STAR WARS THROUGH THE AGES
ITEM: YouTube user Marcelo Zuniga has made some videos detailing every change ever made to the first three Star Wars films, complete with side-by-side comparisons.
Many of them I already knew about via the 1997 "special editions", but I didn’t know they’d been making extra alterations in subsequent home video releases. Many of them are fairly subtle, others not so much.
Anyway, as part of the original Star Wars generation, I think these videos offer definitive proof (to me) that the originals really didn't need "fixing". In my opinion the Biggs scene is the only deleted scene that was worth adding in.
It occurs to me too that one of the biggest problems here is that Lucasfilm is subtely (if not intentionally) altering film history.
The original SW trilogy was heralded in large part because the FX were groundbreaking and visually stunning for the time period. That matters because when you watch any old film, yr basically seeing films that were made with the tools available at the time, some of which may have been invented specifically for that film. That in itself is a tribute to the ingenuity of the filmmakers, and even if it looks a little clunky by 2015 standards, you can still appreciate what they managed to accomplish.
Star Wars has a well-earned rep as a game-changer in FX, but when you stick in scenes using technology that didn’t exist at the time, it’s like cheating. People seeing Star Wars for the first time may look at the latest version and think, “Wow, they had CGI back in the 70s!”
Well, maybe not, if only because Lucasfilm has been fairly transparent about its enhancements, so it’s not they're trying to trick anyone into thinking they were that far ahead of the CGI game. And maybe it only matters to people like me who have a fascination with film FX tricks and the art of making fake look real, and how they used to do it in the Old Days compared to now.
And considering a lot of the original FX are still intact, I guess you could say the upgraded films serve as a kind of mostly seamless comparison of old-school and new-school FX that demonstrate how sophisticated Lucasfilm and ILM were when they first started.
Still, now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, I’m hoping one day they’ll release the original versions for us Old And Cranky People who will always swear that Han shot first. That doesn’t seem likely, internet rumors notwithstanding. And Lucas has adamant that the “special editions” are the definitive versions as far as he’s concerned, and the originals are “half-completed” films.
If it ain’t broke,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1536974.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Many of them I already knew about via the 1997 "special editions", but I didn’t know they’d been making extra alterations in subsequent home video releases. Many of them are fairly subtle, others not so much.
Anyway, as part of the original Star Wars generation, I think these videos offer definitive proof (to me) that the originals really didn't need "fixing". In my opinion the Biggs scene is the only deleted scene that was worth adding in.
It occurs to me too that one of the biggest problems here is that Lucasfilm is subtely (if not intentionally) altering film history.
The original SW trilogy was heralded in large part because the FX were groundbreaking and visually stunning for the time period. That matters because when you watch any old film, yr basically seeing films that were made with the tools available at the time, some of which may have been invented specifically for that film. That in itself is a tribute to the ingenuity of the filmmakers, and even if it looks a little clunky by 2015 standards, you can still appreciate what they managed to accomplish.
Star Wars has a well-earned rep as a game-changer in FX, but when you stick in scenes using technology that didn’t exist at the time, it’s like cheating. People seeing Star Wars for the first time may look at the latest version and think, “Wow, they had CGI back in the 70s!”
Well, maybe not, if only because Lucasfilm has been fairly transparent about its enhancements, so it’s not they're trying to trick anyone into thinking they were that far ahead of the CGI game. And maybe it only matters to people like me who have a fascination with film FX tricks and the art of making fake look real, and how they used to do it in the Old Days compared to now.
And considering a lot of the original FX are still intact, I guess you could say the upgraded films serve as a kind of mostly seamless comparison of old-school and new-school FX that demonstrate how sophisticated Lucasfilm and ILM were when they first started.
Still, now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, I’m hoping one day they’ll release the original versions for us Old And Cranky People who will always swear that Han shot first. That doesn’t seem likely, internet rumors notwithstanding. And Lucas has adamant that the “special editions” are the definitive versions as far as he’s concerned, and the originals are “half-completed” films.
If it ain’t broke,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at http://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1536974.html. Please comment there using OpenID.