That is one very interesting article. Thanks.

Part 2 is up now

http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?s=8&c=29&n=1&burl=

Kickarse! I have been waiting for Empire Strikes Back.

"Looks like?" Because you must not have read the second article. The most bitching I see is from people like PixyJunket, Jackskeleton, and yourself, to be honest.

Anyway, I didn't buy the DVD set and I probably won't buy future releases. These changes are important to me (in that they determine whether or not I buy the set), but I'm not going to discuss it endlessly, because frankly Lucas managed to kill a large part of my interest in Star Wars in 1997.

Yet here you are 7 years later still talking about it. That's some very substantial loss of interest there.

Whatever. Do a search and see how often I contribute to Star Wars threads.

No thanks. I'm not interested.

Anybody know when Part 3 will be up?

Watch ANH. He says he talked to Jabba. But that scene originally was not seen since it was deleted.

Then get a dictionary and look up whining. I'm enjoying the hell out of my DVDs. Haven't whined about anything. How that translates to whining, I'll never know. But I do know quite a few on here who've done nothing but whine like babies.

Hooray for you!

DVDAnswers' articles are so good. What I've realized after seeing that, is that George Lucas has touched up a lot of scenes for the better; however, his additions and changes (specifically using eps 1 and 2 characters) is inexcusable, and I don't want to buy the DVDs for fear of tainting the originals.

Well, folks who don't like the prequels and don't want the original trilogy to have anything to do with, better deal with it or move on. The prequels are a part of Star Wars and rightfully so. Lucas is tying the trilogies together, and that's not going to change. So for those that don't want them tied together, tough. They are part of the the story, completing the story of the 6 film saga.

Remember, this is Lucas' story, not ours.

Terrell the problem with reducing the situation to "he's the creator, not you" argument is that these are also commercial enterprises, which skews the paradigm a bit (imo).
he is not an artist like Van Gogh laboring away in an attic, while being dismissed financially and socially by his contemporary audience.
he is making these films, and making a good buck as well as marketing the hell out of them with every opportunity.
its amusing that he can get money from licensing Sebulba drink lids from Pizza Hut, and then pulls out the "but i'm a serious artiste and this is my artisitc vision" canard.

and while this may be Lucas' story not ours, we are still the intended consumers for the labors.
he isn't.

ckolchak, absolutely none of that changes the fact that it is his story, and he's created it the way he wants, not the way we want. That is the case for any director. They don't create films the way fans want them to. They make the film they want to make. If they audience loves it, great. If they don't, tough. That's the way it is in movies.

No director has ever made a film the way his audience wants. He doesn't take polls to find out what the audience wants. He doesn't send out information to fans to get their input. He makes it the way he sees it and interprets it. Of course he hopes his intended audience likes it.

The fact remains, and it's not debateable, that the prequels are a part of the 6 film story arc. They're Star Wars, whether you like it or not. He's blending the two trilogies together. You can either accept that or not. If you don't, then don't be angry because the originals may have stuff that tie into the prequels, because that's the way it is.'

The best way to solve this problem, if you're anti-prequel, is to burn the originals to DVD and forget everything else.

i'm not anti-the concept of the prequels.
it's just that the only film of the OT that absolutely needs the prequels to 'explain' it, is Jedi.
SW exists quite well all by itself and Empire is just fine with SW as the primer.
Jedi is where all the problems come in and why you need2 or 3 more films to give its silly and poorly conceptualized plot tiwsts some credence.




i can accept a dvd as 'one' type of experience.
i hated Redux, but thankfully i can watch the original instead.
what i have a harder time accepting, is the contempt of the supplier/producer for the buyer- especially when you watch the Doc and see how nervous they were about getting the 'fanboys' on board from the begining to hedge their bets- even going to San Diego to court them at the comic con.
those very same fans are among the ones that would like to see the original versions acknowledged with a decent release.
but now, long after that original base served its purpose, Lucas basically has a message to them "i don't care what you want.
this is all about me and what I want...go away if you don't like it, i have plenty of other fanboys now to pleasure me with their cash"

just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

save for a decent (re: a/v quality) release of the original theatrical versions, this is definitely the last time i will be supporting this franchise (and hopefully its emperor LFLin any way shape or form)

frankly, i could care less about ROTS, because none of the characters in these two films have done anything for me so far.
those characters are just padding in between special effects sequences.

Well, I disagree. But it's not my problem. Burn your originals to DVD, then move on. You can be a completely happy camper by doing that. Then you can completely forget about the SEs and the prequels, which you think are utter garbage anyway.

You aren't ever going to be happy with Star Wars or Lucas from here on it. Find something else that floats your boat. Why continue to agitate yourself with all of this?

You, calling Star Wars like you see it. You've got too much baggage to call it like you see it.

Pretty good advice, don't you think? He's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah! We hear that kind of crap all the time, and it's always BS. Don't bother denying it. You can't convince me.

I couldn't care less that you care less about ROTS. I'll be there with a smile on my face. You'll be there too, despite a million denials ckolchak.

Some people need to stop hitting "Enter" after every sentence.

sigh.

yeah, you're probably right.
i'm sure i will check it out eventually, in its first run, but i have no burning compulsion for it, the way some fans here still do.

i watched SW (what some people refer to as ANH) tonight.
i was somewhat hasty in my condemnation of the mix.
on the whole i thought it was ok but there were definitely more than just several instances where Burtt is too show-offy for the good of the movie- the DS descent being only the most pronounced and probably the most aggrevating.
while i haven't watched ESB all the way thru yet, the climatic "Father" scene appears to suffer from now being recorded in a wind tunnel.
it is a shame that Burtt is being encouraged to follow in Emperor Lucas' shoes and now can't seem to grasp the concept of subtlety.

to my suprise, i actually still enjoyed the majority of SW tonight.
my first impression of the PQ was that the blacks had been crushed.
i did have to raise the brightness of my PJ up about 12 clicks, but after that, for the most part, the image was highly pleasing.
especially in medium shots and close-ups.
its amazing to be able to discern the texture and translucency of Leias gown.
the pushed reds and blues were kind of annoying, but overall a generally pleasing image.
i'd give it an 8 and the sound a 6 or 7 at best.

as much as i hate Jedi, i was tickled to see the Revenge teaser on the set.
i used to own a copy of it, purchased straight from a projectionist at a local theater shortly after they stopped running it in the fall of '82.
this is the first time i've seen it since.

and as much as i wish these were the pure, authentic articles (pretty annoying since so much of the docs and featurettes belabor the point of how influential those versions of the films were), because of the bonus material, and the chance to at least see , relatively pure, extended clips from these films , i don't feel my money was misspent.
the bonus material is of remarkably high caliber (love the fact that not only do the photos have captions, but they actually exhibit a living, breathing personality to go along with them)

this was what i was expecting when i shelled out $250 11 yrs ago on the "definitive" LD set.

Again, I ask... when in ANH did Han state that he talked to Jabba?

Let me rephrase that statement. We all have way too much baggage to ever be completely objective, one way or another.

i thought you were just saying i was fat.
i do need to drop a few pounds around the middle so i couldn't really fault the comment...


as to 'calling it like i see it'
i am able to enjoy some of the SE changes.
we went all over that in a previous thread and i enjoyed some of the new shots last night.
but some i just find to be banal, hack work.

one that never really bothered me before but now strikes me as very creatively unispired and artlessly implemented is the new Wampa footage.
instead of preserving some of the mystery of the original edit (for instance using an over the shoulder shot from behind and using the slurping, chewing sound effects to let our imaginition connect the dots, until we cut to a closeup of another bloody tendon stringed bone getting tossed into a pile next to the eviscerated carcass of the tauntaun- and and then using one brief new money shot of the Wampa in all its glory as it rises- we get three, bland, artlessly blocked medium shots that just show everything without any subtlety, or storytelling vigor whatsoever.

that, in a nutshell, is the problem i have with most of the changes.
they look like they were concieved and executed by a hack who is tone deaf to good storytelling.

i can skip past the Mos Eisl;y entrance and enjoy most of the rest of the first film, but doggoneit!
-theis was one of those rare films that even though i've seen it so many times, i can still get wrapped up in from begining to end because of the sheer joi de virve of the storytelling.
the SE really mucks that up for me and makes it a fractured experience.


and once again, i seems very absurd to make so much of the bonus footage play like a tribute to the films from a historical context of what they meant, when we don't actually get those films.
it would have made much more sense to have the gist of the Bonus footage be "isn't it wonderful for film to no longer be bound by practical physical effects, or for filmmakers to not to need to settle for partial realization of their visions thanks to computers- or for the 'magic' of remodeling a saga 25 years after the fact and the OTs small place in the bigger picture of this Saga .

that is what the films available on these discs represent.
i enjoyed the docs very much here- but they are discussing films that are being denied to us on current viable, high quality media.

even given the same tenor Lucas displayed in a recent CNN interview (they can watch it on VHS if they want)- i think preservation efforts outside the actual studio are going to spur a release somewhere down the line of a decent reconstruction of the originals.

this release was like a pile of chinese food for me.
it filled a temporary craving i had to see the material again, but afterwards i can't really say "that was a satisfying meal".
i feel stuffed and empty at the same time.

Actually, between test audiences and marketing, the common conception is that it's amazing anything good ever comes out of Hollywood. Most directors do what they're told and hope that someday they have enough clout one day to make their dream project. The auteurs are usually the most vocal about studio pressure, so the notion that all directors make the movie they want and audiences be damned is a bit disingenuous. If that were true, "director's cut" should never exist.

That's true, but that's not the directors. That is a bunch of idiotic, bureaucratic Hollywood execs who only care about the almighty dollar. They don't care about the films or the filmmaker. All they care about is trying to find what will make the most money, and it rarely if ever works. But directors just make the film they want, until the studio sticks their noses where it doesn't belong.

Part 3 is now up

http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?...7673&n=1&burl=

Thought this was the weakest entry in the DVDAnswers series. It seems they skipped through the movie willy nilly -- or perhaps it's because they didn't detail the one change I was most concerned with. Did they fix the horrible compositing on the Rancor scene?

I remember being pretty cheesed about that when they released the Special Editions, repairing things that didn't need fixing yet this obviously poor scene was left intact.