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378 Terabytes Of Star Wars on 600 G5s
Mrbill points to this USA Today story on the
digital makeover given to the original Star Wars trilogy, noting that the digitized films have also been converted to HD for later release as high-definition DVDs.
"Go for it George Lucas. Ruin all of your movies. "
Empire Strikes back, despite being 'special', is still entertaining.
Though I agree with the sentiment, we've been around this block a million times. Don't buy it. Let the people who do enjoy it. In the mean time, let's talk about something a little more up-beat:
- Lots of people were employed to work on this.
- The technology and experience will help ILM make better effects for upcoming movies.
- SW in HD will hopefully make broad adoption of higher-resolution DVD players an easier transition.
- Just the number '378 Terabytes' is enough to cause underwear tents to rise all over the Slashdot population.
"Derp de derp."
"...people have to buy the trilogy six times..."
Really?
As far as I know, nobody is being forced to buy it even once.
I've downloaded the laserdisc rips you refer to, or at least, "some laserdisc version of the original Star Wars trilogy ripped from laserdisc and available online through various p2p applications." Disclaimer done.
Anyway, the version I looked at was pretty crappy; it was blurry like I would expect a VHS version to be.
I'd rather see a couple apocryphal scenes (obligatory reference to Han vs. Greedo) than look at grainy 200-lines-of-resolution rips.
Seriously, at this stage of my life, I understand the nostalgia, and I'll gladly trade 480p and surround sound for the price of Han vs. Greedo and the other additions of questionable worth. I *want* the cleaned up special effects transparencies, and I don't mind a little cleaning up here and there, although I would prefer the original soundtrack, not any substituted audio or music.
On another topic, at the risk of being shouted down by hordes of fanboys, the original Star Wars is overrated. It was a great trilogy (I was disappointed by Jedi, but it was Completion to the series, and I am a forgiving person), but there was something more behind it that caused all of us kids growing up seeing the movies to become fans like we did: marketing.
The marketing juggernaut behind Star Wars is what got the hundreds of action figures and model sets, fast food cups and posters and toys, t-shirts, towels, lunchboxes, watches, cookie jars, etc. etc. into our homes.
I would argue that the toys themselves are what kept Star Wars alive much longer had there been a mediocre marketing campaign behind it. When the movie was out of the theater (after an amazingly long run IIRC), we still had our action figures and toy sets to put them in. Personally, I had several friends with Star Wars figures, and we would pool our Star Wars toy resources and set up bases and enact elaborate battle scenes, scenes from the movies, and scenes we would create on our own. We still had the posters, the magazines, the watches, the lunchboxes (I had the original metal Star Wars lunch box, but the last time I saw it (about 15 years ago) it had already rusted up pretty badly.) the bedsheets, etc., etc., to remind us and keep Star Wars close in our thoughts.
This indoctrination of a whole generation in the Star Wars mythos created the best ongoing Star Wars marketing; fans who had SW so ingrained in their life that their favorite philosopher wasn't Socrates or Plato; philosophy and wisdom meant Yoda. Kids (mostly kids, some weird adults) who saw these movies as they were growing up, took Star Wars almost as a replacement for religion or oral tradition, or as a replacement for every Mother Goose story their parents never read them because they were too busy working overtime because they were single parents, or because dad was an emotional cripple as a result of his dad being an emotional cripple.
I'm sure if some interested college psych major wanted to, he could interview hundreds of 30-something children who gravitated to Star Wars and come up with a great dissertation subject about marketing and the psychological effects on young children who become overdoctrinated with commercialized fictional characters.