George ! ! !

Entry posted by Nathan Strum May 5, 2006

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So, it turns out that George Lucas has decided to release the original versions of the Star Wars Trilogy after all.

Now, this is very cool news, because I'm a fan of the original Star Wars.

"Episode IV - A New Hope"? Phooey! Ever since I first saw that appear in the opening crawl in 1981 it's looked out-of-place to me.

The original "Star Wars" opening crawl synced better with the opening music, and well... it was Star Wars! The movie I grew up with, having seen it a dozen times during it's original theatrical release (which lasted well over a year). That was a lot of times for a 12-year-old kid. Especially when the theater was downtown and my dad had to drive me down there to go see it. That was the only way I could see Star Wars, and I absorbed as much of the movie as possible every time I saw it. No VHS. No DVD. No cable TV. Only my memory to keep the movie alive in my mind. It was a truly magical film. Aside from a handful of Disney films, it was really my first movie experience.

I can still vividly recall being run over by that giant Star Destroyer flying overhead at the beginning. No - it wasn't on screen, it was overhead! And it shook the whole theater. What a ride. And it was Star Wars.

I thrilled to that movie every time I saw it. The movie theater had the smarts to have a Starship 1 game in the lobby, too. So of course, after the movie I'd go out to the lobby, and fly the closest thing to the Millennium Falcon or an X-Wing that I could find.

After Empire's release, I had gotten used to seeing "Episode V" at the beginning of its title crawl. But when Star Wars came back to the theaters the next time, I thought they were running Empire instead, because instead of, "It was a period of civil war", I got "Episode IV", which confused me. Even though I'd heard that Star Wars was now "Episode IV", I never expected them to change the movie. Sacrilege!

And "A New Hope" was a weak title too, at best. Blecch.

Fortunately, the rest of the film was unmolested. That is, until the "Special Editions" started rearing their ugly heads.

Man... don't even get me started on those.

Suffice it to say, I don't like people messing with my memories (much less a film that's on the National Film Registry). Every time I see one of the altered scenes in "Episode IV", I get yanked right out of the film, completely ruining for me.

The weird thing is, as an artist, I totally understand George's point of view. I'm rarely satisfied with anything I've created. I often want to go back and fix things. And I think if George wants to keep tinkering with the original trilogy - that's fine (he could replace half of Return of the Jedi and I wouldn't care). But those films are a part of film history, and deserve to be preserved and released in their original state. They affected a lot of people's lives, and really belong to the public, as much as they belong to George.

So I'm really glad that George has decided, for whatever reason, to release the original films. Maybe it's just a last ditch effort to squeeze out some more DVD sales before Blu-Ray hits. Maybe George wants to use it as an educational tool to show filmmakers why he made the changes he did. Maybe he's feeling magnanimous. Maybe he just got tired of the whining. Whatever. I'll pre-order mine as soon as they show up on Amazon. Maybe I'll even buy two.

I just hope that this is really the original Star Wars. No "Episode IV". No remixed audio. No fixes. Just a nice, clean, restored print of the original film. That will do nicely, thank you very much.

Oddly enough, this announcement is hitting right at the time when I'm wrapping up a painstaking transfer of my Star Wars "Definitive Collection" Laserdiscs to DVDs (personal copies only - definitely not for sale). I've been working on this using the best video equipment available, starting with uncompressed transfers from the laserdiscs (about 900 GB total for all discs), and squeezing them down at a high bit-rate to fit neatly onto dual-layer DVDs, complete with audio commentary and other goodies. This has been my hobby project (outside of the Atari stuff) for the last year-and-a-half, and I'd planned to wrap it all up in June.

So of course, it just figures George would go and do something like this now.

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EricBall 235

Posted May 5, 2006

I agree, I'm just hoping that these are the same as my THX Widescreen Collector's Edition VHS tapes. For that version they went back and cleaned up the picture and made some subtle improvements on some of the optical effects. (Although I don't think they fixed the wormy Emperor.)

But most importantly, they did nothing else. No re-voice overs. No micro-edits so you don't see guards getting lasered. Just making the video (and audio) as good as possible.

I'm going to wait to see if whether these are the real deal before I buy them.

And I too had been making DVDs from those VHS tapes. Capture from S-Video input with lossless compression, gently filter and IVTC with AVI Synth, compress at a high quality/bit rate with TMPGEnc.