{"id":544,"date":"2006-05-04T16:47:59","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T16:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=544"},"modified":"2006-05-04T16:47:59","modified_gmt":"2006-05-04T16:47:59","slug":"unfked_with_edition_getting_di","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/04\/unfked_with_edition_getting_di\/","title":{"rendered":"Un-F**ked With Edition Getting Dissed Again?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hmm. Only hours after hearing the news<\/a> about the original, unaltered Star Wars<\/i> movies being released, my buzz is crumbling because of all the rumors flying around the ‘net about them. Basically, folks are suggesting that my long-awaited grail is going to turn out to be a half-hearted effort at best. According to a USA Today<\/i> article<\/a>, “the original films’ video quality will not match up to that of the restored versions.” The article quotes a Lucasfilm employee as saying, “It is state of the art, as of 1993, and that’s not as good as state of the art 2006.”<\/p>\n


\nSo what the hell does that mean? Will this release be, as Chenopup suggested in his comments on the previous entry, no better in the video-quality department than one of those old 12-inch laserdiscs (which, if you don’t remember them, were better than VHS but not nearly as sharp and clear as current DVDs)? I simply can’t accept that a decent-quality digital print of the original films doesn’t exist somewhere<\/i> in the Lucasfilm Archives. Given what I know about the Lucas operation’s meticulous preservation of everything<\/i> related to these movies (think of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/i>), it just doesn’t make sense to me that Lucas wouldn’t have kept a copy of the pre-revision versions, regardless of how obsolete he may believe those versions to be. And I’d like to give Uncle George the benefit of the doubt for not being stupid enough, or stubborn enough, to enrage old-timers like me by not selling us something that’s actually worth owning. Surely now that he’s come far enough down off his high horse to actually release the original cuts, he’ll go far enough to make them worth our time and money, won’t he?<\/p>\n

I’ll admit that this may just be the undying hope of my inner seven-year-old. Is it possible that Lucas really is tone-deaf enough, petty enough, vain enough, or unmindful enough of his already badly wounded reputation among his own fans, to answer our hopes and wishes with a symbolic “screw you?” Anything’s possible… George may throw us a soft, fuzzy-looking mess just to shut us up. Or this talk of poor quality may be just the Internet churning out its usual half-digested stew of nonsense and fear.<\/p>\n

In other words, I’m going to try and reserve judgment until I learn a little more about these releases. I’ve followed the DVD business enough to know that disc specifications can and do change suddenly, sometimes only days before the final release, so you never really know what’s coming down the chute until you put it in your player, or at least read something on the ‘net from someone who has. It wasn’t clear until only days before it hit the shelves whether or not the double-disc E.T.<\/i> set would even contain the original version of that film, let alone how good it would look. So I’m holding out for the possibility that we’ll learn as the release date nears that George has actually given some respect to his early work (and his early fans) by doing a good job on these things.<\/p>\n

However, if there’s anything I’ve grudgingly come to accept about my former hero George Lucas, it’s that marketing comes first, there’s always a bigger goal, and there’s always going to be another release on down the line. The guys at The Digital Bits<\/a> apparently feel the same:<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that 2007 is the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars, so I’d be shocked if Lucasfilm didn’t have something up their sleeves to commemorate that. We know that they’ve been working on an uber-ultimate super box set of all six films, so it makes sense that we might see that for the anniversary. Maybe it will be available in just standard DVD, or maybe both standard and high-definition – we don’t know. It might very well be that Lucas is hoping that by releasing the original theatrical versions of these films now on standard DVD, he can avoid having to include them in a future high-def box set release. You know… sort of a “let’s get ’em out of the way now” sort of thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You know what, though? I’d be perfectly happy if that is what’s going on here (i.e., that Lucas is releasing the originals on standard DVD so he doesn’t have to put them in the high-def set), assuming that the quality is up to current DVD standards. I’m perfectly happy with the current standards and am in no hurry to upgrade to high-def. I just wish there wasn’t so damn much mystery about what’s going on. After all the crap Lucas has taken from his own fans in recent years, you’d think he’d be eager to “end this destructive conflict and restore order to the Galaxy.” Giving the old-school fans like me a decent release of the originals in September as well as a clear roadmap about this rumored uber-set would go a long way toward doing that. It isn’t even like he has to admit that he was wrong about the original versions. As I suggested to Cheno earlier, this upcoming two-disc set is a pretty painless way to handle the whole deal. Assuming that the quality is there for the “bonus” theatrical cuts, everyone will be happy. Lucas will be selling us his preferred version, we’ll be buying our preferred version, the Great Flanneled One will save face, and Han will shoot first.<\/p>\n

At least, that’s how it would work in a world where things made sense. How it will work here in this world is anybody’s guess…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hmm. Only hours after hearing the news about the original, unaltered Star Wars movies being released, my buzz is crumbling because of all the rumors flying around the ‘net about them. Basically, folks are suggesting that my long-awaited grail is going to turn out to be a half-hearted effort at best. According to a USA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-wars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}