It's the one people remember most fondly. So memories distort it in to this magical thing.
The reality is much messier.
Happy Star Wars Day! (etc.)
- Thread starter Tallguy
- Start date
The reality is much messier.
That's the thing though, there is no "one". There were multiple iterations of ANH before even tESB was released. The "original" most of these people go on about, is likely the second or third version, and they have no real way of knowing.
That TV version of it I first watched was different from the second hand retail VHS I found at a carboot years later when it was out of print (I remember noticing the sound effect of the S-foils opening was entirely different), and that was different again from the widescreen remasters that came out a few years later, and then came the special editions, and so on and so forth.
To be clear, I'm not saying one can't be nostalgic for whatever version one happened to see first. That's fine, and totally normal. I get a kick out of watching the despecialized edition on occasion too. Where people loose me however is when they make is a value judgement. As if not having "A New Hope" in the crawl makes it inherently superior. That smacks of gatekeeping, and I have no time for it.
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That's all I was saying. "The one" being the first version they saw, not one specific definitive version.
Everything with Star Wars us a value judgment it seems
There's the thing that won the Oscars in 1978 which is not very different from the movie that made it on to VHS and laser disc. (I'm a much bigger fan of the mono audio mix myself.)
Yes, I like having the original crawl. But I hadn't seen it that way since 1978. So it's certainly not a deal breaker. Getting to hear the sound again the way I heard it all the times I saw it in the theater is certainly nice. (When you say that Lucas was tweaking the sound after the film was released, he was. But it also only opened on 40 something screens across the entire U.S. Funny thing is that I DID see Star Wars opening weekend: In July!)
Re-doing Mos Eisley and Cloud City and adding Star Trek VI FX? Hard pass. That's not being "precious".
If those were my options I don't think I'd watch Star Wars very much.
What is it?
It's preferring one movie over a different movie.
Curious. Does one feel substantially different to the other?
I think so. Star Wars the most. Jedi the least.
In the case of Star Wars, Mos Eisley now really feels like it's from a different movie. I admit, the Death Star battle not as much. Star Wars has the worst changes to the sound, but Empire has the worst butchering of the music.
When we saw Jedi at the theater a few weeks ago my son leaned over to me during Jedi Rocks and said "This is new stuff, isn't it?"
It lost Best Picture to Annie Hall!! I'm still mad!!!
Fascinating. Watching the Special Edition the only thing I felt in the movie was that it was overlong.
Jedi Rocks stands out way more egregiously than anything else in Star Wars or Empire Strikes Back, save maybe the Emperor.
It's bad enough as it is. If you see it with a live orchestra it's really awful.
I will freely admit to not paying attention to the music in that scene.
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You're doing parenting right.
Cite for that? Every reputable source I've seen points toward the three prequels/episode 4 idea solidifying after Lucas took over the ESB screenplay in '78.
Pretty big qualitative difference: None of those changed the scene-by-scene structure of the movie, like the Special Editions did. Maybe we can never get back to the exact version(s) that I and millions of others saw in 1977, but we can get very close, and a hell of a lot closer than the Special Editions. And I guarantee that decades from now people will be a lot more interested in getting closer to the original than to the revisions.
No doubt. It's a funny thing, it wasn't until I saw one of the "despecialized" digital versions that a home video "felt" like the first run as I remembered it.
Eh, I'm comfortable making a value judgment in favor of historical preservation and accessibility. And so was George Lucas, at one time.
It does. Following Kenobi's ominous Mos Eiseley warning with a visual slapstick joke is to me the most bizarre choice; the tonal shift is so jarring. And does anyone really believe that any editor in '76-'77 would have made the choice to have big chunks of dialogue repeated just minutes apart (Greedo/Jabba scenes)?
That's just a problem of raw materials. OTOH, what they should have done (if they felt the need to put Jabba back) was cut the Greedo scene back to what it originally was before they had to give it the dialog from the Jabba scene that wasn't working out. I'd still have hated it but I would have respected it more.
I've never looked, did they change any of the Jabba scene in terms of dialog (other than Jabba not speaking English of course)?
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