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Original Star Wars on DVD... Sorta
An anonymous reader writes "The Original Star Wars is available on DVD. Sure it's more moola in Lucas's pocketsess (Gollum accent). But he did finally release the original version for a limited time.
But which Original Star Wars, I bet Episode IV is in the opening titles. " Also apparently the original versions are basically non-anamorphic transfers from the laser discs. So basically, they look terrible.
Sorry, I couldn't help myself :-)
John
So its the same as the last DVD release but one of the bonus features is a crappy version of the very original?
:)
I have every VHS and DVD version of the movies and can usually point out most of the differences. But, I am getting better.... I no longer live in my parents basement
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You know what else grinds my gears? When I can't find the droids that I am looking for.
Honestly? Will the original Trilogy ever be released in a non-craptastic form? Perhaps we will have to wait for the Blue-Ray HD-DVD battle to be resolved. This particular release leaves me feeling underwhelmed, and my pocketbook will stay closed.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Oh, an ultimate set? You don't have enough of my money?
Seriously, I wish Lucas would understand that we would rather see completely new material from him than to see him repackage and alter what we have and do love from him. I would rather see him release 9 mediocre or bad movies than to have him edit, 3D-ify and edit again episodes IV, V & VI.
Damnit Lucas, let the studio technicians re-master the movie (they went to school for it, they know what they're doing) and give us more original content! Look at all the famous directors you've studied. Did Akira Kirosawa edit and re-release Shichinin No Samurai or Rashômon over and over and over again? No, he continued to make more movies, some very very good and some mediocre.
My work here is dung.
I was looking at the comments section at Amazon, and that is the biggest grip, Im going to hold onto my 60.00 and wait for them to show up at the pawn shop if this is the case.
Is Lucas trying to make a point?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"Yea I saw Phantom Menance and Attack of the Shit. It was like your uncle sticking his weiner in your mouth. Not like when you were a kid but grown up. You don't expect it either, your uncle's your favorite person, got you high, bought you your first beer, hate your mom hate your dad but your uncle is cool.
You're at your parents for christmas, everyone's in bed, you're watching Letterman and you look over and see your uncle trying to put his weiner in your mouth. That's what Phantom Menace was like.
I'm not even gonna see the third one (ROTS). It'll just be me walking into an empty theater and there will be Lucas ready to rape me some more. And I'll just do it to get it over with.
Then he'll put on a Greedo mask and call it the Special Edition."
Aw Frell this
He finally releases the originals after he said he never would, and /. still complains bitterly ... If it's all original but fixed a couple typos (such as the opening credits), is that such a horrible thing?
They'll try again in a year.
And again a year after that.
And again a year after that.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
These are not the DVDs I'm looking for...
Meta will eat itself
My wife just bought these yesterday. She put in the original version of Jedi for my daughter. A bit later my daughter came to my wife saying that something did not look right. Then my wife put in the new version, no complaints. I am hoping that it was something simple like the aspect ratio was not right on the TV, but if not it does not bode well if a 4 year old complains about the picture.
When I came home from work, I noticed that the new version was very dark. I turned-up the brightness for the kids. I wish I knew why that was.
How is the quality of the bootleg DVD rips of the original trilogy from LD? How does it compare to these? Wouldn't it be a shame if the bootlegs looked better. Anyway for me quality better than my old VHS versions will be acceptable, but why could it not have been at least an anamorphic rip of the original trilogy on these new discs?
You may be referring to the great print recall in the 1990s. According to this guy high-quality prints still exist and so do the "original" interpositives. Granted the guy is speculating about the interpositives but he seems pretty sure about high-quality prints. If stored carefully these are probably better than the analog laserdisks.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I hated Episode One, I liked Episode Two and I loved Episode Three. Overall, they're a good addition to the Star Wars universe. Episode One was fluff and terrible fluff at that. But it'd be a lie to say I don't own them and I know that these are movies that will survive time and last in my movie collection.
The important thing is that I will show them to my kids, much like the IV, V & VI were shown to me. And hopefully, they'll spur imagination and entertainment for everyone that sees them. That is the point of sci-fi movies, by the way, not to satisfy everyone that views them. I think that any eight to fourteen year old kid would enjoy all the Star Wars movies thoroughly and that makes them good. I, II & III contain excellent social commentary even though some of the acting might be terrible and the plot clunky.
We expected platinum for Lucas and he gave us silver. That's not very fair. Still, I'd rather watch Episode One than 90% of the crap I see hit movie theatres these days.
My work here is dung.
Meh. I've read the complaints, but I'm tired of waiting. Getting 2-DVD sets for $20USD a pop is a good deal, and I put my VCR (original trilogy on VHS) away a long time ago. So I'm going to go ahead and pick them up. If a remastered version of the original ever comes out, I'll probably pick it up. But life is too short to wait around for perfection.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I still have my original VHS tapes which were recorded off of regular TV way back when. I remember using our VCR that had a wired remote control! lol At this point they've been viewed so many times you can barely see ANYTHING in ESB because everything is so dark. I was extremely pumped that they were releasing the "originals" on DVD, only to be crushed by this mess with a bad transfer. Didn't they digitally remaster the originals before making all of those changes?! Can't they use that to make these new DVDs?! They took away the orignal Ewok song / celebration at the end of ROTJ. That part always gave me the shivers. Now we've got that awful multi-world celebration and that horrible music - what were they thinking! And that f'n' animated creature singing in Jabba's palace - hold on, I have to wipe the puke off my shoes.
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
They're not really the originals and they look terrible, but otherwise they're fine?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I bit the bullet and bought the DVDs. Much as I'm loathe to give bullfrog-face Lucas any more of my money (having seen that he spends it on making rubbish like Jar Jar Binks), I decided that the Special Editions just irritated me too much, and I wanted to watch Star Wars without shouting at the TV. Quality-wise, I think they're actually pretty good. They're not the digitally remastered versions, but they still look very clean, and they're also in widescreen. These DVDs offer a much clearer picture than any old VHS tape will, although the compression is a little more obvious than on the Special Editions. The quality isn't anywhere near as bad as some whingers would have you believe anyway. At the end of the day, I'm glad I bought them. They might not be cleaned up, but if they'd never been digitally remastered before then you wouldn't be complaining about that anyway. I think of them as a piece of history i.e. the way the films looked originally, and should really look now. Now that I have the originals, I'm going to blissfully pretend that George Lucas died in 1984, and that the Special Editions and Episodes I, II and III never happened. This makes me happy.
A friend of mine that's a rabid Star Wars fan was grousing about this yesterday, even as he talked about when he'd pick them up.
I told him the SW fans' motto should be "I may have to buy it, but I don't have to like it."I just wanted to clarify something. They aren't transfers from LaserDisc, they are transfers from a 1993 LaserDisc master. Big difference there. And I think crappy is a bit harsh. Do they look as good as they could? No. Are they anamorphic? No. But are they better than the LaserDisc-ripped bootlegs? At the time, I think the answer is yes. Granted, once the X0 Project gets completed, there might be some competition there. But for now, I think this is the best you're gonna see the legitimate non-SE original trilogy. (In other words, that doesn't include some where people integrated the 2004 DVDs with LaserDisc rips, while that's better quality, it's still not the same as a legitimate release)
First: Here's a shot-by-shot comparison of the newly released footage to recent home releases.
Next, here's a simple explanation of what "anamorphic" is all about. It originally comes from the cinema. An anamorphic lens stretches or shrinks the image along one axis. In the movies, they use it to shrink the image horizontally when they film it, and stretch it back when they project it. This is what allows theaters to fit a widescreen image on square cells on the film. Anamorphic DVDs work similarly.
See, the aspect ratio (ratio of width to height) of the Star Wars theatrical release is somewhat larger than TV's traditional aspect ratio of 4:3. Annoyingly, the video format that DVDs use is hard-coded to a range of fixed resolutions, all of which have 4 times as many pixels across as they have vertically. (Ok, I'm oversimplifying slightly, but not critically.) To fit content wider than 4:3 onto a 4:3 format, you have 3 choices:
To display an anamorphic DVD on a regular-screen TV, the DVD player will still need to shrink the image top-to-bottom, otherwise everything will look tall and thin. On such a TV, an anamorphic DVD will not look much different than a letterboxed DVD. On a wide-screen TV, though, the DVD player can stretch the image side-to-side to fill the entire width of the display. This provides a direct benefit over simply enlarging a letterboxed DVD image: You gain vertical resolution.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Schnapple
Err, typo above. "4 times as many pixels across" should read "4/3rds as many pixels across." Carry on.
Program Intellivision!
You people will always find something to complain about when it comes to George Lucas, won't you? If he discovered perfectly preserved original prints of the first trilogy, decided to release them in theatres again, got John Williams to play the Star Wars soundtrack live at each theatre with the London Symphony Orchestra, AND paid for everyone's first ticket to see them, you'd blame him for your popcorn being stale.
I applaud Lucas in his devotion to his creation that millions love. It's an icon of our time.
If you don't like the movies or the editing that has been done to them, that's fine. Don't buy them. It's that simple.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
So basically, they look terrible.
Now, I'm no expert but wasn't that the whole point with releasing the originals on DVD?
*ducks and waits for a +flamebait to hit him*
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
So, is this the equivalent to Star Wars Service Pack III? Even Microsoft stops updating it's OS after a certain number of years.
"Does this wine taste funny to you?" -- Socrates
They make it sound like it was unavoidable to destroy the original footage. Somehow I doubt that.
Wouldn't the first step in making the "special editions" be to digitize and clean up the original film? And who in their right mind would destroy that data? It can't take up too many drives.
So to me it means one of two things:
1. In his hatred of his original work, Lucas ordered the data deleted, which is pretty stupid (since keeping it around would be cheap).
2. He *has* a very nice cleaned up original version sitting on the Lucas SAN somewhere but refused to allow that to be released.
Either way it blows....
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
What do you want? It was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Some of the details were bound to be confused over time.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
As I had not bought any previous DVD version, I bought the Widesreen Limited Edition of Episode IV yesterday. Upon seeing this discussion, I popped in the original version so that you could have the opinion of someone who had actually seen it. I am not a video buff, so I don't know all the jargon, but I am a photographer and have spent a lot of time looking at images. I'm using a 27" Trinitron CRT, so those of you with fancy, schmancy plasma screen may may have a different experience.
Overall, I would NOT say that it looks terrible, though if you want to find things to complain about you can. A couple scenes look somewhat muddy. Some scenes have some dust specks here and there, a few scenes have quite a bit of dust, others have none. But all in all the contrast, brightness and color are pretty good. If you sit up close you can see a fair amount of film grain, but sitting 10 feet back you cannot. What does seem to be missing is what I'll call the "ghost boxes" around the ships in the space scenes.
It does appear to be the original version. The title screen only says, "Star Wars", no "Episode IV: A New Hope" Han shoots first. There are no really bad CG characters added. The Death Star explosion is not enhanced. I'm not enough of a Star Wars nerd to know what else to look for.
I suppose it depends on what you are looking for. If you want to be a video geek and complain how its not that great, you can do that. If you want to have fun and remember how you felt as a 12 year old boy in 1977 seeing something that was completely unlike anything you had ever seen before, this is the way to do it. It still brought a tear to my eye when Han zooms in at the last minute and saves Luke.
Do I think Lucas is a prick for not at least cleaning up the dust specks and giving us the option of 5.1 sound? Yes, yes I do.
So there you are Slashdoters. I hope you are all happy that I ruined my first screening of Star Wars in 10 years looking for things not to like and jumping around looking for "enhancements".
Here's an idea.... rather than say capturing from one laserdisc master, how about they collect 50 or so laserdiscs, capture all of them and then maybe some of the data lost in the analog process could be interpolated from all the copies to produce a clearer picture? I don't know how well that'd work.
This is what the poster is referring to.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
These days computer users take a few things for granted. For instance, if a mistake is made, there should be ways to correct it.
Before the days of the iconic trash can and/or recycle bin, we lived in fear of accidentally deleting an important file. But now, first you are asked, "Are you sure you would like to delete this file?" And if you lose your brain momentarily and say "yes" when you should have said "no", you can pull it right back out of the trash.
Basic user interface design.
Now lets pretend we're designing the control centre for an industrial facility that has to sit in the middle of a lava flow for some reason.
Where exactly would you put the "destroy this facility" button? I mean, if you had the audacity to create one in the first place. Most people would avoid designing a control so sensitive as to turn "stable" into "complete structural failure".
If you're Lucas, apparently you put it right smack in the middle of the console, so that when two people are fighting, they can bump into it and send the structure to a fiery death.
No, "Are you sure you would like to destroy this facility?" At the very least if they really wanted to complete the destruction they should have had to empty their trash icon.
I can accept a lot of things, but seriously... for a guy who embraces technology at the expense of storytelling and style, Lucas makes some surprisingly poor choices for script devices.
With all the Star Wars fans out there and a growing number of Computer geeks, wouldn't it be possible to create an open source project that rebuilds the Star Wars movies part by part using CGI? Think about it - everyone could try to improve a part of the project; someone could model a Star Destroyer another one could work on the lighting of a particular scene etc. - and when enough people contribute the final result could even surpass the original. Until that point is reached though all are working towards one and the same goal (which is uncommon in huge open source projects) i.e. precisely recreating the movies.
Stage 2 would be the creation of an HD version, stage 3 might even be a 3D-Version. Just imagine: the space battles of Ep. IV and VI in full 3D!
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
The release of these DVDs firmly establishes that you cannot please Star Wars fanboys.
:(
Demand for the release of the original, unaltered trilogy on DVD has come up in the form of a great and plaintive whine in every single Star Wars-related story on Slashdot since probably around 1999. Now, here they are, and what are the "fans" doing? Complaining.
Sure, Lucas could have remastered the OT's picture and sound, made it anamorphic, and left out all the Special Edition changes. But then you would just have fanboys complaining that that constitutes an alteration. I know, you think that sounds outlandish, but I guarantee you it's not. Star Wars has become less about enjoying the films than complaining about the films, at least around here.
I think the only way the whiny fans will ever be pleased is when the technology finally emerges to Choose Your Own Star Wars Edition, where you pick from a digital menu which alterations you want. "OK, I want the non-Special Edition, with remastered picture and sound, Han shoots first, lightsabers are colored, old sandcrawler but new dewbacks, I want the new space battles... hmm, the Death Star explosion: ring or no ring?"
I'm kidding, of course. That won't actually solve anything, the whiners will just complain that they're once again being "forced" to buy another edition. George Lucas wants me to pay for entertainment. I have no free will and have to pay for every edition whether I like it or not. Boo hoo.
The unaltered OT is out on DVD. You got your wish. Now, for Christ's sake, quit your bitching. Instead of continuing to moan about what you didn't get, count your lucky stars that we live in an economy that can support your having so many choices in your entertainment. And recognize that it is a choice. You great big giant babies.
Ahh, okay, I feel better. Have a great day.
Penny Arcade tells it like it is..
Those flat colors.... that film grain... the cheesy special effects... Lucas really should've cleaned it up with a computer or something.
Beauty is just a light switch away.
I for one, am going to buy the new 'release', because it's better than VHS, and saves me from having to convert it myself.. I thought the whole point of watching a movie was to enjoy it, not sit and analyze it's post production, but after reading an ongoing thread on 'originaltrilogy.com', several posts by someone who apparently 'works in production and has done work for lucasfilm', insists things like CGI grain has been added to the movies, etc.. Why can't you just enjoy the damn movies? Instead, it has become, I want super higher than high def video and ultra surround sound of a 30 year old movie.. criminey. I'd hate to be around some people when they see a movie in the theater... Just my $.02.
I bought the OT DVD set when it came out in 2004, and would have considered buying these ones too if:
1) They fixed the plethora of problems introduced by doing a rushed DVD transfer by Lowry Digital. Examples that stand out include forgetting to take lightsabre colours into account when colour-correcting scenes and flipping music channels. From what I gather Lowry had 30 days per movie.
2) They included the classic trilogy, obtained from film material from the 1997 film restoration of the OT for the DVD transfer. It seems they underwent a major film restoration process to get the best possible source material for the Special Edition. Surely they preserved that before Lucas started scribbling on it with new effects.
So as it stands I won't be buying these. They've done nothing to fix the Special Edition, and the Classic Edition looks no better than on Laserdisc.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I have watched (some of) Episode IV, and I can assure you that the text "EPISODE IV / A NEW HOPE" does not appear in the scroll-up. Simply "STAR WARS" followed by "It is a period of civil war...". I was flabbergasted -- I've never seen that before, although I had heard that's how it appeared in 1977. Apparently by 1978 or so it had been added.