BSTNFAN

Agreed. Do it like ST:TOS did with both old and new available to watch.

Solid Snake

I don't love Stop Motion but I do like it. Especially when done well in Live action films. Terminator looks fine as is. In fact...I really like the lighting they used during the T-800's walking out of the Diesel Truck fire. They worked hard on it. I appreciate it. And I don't think CGI would transition well in the picture when everything else looks dated(I don't mean that negatively but it is the 80s) CGI would stick out badly.

Michael Corvin

Cameron sounds hypocritical to me. Adding in 6 minutes to Avatar is no different than Lucas adding Jabba to SW. The scene was filmed and left on a cutting room floor for 20 years. Time seems to be the only factor between the two.

Supermallet

Cameron is no stranger to director's cuts, but AFAIK, he's never revised the existing footage of a film the way that Lucas has with Star Wars. I think there's enough of a difference there to make the distinction.

pinata242

Haven't read through this thread to know if this was already mentioned, but they really need to fix the audio mix on the Death Star attach in ANH. Having Sansweet drown out Williams' fanfare for the FX work was a god damned catastrophe on the DVD releases.

Schloob1

I'll agree with you a little here MC. However Cameron makes mention of the fact that he is not altering a scene but just adding and I am going to at least assume that the option will also be there on the disc to include/not include the extra footage when watching. The scene that you mention about Jabba was left on the cutting room sure, but they did not even use that original scene of course because Jabba was not even a slug but a fat guy. That of course led to the lame part where the original actor walked behind Han which made for the need of Jabba being stepped on by Han and making the goofy face. Also of course the fact that we do not have the option which i bet we'll have for Avatar of not seeing the scene at all and seeing the original film like of course most of us want to be able to do with Star Wars.

biglou114

But I think he did that because he was working under Spielberg, who he has always had a good working relationship with.

Joseph B

Just for the record: Cameron has always had the theatrical versions of his movies available in good quality on the "favored medium of the day". In fact, he usually utilizes "branching" to place both cuts (or more!) on the same DVD/Blu-ray. Lucas, of course, doesn't have this option available to him since he digitally altered the backgrounds of so many scenes (especially in ANH). I think that's what Cameron was referring to in his EW interview.

Anubis2005X

Righteous scenes? Hahaha....

Spiderbite

Add me to list of those who will pass on these unless they include the original versions. The prequel trilogy doesn't exist to me and the revised original trilogy don't interest me. When I want to watch Star Wars, I always watch the original versions.

I didn't buy the first trilogy on dvd until the OT versions came on it. I can wait. I seem to care less and less about the Star Wars universe the more it gets fucked with...but it appears many feel that way.

Another thought: Fuck the Clone Wars. Why not do a "Further Adventures of Luke Skywalker" series? That would appeal to the old and the young. Never have understood the major focus on the prequels when there are so many tales they could do with the characters of one of the most important and loved film trilogies of all time.

coli

Cameron releases every movie with ALL editions in the same quality, and lets the fans decide which ones they like the most. We have directors cuts for Aliens, T2, and The Abyss, but in the same DVD set, you get the original versions in the same quality. Lucas puts out the Special Editions in Anamorphic quality, then double dips us with the Original Version in non-anamorphic quality.

I could care less if Lucas keeps updating the movies, as it is his movies and he wants to fuck em up, thats up to him. But why is so hard for Lucas to just release both versions in the same quality in the same boxset??? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that ALL Star Wars fans will buy that boxset!

Michael Corvin

I agree, that wasn't my point. Cameron is arguing from the stance that him changing his movie is different than Lucas changing his movies. It's not. Like you, and others said, it comes down to offering the originals in a decent quality.

tylergfoster

I do think it's different. Lucas' changes are not a a different edit of the movie. He's literally changing things for reasons like perceived continuity and advances in technology. It's one thing to drop or add scenes that were not in the original version and label it a different cut, like an "extended" or "director's cut". It's another to redo all the sound effects, add in new computer-generated footage from the modern era, and swap out actors with different actors.

Bad_Feeling

I also think the Cameron is being hypercritical. How about the lack of mono track on every DVD release and the current BD release of Terminator? The 5.1 mix that Cameron remixed is horrible.

Didn't Cameron also copy and paste Ah-nulds face onto the stuntman in one of the particularly obvious shots in the bike chase scene for the T2 extended cut?

Michael Corvin

Maybe, but is the Avatar 'director's cut' really from a different cut when Cameron has to spend millions to do all the effects shots? I'd still say we're arguing from the same side of the coin. They are both tinkering with the final film to add in stuff that wasn't there to begin with. Cameron is just more subtle about it.

doctorthodt

Cameron's first cut of Avatar was 4 hours. He wanted the film to be longer, but had to cut it down due to the constraints of IMAX projectors (and presumably time/budgetary concerns).

Drop

And Lucas was limited by a release date and the SFX not being what he wanted. Every director has some sort of limitation to deal with. Cameron is hypocritical, it's just not that big a deal because he offers the first theatrical cut of the film.

Josh-da-man

I think that the two over-riding factors that piss off Star Wars fans about Lucas' changes to the Star Wars trilogy are:

1) The changes weren't limited to things like cleaning up special effects shots and adding in deleted scenes, and a lot of the new things added are changes for the worse, like the pointless Jabba scene, Greedo shooting first, and the cartoony (and out of place) musical number in ROTJ. Few people are upset about adding windows to Cloud City or taking matte lines off of the Rancor.

2) Lucas has historically tried to replace the original versions with these new versions. While he did relent and put out the unaltered trilogy on DVD, it was as "bonus" discs piggybacked onto a re-release in a non-anamorphic widescreen format, so those of us with HDTVs have to choose between watching it windowboxed or having the player generated subtitles cut off when we zoom feature is used.

coli

Some of Lucas's changes to the movies have nothing to do with being limited by technology or release date:

-Inserting Hayden Christenson and deleting Sebastian Shaw in the Force Ghost scene in Jedi. The dumbest change of all 3 Special Editions!

-Having Greedo shoot first instead of Han. What limited Lucas from shooting this scene in 1977?

-Luke falls from Cloud City in 1980 version of Empire
-Luke screams while he falls from Cloud City in 1997 version of Empire
-Lucas deletes Luke screaming while he falls from Cloud City in 2004 version

This just shows that Lucas likes to tinker with the movies for the sake of tinkering, and there is no master plan.

Qui Gon Jim

Agreed.

milo bloom

I think there's room for both. There's a lot of untold stories in both eras, but they don't have to exclude one for the other.


And I have to come down on the side that what Cameron and Lucas do to their films is different. There's numerous examples in this thread alone, but it boils down to the fact that Lucas *changes* content, he doesn't just drop in otherwise deleted scenes, or fix FX shots that were obviously lacking. Now, Cameron putting in a scene may add an extra layer of dimensionality or meaning to another scene in the movie, but that original scene is still there. Lucas rotoscoping an anorexic Jabba the Hutt into ANH, and having Han step on the tail of the most "fearsome gangster in the galaxy" changes what we knew of that character.

The best option is of course to always include multiple cuts at comparable transfer quality. And I'm finding it really hard to get excited for this set knowing it's pretty likely we won't get the original versions included.

Yavin

Not to get too far ahead of myself, but this is one set that I hope uses slim cases instead of a horrible multi-disc case. There's so much great poster art for these films, I would love to see individual covers for each film.

Jedi Master 33

This new animated SW comedy show that's in the works is said to have the OT characters.

GoldenJCJ

^I'm not so sure a new animated comedy series is really going to appeal to the old fans of the series - OT characters or not. Animated comedy isn't exactly what I've been hoping for...

Jedi Master 33

Better than nothing though.