Should you buy this now or wait until the giant COMPLETE STAR WARS set comes out with two or three versions of all six films, storyboard comparison discs, special features discs, ect., all packaged inside a Darth Vader shaped helmut? No wait, there’ll be packaging featuring the heads of ALL the major characters, so completists will have to buy 30 or 40 different versions. I’ll be getting the Wookie head although I’ll bet the Princess Leia hair buns will be removable for play time.
Suddenly I’m reminded of Triumph, the insult comic dog, asking Nerd Vader which button on this chest-plate he has to push to get his mother to come pick him up.
In the original ROTJ Luke does see Anakin Skywalker alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda, with the actor that plays the unmasked Vader, he sees his father as he would be with out the Vader Suit and un-blemished in Jedi Robe
According to the Lucasfilm press release, the original Star Wars will be as it originally was, without the “Episode IV: A New Hope” affixed to the opening crawl.
Apparently, as best they can. Jim Ward of Lucasfilm is quoted in a USA Today article today as saying “It is state-of-the-art as of 1993, and that’s not as good as state-of-the-art [as of] 2006.”
I’ll probably buy it (NERD!!!) and I have to wonder if the NEXT version (because we know there will be one) will be the same, but with Dolby 5.1. After all, I can’t see Lucas letting it sit with 2.0…
Happy as I am for all you “Han-shot-first” obsessives, I’m not buying a second copy of three movies I essentially own. Just like I refused to buy Office Space “With Flair” edition, and Airplane “Don’t Call Me Shirley” edition, etc. etc.
Maybe I’m just not cool, but when I was a kid and first saw the movies, LUKE was the guy I paid the most attention to, and Han was just Luke’s pilot buddy. I doubt I even noticed who shot first in that infamous scene, and if it registered at all, it wasn’t an important enough plot point for me to remember for twenty years until Lucas did the “Special Edition” and the whole furor began.
The movie I’ve always cared about is intact. I don’t even know if I would have held out for this edition if I had known, when the first DVD set came out that this would eventually be released too. But that’s academic. I’ve spent the money to buy it once, and that’s that, Greedo be damned.
In the original movie han blows Greedo out of his boots when Greedo comes to take him to Jabba. It gave him a certain lawless and amoral quality that made the rest of the movie make sense because he was just in it for the money.
In the SEs they added a particularly bad shot by Greedo a split second before Han shoots, making it seem like Han was defending himself rather than just blowing Greedo away. It took a lot of the character out of the character, if you know what I mean. It softened Han to the point that hardcore Star Wars fans immediately started calling for Lucas’ head on a pike for ruining the feel of the original movies and corrupting the character of Han among people who were first seeing the movies with the Special Edition version.
What do they mean by the “2004 digitally remastered version?” Is this the same, special-edition, greedo-shooting-first film released last year in the 3-film set? Or is it a remastered version of the unaltered trilogy? While I wouldn’t mind buying two academically different versions of the NON-Special-Edition trilogy, I don’t really want to be conned into buying the special editions AGAIN just so I can get the originals as a “bonus” afterthought.
If that’s the case, I might have to think about it. I’ve already got DVD ripped versions of the old laserdiscs.
On first read I thought this was going to be two versions of the original trilogy, one being the original theatrical versions, complete with non-ring explosions, visible matte lines, undoctored opening crawl, and the like. The other version would be the cleaned-up, THX version they released on VHS in the nineties. Geek that I am, this I might buy.
[hijack]I always thought Greedo implied he was going to kill Han, not take him to Jabba (from memory):
Greedo: Tell that to Jabba. He might only take your ship.
Han: Over my dead body.
Greedo: That’s the idea. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.
Han: Yes, I bet you have.
So Han had reason to believe he wouldn’t have made it out of there alive if he hadn’t shot Greedo. And if Greedo was indeed planning to take him to Jabba, Jabba would be surrounded by more guards with guns and his chances would be worse. So, he had the forethought to get rid of Greedo and escape. Han is still a mercenary, acting out of self-interest and self-preservation, but not exactly a cold-blooded killer.
However, that still puts Han in the “Oops, you just admitted you’re going to kill me, so I’m gonna shoot you under the table” rather than the “I’ve got my gun pointed ato you under the table but I’m still going to wait for you to miss me from three feet away before I kill you.”
You mock, yet may I point out that this year we’re seeing the emergence of TWO formats for high-definition DVDs, and George Lucas hasn’t said anything yet about that.
IOW, expect him to figure out yet another way to get you to buy these movies.
Well, it took Lucas ages to get on the DVD bandwagon (and supposedly he’d talked Spielberg into delaying the release of his movies on DVD since Lucas didn’t think much of the format). I can imagine that Lucas (with his tight control over all things Star Wars) will hold off until things shake themselves out (Wonder if historians will refer to the coming HD format wars as “Betamax 2: Electric Boogaloo”?). Frankly, unless the price of HD TVs come down dramatically and there’s 8 billion hours of extra goodies on the the HD versions of the disks, I can’t see me buying them.
It was included with the bootleg. I’m fairly convinced, the SWHS will NOT be officially released in any format.
And yes, I’ve seen it. Parts of it, anyway, as a nearly unviewable movie file at 160x120 resolution, with extremely poor sound. From what I can make out, it’s bad. VERY bad. UNIMAGINABLY bad. So bad, in fact, that it MUST be preserved for the ages. Its badness borders on divine.
