Pay attention, George, this is how films should be restored and presented on Bluray:

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/04/10/jaws-restored-blu-ray-video/

This trailer taught me all I needed to know about Pan & Scan vs Widescreen. I first saw it on a VHS version of Alien or Aliens back in 1991 in the UK and ran right out to buy the Star Wars Trilogy Widescreen Collector's set as soon as it became available at my local WHSmith.

A Generation Apart

I think the biggest problem for people of my generation, is that we were all kids when the original Star Wars Trilogy was released, but grown ups when the prequel trilogy finally hit theaters. Had George Lucas continued to release Star Wars movies every three years or so, until all 9 episodes of his saga had been created, I think things would have been ok. But 16 years passed between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. I was 8 when Return of the Jedi was released and 25 when Episode I came out. That is a big difference. By 1985 Star Wars was moving off the radar. No new movies were being readied and even Kenner had stopped making new toys. It wasn't until 1992 When Timothy Zahn published a new Star Wars Trilogy did my excitement for Star Wars return. Within a few years there were hundreds of new Star Wars books in the "Expanded Universe", the toys came back, and new video games were released. Everyone wanted more Star Wars, and George started writing a new episode. Has anyone ever stopped to think how great it might have been if he had used the Thrawn trilogy for his blueprint? The original cast was aging, though I think Harrison Ford and Mark Hamil would have been able to reprise their roles.

Great Expectations

However, George Lucas wanted to write a prequel story, and tell us how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. All Star Wars fans instantly envisioned their own take on how this could have happened, but we were confident that Mr. Lucas already had most of the story planned out in notes at least from his original drafts written in the early 1970s. Everybody knew that it was going to be great. When the original teaser trailer was finally released it promised greatness, despite the title. The music, the lightsabers, the space ships, state of the art CGI effects, it really looked like Star Wars was back:

The Reality

When it was finally released, I went to see The Phantom Menace on opening weekend (no I did not queue up on opening night). Like everybody else, when the Lucasfilm logo appeared I cheered. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled as I read "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", and then the huge Yellow Star Wars appeared and the crowd went wild, things were great, there was no way this could suck. We had waited so long for this, and so far it was everything we had imagined it would be. The crawl began and... Wait, what? The language was all wrong, it just didn't feel right: "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute... blockade... Trade Federation" ??? Yawn! "...secretly dispatched two Jedi Knights, the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy, to settle the conflict....", well that doesn't sound quite so dull, let's give it a chance. But that initial feeling of joy, optimism slowly vanished, replaced by a growing disappointment. Is it really this bad? Now, to be fair, it wasn't all bad. Darth Maul was pretty cool - too bad they killed him. At the time, I was really into Chinese Martial Arts and Wushu, so I thought the lightsaber duels with Darth Maul were great. The Podrace was... ok. I do remember that despite the cheering at the very beginning, there was just silence for the rest of the movie. No cheering, no laughter, no gasps of surprise. As I left the theater I was quite disappointed, but trying not to show it, I mean this was Star Wars, and I had waited 16 years for this!

I didn't pay to go see it again, but I did buy the DVD. Perhaps in the 6 months or so since I had seen it I had convinced myself that it hadn't been as bad as I remembered. Watching it a second time, however, I realized that it wasn't the kind of film that grows on you. In fact it just got worse and more annoying. The CGI Yoda was less believable than the muppet, and his inverted diction just seemed forced, almost a parody of Yoda. Jar Jar Binks seemed to be what someone with no sense of humor thinks humor is. He has an annoying voice, he walks funny, he steps in crap. That's funny, right? Well, not to my generation, but my kids seemed to find him quite amusing. Which raises an interesting point: I was a kid when Star Wars came out, did the grown ups at the time love it as much as my generation? Probably not. My parents were not excited about watching it every Christmas like I was. They watched it once in a while, and seemed to appreciate it, but that was as far as it went. So did George Lucas write the movies for kids? Is that why we just don't get it? Maybe, but am I the only one who had to try to explain what a trade embargo and sanctions are to my kids? Even my kids' eyes were glazing over for most of the film, only getting into it during the lightsaber duels, the podrace and the space ship battles. The rest of the time they looked even more bored than I was. Should George Lucas have written the prequels targeted at a new generation of fans (read kids who will buy merchandise for many years to come) or for the aging generation who loved the original movies? Perhaps in trying to please both, he pleased neither. He went on the record explaining that he wrote it for the kids, but is that true or was that just his excuse? Do kids really care about taxation, politics and Senate Meetings? Does anyone? Is George Lucas just too big now for anyone to question his ideas? Is he now surrounded by yes men who when asked if they liked Jar Jar told him it was fantastic?

But what about the Ewoks, they were pretty bad too weren't they? Well, yeah, but at least they were really there, not just CGI. The whole green screen virtual sets and interaction with CGI characters was a big part of the problem with the Prequels for me. I don't think it helped the actors deliver the best performances, and it didn't suspend disbelief in quite the same was as a real set and real people in costume.

Midi-chlorians

When Obi-Wan introduces 'The Force' it is described as an "energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." It is all very spiritual. Some people are more sensitive to it than others, but perhaps with the proper training anyone might become a Jedi. Admit it - you've tried more than once in your lifetime to "use the force" to move an object or to try to influence someone's mind. As powerful as it is, your moral compass becomes very important or it could lead you to the dark side.

"The Force evolved out of various developments of character and plot. I wanted a concept of religion based on the premise that there is a God and there is good and evil. I began to distill the essence of all religions into what I thought was a basic idea common to all religions and common to primitive thinking. I wanted to develop something that was nondenominational but still had a kind of religious reality."

―George Lucas

Then came Midi-chlorians which reduced this religion to a measurable genetic anomaly which you either had in sufficient quantities to be a Jedi, or you didn't."look at how much religion you have!" Bummer!

Conclusions

Fans know what they like, and essentially what they want from a sequel (or a prequel) is more of the same. In many ways, Return of the Jedi was a remake of Star Wars - it begins on Tatooine, Jabba is there, his palace is filled with odd looking creatures, and music just like the Cantina and at the end there is a huge space battle in which the Rebels destroy the Deathstar. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade used many of the more popular aspects of Raiders of the Lost Ark, such as making the Nazis the bad guys, and having the bad guy's face melt off at the end. I think The Phantom Menace, and the prequels in general, just failed to deliver the key features required for a successful Star Wars movie.

To be fair, everybody who had seen the originals, or even just the special editions, had expectations, and there was almost no chance of George Lucas meeting them, but I truly believe that the prequels could have been so much better.

There are several types of changes that George Lucas made to Star Wars for the Special Editions. The first was that they went back to the original negatives and digitally cleaned up the images, removing millions of pieces of dirt. That seems like it would have made a good "save point" right there. Save that, make it a master and work with a digital copy of that to make the special edition. Then release both the cleaned up original version and the Special Edition on VHS, laserdisc, etc. Everybody would have been happy. George would have been happy with his new "fan edits" of Star Wars, and the public could make up their own mind about which ones they prefer. Sadly, this was not the case.

Geroge Lucas had always felt that the original theatrical films were unfinished, that they didn't match his "original vision" of what they should have been. There were time constraints, budget issues, limits to special effects technology, etc., and the press releases about the upcoming Special Editions led us to believe that just things like the wipes, disolves, and a few special effects usch as explosions would be updated. As a huge fan of the original film, I wasn't too worried about what this might mean. It was all very exciting, I remember downloading those tiny (in terms of resolution) sneak peaks over the web (at a time when most of us still had dialup). Many of the tweaks that were made are pretty insignificant and most people, even those of us who had seen the originals close to a hundred times wouldn't notice some of the changes unless they were pointed out to us or the film was compared frame by frame with the old version - even the toned down violence in the deathstar sequences went unnoticed by me until I read about them.

Then, of course, there were some bigger changes. I think Inserting the Jabba the Hut scene was a bad idea. I think that once they realized that Jabba would have to be scaled way down to fit him in the scene they should have just quit right there. For a start, there is absolutely no need for that scene to be there at all since when they realized they couldn't use it originally they put all the information we needed into the scene with Greedo in the cantina (more on that later). However, I think it would have made a nice featurette for the DVD. "Here is the original Jabba scene that was cut because we couldn't make it work back in 1976, and here is the version we worked on for the Special Edition. As you can see, the CGI Jabba didn't really work because we had to make him much smaller, and the only way we could keep the scene was to have Han step on his tail!" The irony is, that fans would have created their own fan edits that reinserted this scene in the movie!

Han Shoots First

As you know, originally, Greedo didn't shoot at all. This made Han Solo a bit of a bad ass, but even watching it as a kid, my mother never complained about that scene being too violent, or that Han had killed Greedo in cold blood. After all, Han Solo is a smuggler, an outlaw, part of the scum and villainy that Mos Eisely is known for. But what made the Special Edition version of this scene so absurd was the fact that Greedo missed from 2 feet away! What use is a bounty hunter who can't hit a target from across a booth? Putting aside the fact that I don't think this scene needed changing at all, if they wanted to make it clear that if Han didn't shoot he was going to be killed, why didn't they have Han shoot first, and THEN have Greedo shoot and miss... In other words, they shoot at almost the same instant, but Han is just a fraction of a second quicker, causing Greedo to miss. This scene has been tinkered with a few times since 1997, but it still doesn't work. Furthermore, it is an attempt to change the fundamental character of Han Solo. These kinds of changes are almost like DeVinci suddenly appearing in the present, explaining that he actually invented time travel during the renaissance and that while he was here he planned to visit the Louvre and "fix" the mona Lisa. He never felt happy with the way her mouth turned out, but at the time, his techique was not developed enough to correct it. Using some CGI he could easily fix it now to make it more like the way he had originally envisioned it. Never mind the fact that people had been admiring it for centuries, it is his painting, he owns it and can do what he likes with it.

Toning down the violence with CGI effects is something Steven Speilberg did for the DVD release of E.T. but at least he was kind enough to offer both versions of the film on DVD. Ridley Scott also released 5 different versions of Blade Runner on Blu-ray and the Alien Anthology also includes the original Theatrical and the Directors cuts of each film. Come on George - what's the big deal? Back in 1988, George Lucas himself crusaded against Ted Turner who wanted to colorize Black & White films, testifying before Congress that Black and White fims were the embodiment of our cultural heritage, and that they shouldn't be tampered with:

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be "replaced" by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.

-George Lucas (1988 Congressional testimony)

Do as I do, not as I say? How does this not apply here?

I bought the original Star Wars Trilogy on VHS, then I bought it again when they released it in wide screen. I bought it again on Laserdisc and again when the released the Special Editions. By 2003, impatiently awaiting the DVD releases I bought the "Five Star" DVDs which were laserdisc captures. The quality was quite good, but they were the Special Editions (I'll discuss my thoughts on those in a separate post) and I really wanted the originals, so I bought a video capture card, connected my laserdisc player to my PC and captured both the Star Wars Trilogy and the Indiana Jones Trilogy in reasonable quality. Better than VHS, and - it could be argued - slightly better than laserdisc because I now had the entire movie on a single disc that didn't need to be flipped and changed every 30 minutes or so. However, it still was not good enough. About this time, I also found OriginalTrilogy.com where there were at least a dozen similar projects underway, and all of them had already achieved higher quality picture, sound and menus than I had been able to.

Then George Lucas finally released his DVD set which I quickly rushed and and bought. The sharpness of the picture blew away everything else I had seen, but it was only the special editions, and the color "correction" was questionable to say the least. This was the picture and sound quality I had been looking for, but I wanted the original versions of the movies. The good people at OriginalTrilogy.com began working on a number of new projects to "despecialize" the special editions by color correcting them and inserting footage from the old laserdiscs to replace the special edition shots. They updated their online petition, hoping to persuade George Lucas to release the original films with the same standard of quality.

In 2006, George Lucas seemed to relent, and did finally release the original Trilogy on DVD (which I also rushed out and bought). Compared to the Special Edition releases, the quality looks pretty bad, which I think is very deliberate. It is almost as if George is saying "see - look how bad the original is compared to my new version". All the DVNR (Digital Video Noise Reduction) smearing that was on the THX laserdiscs is still there, but it is still the highest resolution version of the original Trilogy available. Once again, new projects were started on OT.com. Some took the the "GOUT" (George's Original Unaltered Trilogy) and worked on improving the picture (Mothr's pawnage edition and Dark Jedi's V3 DVDs are probably the best to date) while others continued to despecialize the special editions, now using the GOUT to source the replacement scenes.

5 Years later Star Wars was released on Blu-ray, but still no pristine unaltered original trilogy. I don't object to Mr. Lucas tweaking and changing and updating the Special Edition trilogy for every new release, but I do wish he would also release the original versions. I understand that he was not happy with the theatrical versions, felt they were unfinished, but he doesn't seem to care that millions of people watched that version for 20 years, before he started tinkering, and that is the version we still want to watch.

I suppose there are now two generations of Star Wars fans. Those who grew up with 3 movies, and those who grew up with 6. I grew up with 3. I was just 2 years old when Star Wars came out. My father did take me to see it, but sadly I was too young to remember it. I didn't see it again until 1983 When it finally premiered on ITV in Great Britain. I was enthralled, and would tune in every Chritmas thereafter to watch it again (We didn't get a VCR until 1988). I started collecting the toys (a little late, but I managed to collect about 90% of all the figures by the time they stopped making them in 1985). I watched The making of Return of The Jedi on TV, but I didn't get to see it until 1985. I was lucky enough to see Return of the Jedi in a theater on an American airbase in Germany in 1987. When I was 12, I rented the trilogy on VHS and watched Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and Star Wars again, all in one day, and was sure that the only wasted time I spent that day was eating meals and going to the bathroom. The Star Wars Trilogy, The Indiana Jones Trilogy, James Bond, Back to the Future and Jaws, probably ranked as my all time favorite movies.

I have collected a lot of Star Wars "stuff", and I would like to preserve and share what I can here with anyone else who might be interested.