create lots of threads no one cares about, it's a wonder any of us return.  He's been lurking and doing this for maybe 5 years with multiple accounts, looking for something he is.

You have that right, I wonder the same thing all the time, I have to admit I really enjoyed this place a lot more years ago before all the AK's and Pessimists, that is why I am SO glad to be done with my latest project and soon as I see what people think and I figure out how I am going to share these, I may retire from here to LOL.

I am though very interested in the Saga Set coming, and I do not buy into any of the 2 very annoying groups, which are the Ass Kissers(AK's) and the other side, the Pessimists, because to me both sides are so full of shit they are just flat out blind, NO ONE here has seen these Blu's in their own Homes, NO ONE, so if people want to make shit up and believe everything they read and see online, well that is just ludicrous, sure some of the info may start to lean one way or the other, but it still is not HARD FACTS, I honestly don't understand why we can't all talk about what we do know without all the crazy conspiracy theories.

I know that this will give me some flack from some now but that is OK, but that is how I feel, like double05 said above, "I will believe it when I see it".

 I find this ironic considering you've pre-ordered the set months ago. That's not really wait and see; You've endorsed the product in advance and are now upset that everyone is criticizing something you've endorsed. This philosophy is really "buy and see", and thats the whole trap people fell into in 2004. We will wait and see precisely what is different and the same to the 2004 master, but there is a pretty substantial body of evidence that gradually emerged that gives us fairly solid, evidence-based indications of many of the fundamental issues that people wondered about the release. You have to use your head, take it all in, concede that there are several variables still unknown, and make a judgement call. The most reasonable stance, as far as I am concerned, is that indeed the set has most of the problems from the 2004 master, is in fact basically a slightly tweaked version of that master and not a wholly new transfer, but has improved a few issues while also introducing a few new issues. I don't think this is an extremist Pessimistic-with-a-capital-P view, but a level-headed one. To ignore all the emerging evidence and merely proclaim "we will never know until we see the final product" is to ignore a lot of common sense and it's essentially the same argument that the "Ass-Kissers", as you designate them, have been advocating. We will wait and see, and we will hope for the best, but there is quite a lot of information out there that can guide our expectations and judgements in the meantime.

The laws are there, Lucas just shot himself in the foot because he never made up a contract whereby he would retain ownership of the work. Whenever someone makes a deal for a film it comes with a contract--when I worked in the camera department I had to fill out a 10-page deal memo every time I joined a crew. If you go under the table like Lucas did, you void any rights you could have demanded the employee give you. Lucas obviously didn't care at the time, because he couldn't forsee the film being successful firstly and prop replicas becoming a market secondly; the trade off, though, is that if the film is so successful that this becomes a market then it means you are making a million dollars on a hundred other things, so its all peanuts anyway. The cost of Lucasfilm's legal suit is probably more than this single man would have made in profit anyway.