CT Rumor: Disney to Release Unaltered Old Trilogy on BR

I watched the deleted scenes on youtube. My parents were going to buy the box for me for an early Xmas present, but I refused. Kept the 2006 original cut DVDs, until I got the despecialized edition. Lucas wasn't getting my money when he made more crap changes to films I love.

 

You're better at keeping to your principles than I was, lovelikewinter, for which I applaud you.

 

I'm somewhat in two minds when it comes to that. On the one hand, yeah, it crossed my mind that buying the BR box may help to further entrench the demise of the OOT. On the other hand, it would be nice to think that enjoying the SE films and having the OOT preserved aren't mutually exclusive.

 

I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment. I wish more people did.

 

It's really too bad we never got a good SE version. If they had limited the changes to only correct flawed vfx, I'm sure the changes would have been embraced. But by changing scenes, actors, dialogue, and altering the editing and pacing of the films, yeah everything sure got turned into a right old mess.

 

Seriously, spotted with blood? We're talking "Star Wars" here, not "MacBeth".

 

I don't like people who destroy movies.

Of course it's not the same as killing a person, but I do think it's on a par with that guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pietà. And the fact that in this case it's the filmmaker undoing his own creation (years after the fact) alters my judgment not one iota.

 

Moving away from the da Vinci analogies now, I see. Probably a good idea.

 

Lucas destroyed the movies because he added in new effects shots, restored a few cut scenes and added a few new scenes? If that was the case, then he destroyed his own films the first time they were tinkered with. Like TESB had the ending redone a couple of weeks after it was released. Or the first changes to ANH where Beru's voice was dubbed over and a few other alterations were done. Mind you, he never released those versions again. Where was the outrage then?

 

I still want to know why I can't get a copy of The Hobbit with Tolkien's original Riddles in the Dark, you know, before he changed it to be more in line with those Lord of the Rings books he wrote.

 

That too. The revised version is continually put in print, but the older copies are falling apart or are being destroyed by other means. Yet, not too many people are heart broken about that.

 

My hate keeps me strong. J/K


I found that since I only acknowledge the theatrical cuts, my bitterness towards Star Wars has lessened. I think that a release of the OOT and the choice of which version you want to see would do that for so many people. There seems to be a thought among certain people that the OOT fans should just accept the SE versions and let it go, therefore conforming and erasing the rift in fandom.

I say no.

 

Cultural barbarism of the highest order.

 

Check out The Annotated Hobbit, edited by Douglas A. Anderson. Every alternate line from the original 1937 printing of The Hobbit (and not just the revisions from the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter) is in there. It's easily available from places like Amazon.

Still, I'd gladly pay for a physical facsimile reprint of the 1937 edition of The Hobbit. In fact, just such a project has been in the works for a while now at HarperCollins (though it's been delayed repeatedly, alas).

 

Nobody complained when, as part of a structural stabilization, President Harry Truman gutted the historic interior of the White House in 1950 or so, and replaced the beautiful existing rooms with vastly inferior redesigns. Not only that, the "renovators" also threw out everything of note that had built up behind the walls in the previous 135 years--including wall beams and interior layouts placed there by the original architect in the days of the Founding Fathers.

Nobody complained, that is, because in those days the preservation movement in American architecture simply didn't exist yet. 65 years on, architectural scholars across the US still rue the irreplaceable loss of those historic materials.

Nowadays, when architectural historians want to study the historic interior of the White House, they're reduced to studying photographs of the house taken before 1950, when President Truman had everything within the outer stone walls of his own house sent to the rubbish heap.

But I'm just speaking from my real-world job experience. Don't mind me.

And I, for one, would love to see a re-release of the original version of SW 1977 with Shelagh Fraser's original voice track for Aunt Beru.

 

The last home video release of Star Wars that I own is the 2000 Special Edition VHS set. I never bought the DVDs or the BDs. And I never will. My money will only be spent on a proper restoration of the OOT.

I won't buy the prequels on BD either, until the atrocious color timing on AOTC is fixed.

 

Of course, the magnitude of the damage done when works of art are mutilated, even by their creators, is best measured by how easily repaired that damage is. In this respect, words on a printed page, which can be re-typed and re-printed in future editions, are far, far easier to restore than movies (which are by definition filmed in a particular time and place, never to be recaptured).

That's why something like Tolkien's 1951 revision of The Hobbit, which involved alterations to printed text, is (for me at least) an order of magnitude less alarming than GL's apparent attempt to hunt down and destroy every film reel of the OOT in existence. Until we invent a time machine, a movie, once lost, stays lost forever.

When director David Lean restored his 1962 version of Lawrence of Arabia (which was cut down severely by the studio for general release) in 1989, with Steven Spielberg's help, he found that the dialogue in many scenes had degraded beyond usability. Lean got Peter O'Toole and Alec Guinness to re-record their characters' lines.

However, there were other damaged scenes which featured Claude Rains and Jack Hawkins. Since both Rains and Hawkins were dead, Lean faced the choice of either hiring impersonators or leaving the scenes out. He hired Charles Gray to impersonate Hawkins, but wasn't satisfied with the result, and he had to leave those scenes on the cutting room floor. To this day Lawrence of Arabia is still about five minutes shorter than David Lean's original 1962 cut of the film.

Now imagine if Lean hadn't bothered to do this back in the 1980s, and instead, somebody tried fixing the film's missing audio today. How far do you suppose they would get, without either Peter O'Toole or Alec Guinness?

 

Books are a lot more durable than film. With the Hobbit, a lot of people never realized there was a different version. Star Wars is a different beast altogether. I'm sure Lucas wanted the OOT to go the way of The Hobbit 1937, but that's wrong. Unless you are saying we should just allow that to happen and the SEs be the only thing anyone remembers. That way leads to a Star Wars I want no part of.

 

I didn't know that. Details, please.

 

I'm not convinced he's got the story quite right.

 

I think he's referring to the 70mm version. If you have a look at the page on Wikipedia called List of changes in Star Wars re-releases, it contains a list of the differences between the 70mm and 35mm versions. I don't buy that there were no 35mm showings in the first two weeks.

 

Me, too. It was supposed to be released in 2012. Then 2013. Then 2014. Then 2015. Now 2016. This is ridiculous.

 

From Wikipedia:

"The film went on to official general release in North America and the U.K. on May 21, 1980. The first wave of release included 126 70 mm prints, before a wider release in June 1980 (which were mostly 35 mm prints)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_Strikes_Back#Releases

This tracks with what is said by one of the effects guys on the DVD commentary. He says a couple weeks after they already sent the movie out George contacted them wanting to make more changes, most notably adding some new shots of the fleet at the end. I can only assume they made these changes to the 35 mm versions which were sent out in a wider release a little while after the initial 70 mm release. So there were certainly more than a few people who saw the 70 mm version first, no doubt imprinted forever in their memory as the one true and forever version of Empire, and now don't have access to it. An "OOT" release as commonly envisioned by so-called purists would probably deprive those people of their rightful cultural heritage. Because what is commonly believed to be the OOT Empire Strikes Back is not really the OOT Empire Strikes Back. I'm afraid many people here may have been....living a lie.

 

I'm sure the purists would be happy to have the 70mm cut included on all future home video releases via seemless branching. You can hardly ridicule them for not defending a cut of the film that most off them are probably unaware off. This is point scoring of the most childish order.