Original Star Wars Versions Not On DVD

Cafe Society
21

Um, yes. That was basically it. And they were minor things. But I’m back so I shall clarify:

  1. Midichlorians are not what people think. They’re a biological explanation for being attuned to the Force, they are not the Force itself, so get over it already. They do not interfere with what we have always believed, that the Force is a spiritual Energy. But who can use it, and why it runs in families, must be biological. That’s just logic.

  2. Threepio will have his memory erased. That’s why he can’t recall Tatooine at all. (admittedly this doesn’t explain Owen not recalling Threepio, but it’s possible that there are many droids all named C-3PO. Would you remember a cow you’d seen twenty years previously? Or a microwave oven? Not just the brand, but the actual one? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t - especially if it had a whole new outer covering put on it.

  3. Lucas doesn’t listen to fans if it intereferes with his story he has mapped out. But he does recognise what fans generally like, and so tries to put that in his movies - chases and light sabre duels and space ships and skimpy clothes on all the women. (the point someone made at how he only seems to listen to his kids, though, is a good one, and seems to be alarmingly true)

  4. NSync were never going to be in the movie in the way people thought. They wanted to be, and they had planned to be, but it never happened. You saw the big battle at the end - if any of them had been NSync would you be able to tell? So no big deal even if it had all gone ahead. But George Lucas didn’t arrange it, it was Rick McCallum who met the band (some of them) and asked them along. As far as I can tell, it was filmed, but cut out simply because of standard scene editing. Or perhaps not ever intended to be included in the first place. It wasn’t due to pressure from ay outside source.

The problem with Rick McCallum is, he lies, or exaggerates, or says things he doesn’t mean or have the authority to tell - unfortunately he contradicts other official (and unofficial but reliable) sources constantly, so it gets pretty confusing sometimes.

22

No, they are bootlegs and some of them are ok. They even have symbols (some of which are from the wrong companies) and title screen in order to make it look legitimate. I’ve seen a couple reviews of them as well as watched one set. Right now the highest quality legitmate version of the original Star Wars trilogy is the laserdiscs.

However I think a better plan would be to by a computer with a DVD burner and video capture software, buy a laserdisc player and then the laserdiscs. And then make your own DVDs. That’s my plan. Then you could also do Song of the South (the Hong Kong version has no subtitles at all), The Indiana Jones movies, unedited versions of The Rescuers and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Or if I had a spare pile of cash laying around somewhere.

23

DVD bootleg review

24

WHAT??? They’re putting Looney Tunes out in Asia, but not releasing them in the US? What distorted logic are the “suits” at WB using to justify this?

25

No, just insanely stupid. (not you…the whole “The Force as a virus” idea. ) It completely undermines the idea in the first movie that The Force was a discipline that anyone could learn. Granted someone built like Bruce Lee is gonna be better at it than someone built like say…Lou Costello, but either could learn it. I suppose that Lucas can tapdance and say “We ALL have the Force-Virus in us, but some people have more than others.” in which case the question becomes "Why introduce idiotic techo-babble to answer a question that nobody asked. The concept of The Force worked perfectly well in the first three movies without Force-bugs, why use screen-time to techo-babble it?

Ever heard of Occam’s razor? There’s a science fiction equivilant: The explnation that that uses the least techo-babble is the best.

'cause the minute you start trying to put technobabble on top of a concept that doesn’t need it, people who enjoy looking at the internal logic of the story start asking questions like these:

If the Force is merely a virus, or virus shit, or similar, why the Hell, with thousands of years of Light-Side Ascendency, didn’t the gawddamned Jedi Council start “innoculating” everyone with Force Bugs? Can’t be that hard for a culture that casually has FTL travel, healing tanks, and sentient robots. Get some of Yoda’s blood, centerfuge it, put some of the serum in a bunch of petri dishs, let the Force Virus grow and start injecting people. Voila: tons of good hearted people now are instantly infected with the Force. How could that be bad? People start having precog flashes when loved ones are in trouble, people start being more intuitive, and the Jedi have a lot bigger pool of people to draw from who can be trained as Jedi. Plus if you re-infect the existing Jedi with the Force-Virus, you’ve now got much more powerful Jedi who can do more good.

Really. It’s a stupid idea intended to fix a non-existant problem (Alleged Problem: “Why does The Force run in families?” Answer: “It does 'cause it’s a fictional construct and a conceit of the plot. Why doesn’t the Force allow you to teleport? Same reason.”)

Fenris

26

I was hoping that the reason midichlorians were introduced as an idea would have something to do with the Clone Wars. And this may yet turn out to be the case, but I’m not as sure as I once was.

If Palpatine was to experiment with cloning Jedi to be a part of his Sith army, then Midichlorians would be a good explanation as to why it didn’t work out, or whatever. But seeing as there can only be two Sith at one time, and the clones seem to have nothing to do with the Force either, it’s probably not gonna happen.

I do, however, think George had his reasons for it that he believed made sense.

I’ll ask him next time I see him. :wink:

27

Ah, GuanoLad any hint on where these revelations are coming from? Anything that sets them apart from any other rumblings?

Because I remember how Aurra Sing was going to play a big role in Episode 2, which would reveal what she was doing on Tattooine in Episode 1. And if I recall, she’s in exactly zero frames of Ep 2, which is only a few more than she is in Ep 1.

Remeber when Qui-Gon’s role and death were going to be explained more fully in Episode 2? Lucas didn’t, because there’s only, I believe, two mentions of him in the whole movie, and each time only very briefly. Quite an honor for a Jedi whose apprentice doesn’t even mention him later on, especially when he talks about who trained him.

As far as Lucas having the story “mapped out”, come on. There’s more than enough evidence that this is not the case. I for one think it’s obvious that Darth Vader, Luke, and Leia are not related in Episode 4. Do you also remember when there were nine episodes, that the story was a trilogy of trilogies? Oh wait, no it wasn’t (even though there were plenty of interviews with Lucas at that time saying there were) because after Lucas changed his mind and decided the story was about Darth Vader, he decided to retcon the facts and make it so that not only were there only six episodes, there only ever were six episodes.

And midichlorians continue what I have come to consider to be a poor choice of ideas for the movie. The idea of “The Force” is not a terribly deep or original concept, but it was nice to have it in Episode 4. However, when we decided that it was somehow genetic, and that divine bloodlines were involved, it really torpedoed a lot of what was good about the original movie. Suddenly Luke wasn’t just a local boy done good, he was heir to a mystical legacy - not at all the same things and not very inspiring. The best a kid admiring the movies could hope for at that point was to be Han Solo - the eternal sidekick, shut out from the divine power. In my opinion, this seriously weakened everything.

The midichloriens make this even worse. I honestly don’t know why they were involved. If he wanted a “test” for Force-ness, and seriously needed these things, he could simply have said, “Midichloriens are microscopic beings we don’t understand, but they’re attracted to people who are strong in the Force.” Make them some kind of indicator of the Force rather than a channel for it, which is just dopey. (That is, if you must have them in the first place.)

I love the original trilogy, but most of all I love the original film. I like the world Lucas created. But I think he has made some poor choices in the second trilogy, and I think he’s throwing together a mishmash of poorly-thought out ideas and characters and counting on it all working out in the end. I don’t have much hope for this. If this prequel trilogy is as well-plotted as The Phantom Menace, we’re all in a heap of trouble.

Lucas is kind of unique in that some of the biggest fans of his work really resent him and wish he would leave it alone. To get back to the OP, I wish he would stop fiddling with the original trilogy, and I wish he would allow the fans to have a non-“fixed” version of it. At the very least he needs to change the whole Greedo thing, as that is a serious flaw in the movie, introduced for no good reason, and it makes no sense.

28

As much as I acknowledge your points, it’s George’s movie and he can do whatever he likes. I’m happy to let him. You don’t have to like it.

29

That’s another thing that bugged me about The Phantom Menace.

What’s all this crap about “Always two there are, the master, and the apprentice”?!?

In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader tells the emperor, “If he [Luke] can be Turned, he will make a powerful ally.” Okay, so if Vader and Palpatine managed to turn Luke to the dark side, we’d have the master (Palpatine), the apprentice (Luke), and … and Darth Vader hanging off the side like a fifth wheel?! If “always two there are,” then as soon as Luke was turned, either Vader or the Emperor would have to go. And the Emperor was far stronger with the Dark Side than Vader was. Vader must have known this!

30

I can vouch for this. There was at least one interview (around the time of Empire) where he named the possible titles for the remaining movies; (I may be inaccurate, I read the article 20(!!) years ago, but I found the first three titles cooler than words. Very Asimovian feel)

  1. The Fall of the Republic
  2. The Rise of the Empire (or Emperor)
  3. The Corruption of Anakin Skywalker
  4. A New Hope
  5. The Empire Strikes Back
  6. The Revenge of the Jedi
  7. (Don’t remember, but it was something like “The Phantom Menace”, since there was to be one last bad-guy lurking about)
  8. (Don’t remember, but something about a renewed threat as new Jedi trained by Luke had to go out and try to stop a growing menace)
  9. (Don’t remember, but something like “A Final Chance” or “The Last Battle” or somesuch)

**

I agree. And it hurts the character of Han. When we first see him, he’s a likeable rogue, but has no real conscience, no real committments (other than to Chewie) and no real morals. Shooting first demonstrates that: he thinks there MIGHT be a threat, so without a hesitation, he kills Greedo. By the end of the movie, he’s grown so much that he’s entering a hopeless battle to help a friend. By the second movie, he’s still helping friends at great personal cost. By the third movie, he’s a full-fledged hero.

All of that’s undermined by making Han wait for Greedo to shoot first.

And yeah, they’re Lucas’s movies, but as one of Lucas’s consumers, I feel free to gripe about how his “touch-ups” keep making things worse.

Fenris

31

That’s also the way I remember it, although 10 years later. I thought that 7, 8 and 9 were the Timothy Zahn novels, since no movies were to be made of them. And the novels were Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command. Ah, I was so out of the loop who knows where I got that.

We’re getting off track but this site claims to have a Episode 7 plot summary written by Lucas himself. I’ll leave it at that.

32

Is there a part in episode 9 when Luke gets all burned out and alcoholic and turns into Wing Commander?

33

yep.

see

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1572549625

(I recommend that one, btw)

They also released 2 Tweety DVD’s in Japan.

Rumor has it region 1 DVD’s are in the works.

And, for LD-DVD transfer - watch for stand-alone DVD burners - no computer needed. Right now there are competing standards (basically Phillips v. Pioneer)

34

Bootlegs DVDs are sometimes available from various sources. I might know someone who has them and I might have seen them. They’re transfers from the laserdiscs. Unfortuntely, they’re not anamorphic and the sound tends to be off later in the movie (imagine TESB with the lightsabre duel between Luke and Vader having the sounds of the clashing sabers about 1 second off).

Here’s a review of some of those that are available:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/starwarsboots/

There used to be an online store that sold bootleg DVDs, but I can’t find it now.

I don’t have to like it, but I can say something about it, and if enough people say the same thing, he might listen (hint hint :wink: ).

From the petition:

Admittedly, it’s got a long way to go :). If only I could get a plug on fark.com…

35

Oh and on the slight off-topic subject of 6 vs. 9, here’s a story about producer Gary Kurtz (who left when he didn’t like the direction the Revenge/Return of the Jedi story was taking) and what the “original” plans for the nine stories are.

http://cgi.theforce.net/theforce/tfn.cgi?storyID=2624

Of course, Lucas is quoted as saying both six and nine. Here’s a discussion:

36

Lego, the EPII book did kinda explain the Qui Gon thingy.

When Anakin kills the Tuskens, you hear Qui Gon yelling “Anakin! Stop! NO!!!” That wasn’t just a memory playing out. That was supposed to BE Qui Gon yelling at that time.

Up to this point, Jedi’s coming back as ghosts just didn’t happen. Once a Jedi was dead, he was dead. But with Anakin going nuts like he did, he knocked the Force off ballance and this gave Qui Gon the ability to interact in the living world.

Now that the Force is off ballance, it will try and right itself. One way, I guess, it to allow Jedi spirits to interact with the living world.

That’s what I gathered from the book anyway, and it does explain a few things.

37

If there’s no original trilogy on DVD (screw this thing with Lucas editing newer parts in with the old to support a stupid Episode I-III storyline), then I shall buy every VHS set of the original trilogy I can find. I love my DVD’s but I’m sick of Lucas screwin’ it up.