Star Wars coming to Blu-ray!

A while back Amoeba Berkeley had SEALED copies of all three movies on the "faces" laserdiscs for something like $2 each. I should've picked them up but I didn't.

Oh well, no LD player anyways.

 

Seriously, the Yoda puppet looks so much better than CGI Yoda!

What's weird though is that the puppet Yoda in Episode I looks pretty bad. They should have just used the old puppet if they were going to use a puppet. I mean, should Yoda really have looked so drastically different because he was 750 years old in Episode I compared to 800 years old (or whatever) when we see him again in the Empire Strikes Back?

 

I've preordered the complete set at Amazon. What the hell.

 

Not great when compared to the SE DVDs. They look better than the faces LDs, though, at least on my LD player.

 

I did the best I could. Some of those flaws were embedded in the negative scans, there's only so much we could do. The director specifically asked for the film to be dark, so that was a deliberate creative choice.

Note this is the special-edition 2004 DVD version, not the old transfer of the original unaltered film.

I wasn't totally happy with the lightsabers, either, and I was hoping they would eventually go back in and redo all those effects, just to make them more consistent and to work within video's dynamic range.

 

Agreed about both the puppet looking better than CGI, and the ESB puppet looking best. Part of the reason being that Frank Oz is such an excellent puppeteer.

They coudln't use the ESB puppet on Episode 1 because by that point the puppet had deteriorated. I think it was used as a "fill-in" for rehearsals, though.

 

Yes

 

Yeah that's always kind of baffled me that with all the other changes they made that they didn't go back in and CGI the old lightsabers to make them look more in line with the prequels. Not that I condone that, I'm just surprised that they didn't.

 

You know, I thought they did a very, very good job with the puppet as CG in Episodes 1-3.. I remember the ILM guys excitedly telling Frank Oz, "hey, we even got that little wiggle in Yoda's head, just the way you did it!"

Oz was flabbergasted and said, "but I hated that! That's a flaw in the puppet!"

The ILM guys said, "well, George likes it that way." Looked fine to me. Heck, I never even once questioned that it wasn't a real character! (Maybe I'm easily fooled.)

Believe it or not, they don't have unlimited time and money to redo everything. At some point, it becomes a new movie.

I know for a fact George is not happy that a lot of the model shots in the first three films look like model shots. It doesn't bother me, but hey, it's not my movie. And most of those were not changed very much.

 

So how soon before George removes the footage of the main actors from the original trilogy movies, and just CGI's each and every thing that isn't the actor (IE: every background, everything in the foreground, every ship, the exterior Death Star shots, etc) to match the look of the prequels?

I'm convinced that George Lucas has some major sort of weird OCD about these movies and that they'll never; ever be "right" in his eyes so he'll just keep manipulating them 'till the day he dies.

 

You did the color on ANH? I didn't mean to attack your work. Lucas must have been behind your shoulder all the time telling you what to do, sometimes leaving you scratching your head in puzzlement, I bet.

 

I'm guessing there'll be yet another attempt at the CGI Jabba with Han in the hangar scene.

 

I used to have the "Faces" trilogy but got rid of them in favor of keeping the box set. The only difference between them is that the "Faces" version is clv and the box is cav, right?

 

Well, I'm still waiting for episodes 7-9 to drop. It wouldn't be the first time he changed his mind.

Fans parsing his every word noticed the wording in the NYT interview:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/star-wars-films-coming-to-blu-ray-next-year/

He's saying the recent releases get priority over the "very, very expensive" other cuts. Combine that with the quote "..what we call the classic versions..." - who's this "we"? Of course people are looking for any iota of hope.

And of course, the famous shot:



Mark

 

At least Lucas is backing down from the statement he made a few years ago when he said a re-release of the unaltered trilogies would be impossible because they were destroyed to make the special editions.

 

He seriously needs to be punched in the face for wearing that shirt.

 

And also because Yoda was supposed to look younger in EP1.

 

Oh come on, with their resources you know they could have created an exact replica.

And as I already pointed out, should Yoda have looked THAT different at 750 years old as opposed to 800 years old? I'm gonna say no.

 

EP IV looks pretty poor. There's a weird aliasing going on that looks like bad deinterlacing. I'm pretty sure it's like that on the LD versions, too but I haven't seen the LDs in a long time.

They will certainly replace the puppet Yoda in Ep I with a CGI version.

 

I think that they already did for a few scenes in one of the previous releases. It's where Yoda is seated at the Jedi Council, if I remember correctly.

EDIT: Looked it up and it hasn't been released yet, but there are plans to. I knew I remembered seeing it somewhere. From Wikipedia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezak5ZNnA88

 

Correct. And I understand they'll take out the remaining puppet shots for this re-release.

 

Well, they did put special edition shots into the original negative, so the master copies of the original films technically don't exist anymore. We can hope the negative trims were kept somewhere safe and can be utilized in the future (though I assume the color fading on the negative will continue to happen over the years).

 

Can you imagine being the guy to take scissors to the original negative? It could only have been George Lucas himself; anyone else would probably have too much respect for the film to do it.

 

Is it really possible to put something "into" the original negative? I've read over the years that the original negatives were cut up for the SEs (presumably to make a new one, at least in 1997). Has anything definitive ever been said about the state of the original elements?

 

The original film negatives were scanned into a computer and digitally manipulated to add the material. There's no way that it exists on the original film negative at this stage but it could be in the digital version which is what was used to assemble the digitially revised version of the film.