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SDCC: Original unaltered Star Wars trilogy high quality release "quite likely"

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Disney has done an absolutely brilliant job remastering their animated films, so I have little doubt that they could do a phenomenal job on the original Star Wars films.
 
I doubt Disney has to do much pushing of Fox to get this to happen. Fox is probably ecstatic as hell to get to do this because they know all the diehards are going to finally buy the discs.
 
Dragonzord said:
and yet people cried about disney buying Star Wars
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Simple. Star Wars fans have money, Disney wants Star Wars money from fans.

Take film negatives of original theatrical versions, polish them, transfer them to blu-ray.

Giving Star Wars fans what they want = profit. Disney wins....Disney REALLY wins.

Disney uses the underpants gnomes business plan. Just take step 1 and replace it with any property that Disney currently owns and controls:

Gnomes_plan.png


underpants-gnomes.jpg


In the end, the underpants gnomes are always happy.
 
Jack Scofield said:
For the most part, the 1997 Special Editions are the best versions of the films.
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The 2004 DVD editions are better than the SEs IMO. They rolled back some of the stupid changes (Luke's scream), improved some of the bad 1997 CG (Jabba in ANH), at least made an effort to improve Greedo shooting first, and got rid of the weird monkey woman Emperor in ESB, among other things. The only major black mark against them is Hayden at the end of ROTJ.
 
When your fans are doing your work for you and doing a better job than if you actually did it, that's when you know you fucked up.
 
Lucas lies. A lot. If you look into the past about what he's said the films are about and just about anything else you'll see the guy lied a lot of the time but due to his status he was able to get away with it. With the prequels being a massive disappointment, dis satisfaction with the special editions and Lucas overall viewpoint and dismissive attitude towards the audience many began to point out the lies he use to spew a lot. Articles, interviews and more had contradictions, there is no one straight story for Lucas since he's all over the place.

Anyways, good for Disney to release them. I hope they do make great transfers of the movies, fix all the mistakes but don't add anything. None of that horrible musical number in Jabba's palace, no extra sandtroopers on big lizards. Just the original stuff looking damn nice and things like the lightsabers properly corrected.
 
Honestly the only movie I feel is ruined by the additions is ROTJ. The dance number in jabbas palace is worse than anything in the prequels. Plus Dar Hayden and jar jar voice at the end...Fuck that.
 
Dead said:
Honestly the only movie I feel is ruined by the additions is ROTJ. The dance number in jabbas palace is worse than anything in the prequels. Plus Dar Hayden and jar jar voice at the end...Fuck that.
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Vader doing his whole Nooooo bit in ROTJ is pretty bad
 
Dead said:
Honestly the only movie I feel is ruined by the additions is ROTJ. The dance number in jabbas palace is worse than anything in the prequels. Plus Dar Hayden and jar jar voice at the end...Fuck that.
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Yeah, Jedi suffered the worse, but in spite of it all I still prefer the new Ewok song to the yub-yub one.
 
Jarmel said:
When your fans are doing your work for you and doing a better job than if you actually did it, that's when you know you fucked up.
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I don't know if I agree with that. Guys in their bedrooms, working in their spare time are free. Professional editors, engineers and artists expect a salary. Guys holding rare copies of cinefilm and 35mm film will give hobbyists access to their stuff for free/cheap. They'll see Fox/Disney coming and see dollar signs.

I would imagine doing a lot of this stuff commercially would be prohibitively expensive, plus there's no guarantee that you won't miss something/get something slightly wrong/be unable to fix something/do something open to interpretation and have the fans throw your multi-million dollar project back in your face.
 
liquidtmd said:
Yeah didn't Lucas say something quite barkingly odd that in making the Special Editions they damaged or made the original negatives usable??
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No, people asked for the original versions but he was like "we don't have them (failing to add: readily available). The versions we now have are the SE (failing to add: but if we stitch back the footage we cut then that gives us the original versions again)".

Basically he is right they didn't have them readily available, but they could reconstruct them anytime they wanted.

Aquamarine said:
Why would he do that?

Having the release as 720p makes me think those unauthorized versions aren't very high in bitrate.

If you're a stickler for quality, that can very easily make the version non-definitive if he isn't an excellent encoder.
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They are high bitrate alright. It's 720p only because there's no detail loss. The BluRay is sourced from a poor 2003/4 1080p master that doesn't lose almost any detail at all when downscaled to 720p. Blame Lucas.
 
Burai said:
Guys holding rare copies of cinefilm and 35mm film will give hobbyists access to their stuff for free/cheap. They'll see Fox/Disney coming and see dollar signs.
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No, they'll run a mile. Theatrical prints remain the property of the studio and so the ones in private hands are technically stolen property that Fox/Disney would be within their rights to confiscate. That's why screenings happen with very little promotion and are one-offs, and even with those precautions, Lucasfilm people have turned up to take the prints in the past.

If Disney/Lucasfilm or Fox didn't have one of those prints (unlikely, admittedly) and wanted it, they'd have to basically declare an amnesty and allow one of the collectors to come forward.
 
angular graphics said:
No, people asked for the original versions but he was like "we don't have them (failing to add: readily available). The versions we now have are the SE (failing to add: but if we stitch back the footage we cut then that gives us the original versions again)".

Basically he is right they didn't have them readily available, but they could reconstruct them anytime they wanted.
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Exactly. Lucas's "We don't have the original negatives anymore, therefore we had to source the 2006 release from Laserdisc masters" comment has always been incredibly ludicrous.

Nobody "destroyed" the original negatives of the film. They would have to do a bit of reconstruction, but everything is still intact and it would be very easy for Disney to do a Bluray transfer.
 
So if this is released the special/dvd/bluray editions are no longer canon right?

I still think it's a long shot though because Disney and Fox don't play ball together, Disney doesnt get Episodes 1-3, 5-6 until 2020, and I think there may be some bad blood between them over the rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four. I mean they still haven't made any deal with Universal to get the marvel theme park rights back so to me it seems like Disney doesn't want to spend extra cash to reacquire rights.
 
I want the 97' special editions of the original trilogy.
Closest to my hearth, growing up with them. Good enhancements to the originals without being silly and bad as 2004 versions. Some minuses but overall better than the originals, IMO.

EDIT still, if i have to, i'll take the originals over 2004 versions. EDIT or the 2011 blu-rays.
 
Harmy's despecialized versions are incredible and I wouldn't be surprised if they are the best versions for a while still. Amazing work.
 
From that YouTube clip it seems like they didn't do such a good job on the blu rays...
 
To be fair - the lightsaber colors in the original trilogy aren't uniform. And a lot of people would be surprised to discover that the "bubblegum sabers" in Jedi & Empire are actually film-accurate.

I can already foresee people buying this set, and thinking that they caught something the producers missed when all they're doing is pointing out original compositing errors.

"There's a weird slug on the inside of the Emperor's hood! What the hell!?!"

(that's also a good sign that the brightness on your display is out of whack, along with the matte boxes around TIE's & X-Wings)
 
What exactly has been altered with the films anyway? Is it something the average viewer is going to notice or just hardcore fans picking at details?
 
randomrosso said:
What exactly has been altered with the films anyway? Is it something the average viewer is going to notice or just hardcore fans picking at details?
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There's a lot of stuff that seems obvious to a lot of us, but a large number of people really haven't noticed much outside of "Hey, Han & Jabba!" or "Hey, there's a new song at the end of Jedi!" etc. etc.

But a TON of compositing fixes, color correction, sound-altering, and vfx updates have happened across all three films. Star Wars was the most affected.
 
Thank goodness. More importantly, I hope Disney finally gives a proper archival print to the Library of Congress. It's absolutely ridiculous that Lucas has denied them new prints all these years.
 
Aquamarine said:
Exactly. Lucas's "We don't have the original negatives anymore, therefore we had to source the 2006 release from Laserdisc masters" comment has always been incredibly ludicrous.

Nobody "destroyed" the original negatives of the film. They would have to do a bit of reconstruction, but everything is still intact and it would be very easy for Disney to do a Bluray transfer.
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Scientifically speaking, there was some destruction of the original negatives, because each "cut" of the film (the early ones, apparently including at least the first Special Edition) was made using "negative cutting".

In order to attach two different pieces of film to each other, they would lay the film in a rig that holds it steady, make it so the last frame from one scene overlaps with the first of another, and then make a diagonal slash across both frames at once with a really sharp knife, ensuring that both frames have a perfectly matching cut line. Then they blow the little bits out of the rig, and place a square of tape over the frame (carpet installers use basically the same technique of an overlapping cut-and-tape when they have to join carpet for a big room).

When Lucas made earliest re-cuts to the movie (he's been doing that since forever), he probably just cut the ugly tape away and taped onto a fresh new frame.

When they did the restoration, they carefully removed all of the tape so that they could clean the individual pieces, which could theoretically be put back together without more cutting (since the cuts would still line up), but when Lucas took this opportunity to make a "Special Edition" they were still cutting film the old fashioned way, so he apparently added a few more cuts.

It's a miniscule thing, since one frame of film is only 1/24th of a second, and they might have saved enough of the tiny bits and pieces to repair the cuts, and they have high quality copies of most of the damaged pieces anyways, but technically a "cut" of a movie is appropriately named, and (with older techniques) was a technically destructive process.
 
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